Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  People walked through the falling snow toward the deer, then stopped a few yards away, because it was Danny’s deer, and he was the one who should touch it first, and also because it was possible that the deer was not yet dead, but was merely resting at the edge of death, ready to make one more run.

  “Jeez, Danny,” Mel said, “you really know how to sneak up on ’em,” and Danny laughed and said, “What can I say? The deer came to me. My Eskimo friends have a saying: Sometimes the animal wishes to lead me on a long chase, and sometimes it only wishes to lead me on a short chase.”

  “Your Eskimo friends, my ass,” said Mel.

  Danny had a hunting knife in a holster on his pocket, which Wallis had dismissed as a kind of belt-buckle braggadocio, but now as Danny unholstered it and walked down the porch steps, Wallis saw that it had a purpose.

  Danny stopped when he was within three feet of the deer and admired it, remembering the kill. This was the last time, the last moment, that he would be able to look at it as a trophy—studying the high antlers, and remembering the strength and speed of the deer, and the beauty of the moment as it had run. As soon as he began cutting it with the knife, it would cease being a deer, a thing of beauty, and would become meat.

  Danny stepped forward with the knife: took the deer’s antlers in one hand and lifted the head from the snow. Blood dripped from the wet black nose. The deer had long eyelashes, like a lady. Danny put the point of the knife to the buck’s throat and pressed in to make the cut, to bleed the deer right there in front of the bar.

  The deer’s eyes fluttered open, as if the point of the blade had resurrected it. For half a second, the deer studied things. Danny saw what was happening and made a quick slash with the knife, but he didn’t cut deeply enough, and the deer leapt to its feet, throwing Danny backward, and the deer galloped off, a red stain spreading from its throat. It ran into the forest. Several people began chasing it, and others turned their dogs onto the trail.

  For a moment, Wallis saw it all with clarity, as with a sudden gust of wind that brings new scents—an understanding, where before there had not even been a question. He saw how the long, sleepy moments of things lie in calm stretches, eddies, which we continue to believe are peaceful, serene moments—nothing more than slow passages of time—but which are really only a coiling and deepening in preparation for the sudden, near-frantic weaves and pursuits—the lusts. He saw how in the hunt, it all falls into place—how all the elements that seemed previously to be meaningless become now spurred into action: how every element, every atom, has meaning—and how this is the perfect desire of nature, the moment toward which all waiting, which is not really waiting, moves.

  The deer led the chase, and all the men, women, children, and dogs pivoted, and whether to watch or to chase, made no difference: the deer, and its blood collar, were a lever to the universe, whose flight swung into focus all sets of eyes, all attentions. Now it all mattered: snow depth, wind direction, temperature, light remaining in the day, sense of smell, creeks to cross, ridges to run, forests, open meadow. The deer’s flight was the lever to it all. The earth herself was but a fulcrum.

  Charlie, the pig’s cook—surprisingly fast for such a big man—was in the lead. It seemed that his desire propelled him close behind the deer, rather than any athleticism, but that it was almost enough. Two black and white scruffy dogs ran alongside him, barking, and then three or four more men and then a young boy, and then a woman. Then two more women, then some more men and then more children. An old lady trotted behind all of them waving a spatula.

  As Danny, Wallis, and Mel watched, a cold wind blew the snow past in a slant, whipping the vinyl red and white checkered tablecloths over on themselves. One old man remained standing at a table with plate in hand. A haze was spreading across the sun, burnishing it, and the northern sky was a wall of gray, coming in over the beautiful day like some huge freighter from sea. The old man picked at the turkey carcass. A raven appeared and flew in a circle over the abandoned feast, eyeing the leftovers, then seemed to grow excited—picking up the hints, the echoes, of the chase. It gave two barking caws! and then was off in the direction the deer and the people had gone, flying with hard, fast wingbeats.

  “If they wouldn’t chase him, he’d run a hundred yards, lie down, and die,” Danny said. “They know that—they should know that. Fuck,” he said, “if it was their deer, they’d leave it alone—they wouldn’t push it like that. Shit,” he said. He walked alongside the tracks for a short ways, being careful never to step in one, and Wallis and Mel followed. Some of the tracks had blood in them, and the heat of what life the deer had left had melted the snow into clear ice, from where he had passed, and Mel said, “Well, easy tracking anyway, unless he stops bleeding or runs out of blood.” Streamers of mare’s tails were stretching overhead now—and in the wind, the first few snowflakes were tumbling like tiny shavings of pure white wood—not really falling, but floating.

  “If he runs out of blood, he’ll die, and we’ll find him,” Danny said.

  Mel shook her head. “You’d think so,” she said. “But sometimes they keep going. I don’t know how,” she said. “But they do—they just keep going.”

  “Forever?” Danny asked, like a child.

  “No,” Mel said, “but farther than you can go—so far that you can never find him. It’ll be easy tracking at first, but then you’ll have to hurry,” Mel said, turning her face up to the falling snow, “because then it’ll be no tracking.” She looked at Danny, as if having just suspected something in his hesitancy. “You do have to find him, you know.”

  “Oh, I will,” Danny said. He shrugged. His words came in breath smoke. “I don’t like to lose meat. If I did, it wouldn’t matter—the coyotes and wolves and ravens would have a feast. But I want that meat, too,” he said. “I’ll find it.”

  “You have to,” Mel said. “You saw that the knife was still stuck in the deer’s throat?”

  “No,” said Danny, “I didn’t see that.” He shrugged again. “I can always find another knife,” he said.

  “No,” said Mel—as if she were talking to a child, instructing him—and Wallis saw that Danny noticed this too, and was not pleased by it—“You have to go get that knife. You have to find that deer. There’ll be blood on the blade. The coyotes and wolves will lick it, and cut their tongues. The taste of their own blood will excite them and they’ll bite harder. They’ll cut their tongues off, in their frenzy. There’ll be blood everywhere,” she said. “They’ll be attacking each other. They could all eat each other up, just because of that one knife blade. Go get it. Better hurry.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Danny said.

  Mel said nothing; scuffed a covering of snow off of one of the tracks. “In the spring, the bears would find the carcass,” she said. “They’d come gnaw on it and get all cut up. Their mouths might get infected, so that they couldn’t eat. They’d die, too. Shit, Danny,” she said, “you could wipe out the whole upper part of the food chain single-handedly.”

  She was not angry, and Wallis could see there was some bond between them that allowed her to talk this way; some strange respect he had for her, and she for him. Danny nodded and said, “All right. Let me go get another knife to clean him with, when I find him.”

  People were returning from the woods now, walking, snow-wet and tired. One old woman was walking with her head down, as doleful as if she had lost a mate. The men were coming back, too. Wallis sensed that they wanted to avoid Mel, though finally a couple of them came over and told her, “That deer wasn’t hurt; we tracked him for two miles and he was still running as strong as ever,” which Wallis knew was bullshit, because they had only been gone for fifteen minutes; and now the children were coming back, and even the cook, Charlie, with his cleaver, and the old woman who’d run after them with her spatula. Returning without it, having lost it in the snow.

  “I’ll go look for him,” Danny said. “You go on home and get Wallis settled into his room,” he said. The sno
w was beginning to come down steadily, and Danny began dressing—an old coat, a ski cap, gaiters, snowshoes, a pack, a lantern. “I’ll bet he didn’t go a hundred yards past where everyone else turned back,” he said.

  “Better hurry,” Mel said. “You’re going to lose his tracks.” She snapped on her skis. “Do you need help?”

  Danny shook his head. “You all aren’t dressed for it. You go get Wallis settled in.” He checked his pack for matches, primed and tested the lantern, lit it: it made a tiny roar, then settled to a hiss. “There’s no rush,” he said. “It’s a big deer. I’ll find it.”

  “Climb up,” Mel said, and Wallis, a little embarrassed, did so, from the front porch of the bar, as if climbing onto a horse.

  The feast was over; men and women were gathering their plates and dishes and carrying the chairs and long tables back up to the bar; folding the checkered tablecloths in the falling snow. One man tied the carcass of the pig to the side of his saddle and rode off toward his cabin along the river.

  Others headed north on foot, walking or riding on the road down which Wallis and Mel had skied. They disappeared quickly, as if being swallowed by the dark forest and the blowing snow, and Wallis had the feeling that he might not see any of them again until spring.

  Mel was skiing strong—stronger, it seemed, now that they were headed home. “I’d carry you for a while,” he said, “if I knew how to ski.”

  “You’ll have to learn,” she said.

  It seemed though almost as if he were learning, in part, by holding onto her: by feeling the movements and rhythms of her body. His head was turned sideways again to watch the woods pass, and her hair was in his face once more—he could smell the faintest bit of wood smoke, as if it came not from her hair, which the cold wind had scrubbed clean, but from the roots, from her skin—and he closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was skiing, and that he was as strong as she was.

  It felt to him as if they were moving away from a place he needed to be, a way of being, in order to do his work—that it was almost as if he were being lured far away—but the rhythm of her body was hypnotic, as was the sensation of traveling so fast, so easily, across the surface.

  He wondered if Old Dudley thought he was a fool—if that was why he had sent him up here. He wondered if he was a decoy—fodder, emotional fuel, for the legend of Matthew—the one geologist Old Dudley hadn’t yet been able to burn up.

  They skied south, and back into the forest. The river fell away below them. The snow was swallowing everything. Wallis could feel Mel’s body warming and then perspiring through her wool. She labored, going up the small hills; they sped, sailing down the back sides of the hills. The road was a narrow lane through tall trees and rich scents, a path of white through darkness.

  They followed the road for several miles—Mel skiing hard, but saying nothing, and her back growing wet beneath Wallis, and the back of her neck sweating, then icing over. They turned and went down a narrower road, barely a trail—a wide truck could not have fit.

  There were no more tracks. No cars or trucks had been down either the main road or this one since the snow had started.

  They skied a mile down the trail, to the place where it ended, and they slipped through a slot in the bushes and started skiing up a footpath, through old cedars and larch, and then into country slightly more open, with aspen trees—a relief to Wallis, after the darkness of the forest. He had not yet decided whether the dense woods were claustrophobic or soothing.

  Farther up the hill was a snowy clearing, and halfway up that clearing, a small dark cabin with a porch. Home, Wallis thought, though he knew that he had only come here for a while.

  Wallis’s arms were asleep from having held onto Mel’s back for so long. His arms had been wrapped around her for so long that he felt he knew her body as well as a lover, and felt strange, disassociated from not having the emotional bond to go with that intimate knowledge.

  They half-toppled onto the porch, stumbling over one another as Mel let him down, and only now did she show that she was in the least bit tired. She sat there with her legs stretched out and rubbed her knees for a moment, and breathed carefully, and waited to cool down. They listened to the snow fall.

  Finally Mel’s breath began to send out whisper-clouds again, mists of fog, and when she moved, stiff-legged and stiff-backed, Wallis could hear ice crack from where her sweat had cooled and frozen against her body.

  She gave him a hand up and they went inside. It occurred to Wallis that there should be some ritual or ceremony for first entering another’s home—he thought of how it was before he began a map—of how it was before he prepared to enter those lands below, each time—and he thought it was interesting how freely people take one another in and out of their homes. A home to him, and going into it, seemed as special as a person’s body, yet the entry into it carried none of the ritual or ceremony involved with going into another’s body. Mel was as unself-conscious as anyone, or more so, walking straight in ahead of him and lighting first a propane lantern by the fireplace, and then one in the kitchen. She didn’t say anything: just walked right in as if she and Wallis had been coming here every day of their lives.

  The cabin smelled strongly of wood smoke: almost twenty years’ worth of fires. It was cold and drafty—as if they had crawled into an ice cave—and Wallis went over to the stone chimney and felt the cold rocks over the fireplace.

  There were dried flowers hanging from all the walls, dulled and subtle splashes of sun-faded blues, old yellows, pinks, and fading reds. There were cloves of garlic hanging in the kitchen, and in the living area there were pelts and furs: snowshoe hare, coyote, beaver, wolverine. There was a patch of some kind of fur over a bookshelf, a dark patch that looked pubic—Wallis would find out later that it was buffalo—and next to it was a ball of white hair that Wallis felt sure was wolf.

  There were books everywhere: books on the shelves, which lined all of the walls except the south wall, where there was a big plate glass window—Wallis could see the snow driving sideways against the glass and piling in drifts—and there were books stacked along the walls, and below the big window, and a trail of stacked books that wandered crookedly into the kitchen.

  Mel was building a fire in the wood stove: splintering kindling, pieces that were half-split already and had some twist in them, so that she could pull them apart with her hands. Wallis looked at her bookshelves—at the books themselves, and at the objects that surrounded them—feathers, stones, dried bundles of sweetgrass, more old flowers, an arrowhead, a piece of driftwood in the shape of a face, and an old fly-fishing reel, and some dry flies, scattered loose like fluff from cottonwoods in the summer.

  He heard Mel tear apart a green-sounding piece of wood and then she said “Shit,” and Wallis turned and saw that she had gotten a splinter stuck up in under the back of her hand—into a vein, it seemed, for bright red blood squirted as she pulled the splinter out. It had gone in nearly two inches. As she removed it it seemed to keep coming forever, but finally it was all out, and the blood came in a stream. She lifted her hand to her mouth and sucked for a moment, then wiped the blood on her jeans and kept splitting wood. She lit the fire and opened one of the stove’s doors for it to draw air, and Wallis listened to the fire snap and then roar. Mel passed him, sucking on her hand once more, and went down the narrow hallway to go doctor her hand.

  He walked over to her desk, to the corner by the stone fireplace. It was immaculate: papers stacked neatly, technical papers about juvenile dispersal of wolves in Labrador, and her field notes, sketches of tracks with gait measurements. He noticed there were no photographs at her desk—that there were none anywhere in the cabin. There were maps all over her walls, but even they seemed to speak of the future: diagrams of where she believed the wolves would go next, rather than where they had been. Wallis knew little of their cycles, and did not yet understand that wherever wolves had been was also where they would return.

  Mel came back out with a bandage over h
er hand. The cabin dimmed; the propane lamps sputtered as the temperature outside grew colder, deeper into dusk, as if the whole cabin, or the world, were sliding down a funnel into darkness.

  “Come here,” Mel said. Her bandage glowed pale in the cabin’s orange-hued dimness. “Look at this,” she said, opening her propane refrigerator. The yellow battery light glowed when she opened the door.

  The refrigerator was about four feet tall, old and bare and white. Inside, there were only a few items on the side door—eggs, mayonnaise, mustard—but in the center, where all the wire racks had been taken out, there was a huge gleaming fish, a silver sockeye salmon so large that it had been doubled over to fit. The effect was that it appeared to have been surprised in mid-leap. The curved, toothy, underslung jaw; the wild eyes; the torpedo-shaped head—and that silver, with the black speckles and red dorsal line down the side of the fish—it was all as shocking to Wallis as if a human body had been hanging in the refrigerator.

  “Matthew sent it to me,” she said. “I haven’t had time to eat any of it yet. I’m anxious to eat it, but I also like looking at it. Isn’t it wonderful? Smell it,” she said. “Touch it. Look.” She leaned in and sniffed the fish’s flanks.

  The water rattled in the pot on the stove. Mel left the refrigerator door open and went over to the stove and took the lid off, then poured tea. They moved over to the window to sit in chairs and watch the snow come down in the last bit of light. They said nothing, just watched the snow come down harder, piling higher. It was difficult for Wallis to not be panicked by this. He was used to doing the diving himself; he was not used to being buried by the earth.

  He relaxed and let it come. But as he relaxed, it seemed to snow harder.

  The refrigerator door was still open. The light shone on the bright salmon. The salmon watched them with its toothed grin, as if it had them right where it wanted them.

  Mel continued to watch the snow. She held her tea glass in her cupped hands, so that the steam seemed to be coming from her hands.