Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  The fire popped. They watched the light go away, watched the night come in from out of the woods: watched the tea cups stop steaming, watched the snow turn bright in the night and the woods turn black; and even when they could no longer see the snow falling, could see only white shiftings, they sat there and felt the compression of it—felt autumn leaving.

  Mel went to the refrigerator and with a large knife cut some meat from the side of the great fish. She placed the small offering on two small china plates, bone-colored with a faded blue floral pattern, and handed one to Wallis.

  They ate in a darkness that was broken only by the orange firelight. The fish did not taste salty, as he had imagined it would, though he could taste the smoke of the alder in which it had been cooked. He could taste other things in it, too, things he knew nothing about.

  They drank more tea, staring out at the paleness of the swirling snow. When Wallis could no longer stay awake, he lay down on the couch and pulled an elk hide over him for warmth.

  Sometime in the night Mel got up and added wood to the stove, then returned to her seat by the window, where she lit a candle and read. At some point she got up and rinsed the fish’s residue and odor from the plates and put them away, but Wallis dreamed of the ocean nonetheless. The earth desires life—this was the last thing he remembered thinking before he fell asleep beneath the elk’s skin, and with the beginning of winter trying to bury everything on earth below.

  He dreamed of the ocean, dreamed of the forests that had yielded the years of firewood that had been burned in the cabin to give it its smell. He slept long and hard, moving from dream to dream—dreaming of Susan, and then of Matthew, and then of the falconer—dreaming like an elk moving through a snowy meadow, pawing beneath the snow for green grass.

  In the morning the snow had stopped, and the day was bright and cold. They skied back to town to see if Danny had found his deer. Mel had an extra pair of skis that belonged to Matthew, and she gave Wallis some of Matthew’s clothes to wear. The clothes were too large, but warm. They moved slowly, Wallis following in Mel’s tracks as he tried to learn how to use the skis. He fell often, but it was not a thing that was beyond his ability to learn.

  Coyotes came to both sides of the road and stood on top of snowy logs and watched them pass. Here and there would be a stump where a woodcutter had felled a tree for firewood.

  The deer had been moving at dawn—trying to adjust to the cold, and to find the browse that was now hidden. Their trails wandered delicately through the woods like sentences trying to describe something great and wonderful just ahead, though Mel and Wallis saw none of the deer themselves, only the signs of their passage, and it made Wallis feel as if he were late for something.

  “Yesterday was Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “I think so,” said Mel. “I think that’s what all the food was about.”

  A band of ravens followed them, curious about their procession and intent. From time to time the ravens would call out to one another in their odd croaks, then would fly ahead in a sprint, doing barrel rolls and spins; but after a while they disappeared, though for some time Wallis and Mel would still hear their shouts in the woods ahead—a sound almost like human voices.

  When they got to town, they went around to the back of the bar and peered into Danny’s window, where they saw him sleeping on his bunk, mouth open, snoring, swaddled in a mass of hides and blankets. There was no sign of the deer. Mel said that if he’d found it, it would be hanging from the rafters in whole or part. Danny’s lantern and pack were on the porch. She took the hatchet and bone saw from his pack, examined them, found no blood or hair.

  “Let’s go look for his deer,” she said.

  They entered the woods where the deer, and his pursuers, had entered. It had snowed several inches, but the path of the pursuers’ passage was still visible under the soft swells of snow. They followed it until it ended, only a few hundred yards into the woods.

  From that point, they followed the faint snow-muted trace of Danny’s lone passage—trusting that he had been on the deer’s tracks, that he was not leading them astray. Sometimes his tracks were hard to find, and Mel would have to brush away the snow to find his footprints in the compressed ice beneath the new snow. Occasionally when she did this she would find bits of frozen blood, and would point it out to Wallis, who told her he was color-blind, that he couldn’t see red, nor red and green in combination. This surprised her so much that she stopped skiing for a moment. “Oh,” she said. “So is Matthew.”

  She wanted to keep thinking about this, to ask if it were coincidence, or if it were a thing Old Dudley sought in his geologists, but she knew these thoughts would get her off the focus of finding the deer, and so she let them fall away unconsidered, as if to be buried by falling snow. Wallis didn’t remind her of Matthew, but perhaps she was missing something.

  They followed the faint scallops of the deer’s trail. They came to the place where Danny had given up and turned back, and now the tracking became harder. At one point Mel stopped and showed him a blood-mark against a spruce, where the deer had brushed against the tree. There were coarse brown and white hairs caught in the bark.

  Wallis found Danny’s knife: skied right over it and felt it clink against his pole. He stopped and dug it out, picked it up. It was a nice knife.

  “You’re good at finding things,” Mel said.

  Wallis shrugged. He was enjoying the outing, but was impatient to begin his job. He felt as if he were betraying himself, letting his talent slip away from him, by his traveling horizontally, rather than straight down.

  “Danny won’t believe it,” Mel said. “He’ll be very pleased.”

  The tracks disappeared beneath velvet mounds of snow, but Wallis saw that Mel knew deer so well, and had already in tracking this one learned its rhythms well enough, that she could tell what the deer was going to do in response to the landscape. She stopped and began clawing at a mound of snow; she uncovered a red-smeared depression, an ice-cast of where the deer had lain.

  “Spruce and pine trees have a physical quality,” Mel said. “Cedar is a tree of spiritual qualities. This deer’s not ready to die yet. He’ll stay in the spruce and pines for as long as he can. Only when he knows he’s going to die will he go down into the cedars. But that’s where he’s headed,” she said. “I think he knows already.” She lifted her hand to her throat. “If the snow hadn’t fallen, you could see all the blood,” she said. “It would look like a forest of blood. I can smell it, even beneath the snow.

  “It would have died here,” Mel said, pointing, “if folks from town hadn’t kept pushing it. It would have laid down under this cedar and rested, and gotten ready to die. But they must have been right behind it, at this point. Closer than they realized.

  “I’ve seen them get shot and fall down in a stand of fir or spruce or pine, then get up and crawl a hundred yards or farther to die under the cedars,” she explained. “Scientists will give you some mumbo-jumbo about physiological responses, that the cedars are darker and cooler. They’ll talk about thermal regulation and reduced fucking phototropism. The truth is simpler. The deer are leaving this layer of earth and are going to the next kingdom, and the cedars are a bridge between those two worlds.

  “Science has never been all the way right about anything,” she said.

  They traveled now with great anticipation through a tangle of old cedars. There was a silence and stillness, a compression of space and time, which they felt as a ringing in their ears. They slowed, then stopped, knowing the deer was nearby, but that they just were not seeing it.

  “There,” Mel said, and Wallis saw the deer curled up, as if only resting. It was beneath the shelter of cedar fronds. A light dusting of snow had filtered down onto its back. The antlers rose sweeping into the branches, so that it seemed the antlers had become the branches. The deer’s back was to them, so that it appeared he was not dead but instead only looking off in the other direction, ever vigilant.

&nb
sp; They cleaned and boned and quartered him and loaded him into their packs, along with the hide and antlers. They cleaned him with the knife Wallis had found in the snow, the bone-handled knife that had helped kill him. Before leaving, Mel rearranged the bare bones and hooves into a running position beneath the tree. The blood from where they had cleaned the deer, though no longer warm, had soaked down through the snow, where it would stain the ground until spring: soaking down into the soil an inch or two, but then no farther.

  The packs were heavy. Mel carried most of the weight. They followed their own tracks back out. When they reached the part of the trail where Danny had still been tracking—closer to town—Mel pointed to a grove of trees whose trunks were coated with ice. She had noticed the grove on the way in but hadn’t commented on it, wanting to see if Wallis would notice it.

  “Danny stopped here to rest for a while,” she said. “It was night by that time. The heat from his lantern melted the snow in the trees and it ran down the tree trunks. Then when he moved on, it got cold and froze again.”

  The trees glittered. Now the path was easy to follow—a winding path through the woods, the injured deer always choosing the easiest route, and the trees shimmering in their ice coats, as if in some beautiful hallway. Mel and Wallis knew that the proof of the deer’s passage, the blood and the tracks, lay just beneath them, beneath the snow.

  By the time they neared town, they were drenched with sweat and discolored by some of the deer’s blood that had leaked from their packs. Though it was only mid-afternoon, the sun had peaked and was in fast descent. They stopped to drink water from a trickling creek: took off their packs and crouched in the snow and lapped the water straight from the creek, to avoid wetting their hands.

  They skied back into town and left their skis stuck in the snow in front of the bar. The sweat and blood had started to freeze on them again, but now in the heat of the bar it melted quickly, running down them in a sheen. They said nothing but unloaded their packs, laying the mahogany antlers on the floor and stretching the furred hide out. Danny came over, grinning, and gave Mel a hug. He shook Wallis’s hand enthusiastically—and when Mel said to Wallis, “Go on, show him what you found,” and Wallis handed Danny his knife, they thought Danny was going to explode out of his skin. Danny whirled in dervish circles and bounced up and down like a man on a pogo stick, holding the knife in both hands—Wallis thought at first he had been drinking, but Mel told him later that no, that was just the way he was—and Danny hugged them both now, almost lancing Wallis with the knife as he did so, and rang the cowbell at the bar’s counter, announcing free drinks for all. Then he dropped to one knee and ran his hands through the deer’s hide, admiring it, and found the four holes—two entries, two exits—of the bullets; found them hidden beneath the thick fur, and examined each one with his fingers.

  And while Artie, the bartender, was pouring drinks, Danny took the antlers and went over to one corner of the bar and with hammer and nails tacked them to the wall, with the fur still fresh upon the skullplate. Wallis felt dizzy from the heat and weakened from the rigor of packing the deer out, and from the shock of his drink, a rum and Coke. He imagined what those antlers would look like twenty years hence, and how the story behind them would be told—perhaps altered slightly, its boundaries compressed here or expanded there, as if the story itself were a thing that was still moving across the landscape, along with the cultures and lives of the humans who carried it . . . and Wallis wasn’t sure he liked that feeling. Part of him was proud to be accepted into this—what? village? clan? pack?—so soon, even if in a small way—but another part of him wanted to take the antlers down and have the story, and the day, slide away into darkness.

  But it was too late. Danny was packing the meat into his propane freezer, wrapping it and labeling each cut of it, and Charlie—the big man with the black beard and the cleaver, from the day before—was searing some of the meat in a skillet on the big wood stove, salting and peppering it as he cooked, and passing out samples to everyone; and the story, the moment, was alive and well on its own, beyond Wallis’s control.

  Wallis began looking at some of the old photos on the wall. There were so many of them, and yet he understood that this was almost all there was: that this valley was still so new to the world, so recently wrested free of glaciers, and inhabited marginally by humans, that this was it—there was almost nothing else beyond what was on the walls. The Indians had hunted the high valley in the autumns, but had never settled there. It had been even colder then, so close to the time of glaciers, and before the earth had begun its slow warming, like a face turning slowly toward the sun.

  Charlie threw more wood in the stove—big logs, each seeming as long as a small canoe. His face shone with sweat, and he grinned, as if he loved only those two things in the world—cooking and sweating: as if he could not get close enough to the fire. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans; he did not own a coat.

  There were so many photos of Matthew, and of Matthew and Mel together—so young, already so long ago. Wallis found it hard to believe this was the same man he had shared an office with: a volatile man whose sole focus was diving and striking at the oil, and who did so with eerie, overwhelming success.

  In some of the photos, he was just a boy with a rifle—a brace of grouse set before him, a dog, a picture of the boy in snow, on snowshoes—and a young clear-eyed man standing next to an elk, and in another photo, a monstrous deer.

  Photos of Matthew lounging in a hammock with Mel—eighteen, nineteen years old? (Wallis had never seen Matthew sleep before, except when he occasionally fell asleep at the drafting table late at night, and lay there with his head down for a while, as if listening to the map he had just drawn)—and photos of Mel and Matthew ice-fishing, and photos of them canoeing in summer. Mel in a straw hat. All black and white photos; all ancient, it seemed. Wallis stared, tried to remember being young with Susan. He had saved nothing from that life. He couldn’t believe Mel’s and Matthew’s youth. Twenty years had never seemed so long to him.

  There were older photos, too: from fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. He peered closer. The men and women from back then definitely looked different, as did the country, in some slight way.

  Danny came over to where Wallis was studying the photos—studying them as if for a test—and he, in his exuberance, was wrapped in the deer hide. He clapped a hand on Wallis’s shoulder, squeezed the muscles between his neck and shoulder, and called back to Mel, “With all that sweat and blood on him, except for being a little on the puny side, he even kind of looks like Matthew.”

  “I shape them that way,” Mel said, laughing. She had finished her drink.

  “Old Dudley shapes them that way,” Danny said.

  Wallis went back to sit with Mel, and to have a drink. It seemed important to have only one, or possibly two. He imagined how easy it would be, in the midst of all the snow—but secure and warm in the bar—to start drinking and not stop until the days grew bright and long again.

  He had been away from his work for a week: the longest ever. One more drink. Mel looked at him and smiled, remembering the simplicity of the day: hauling meat.

  The door opened and with it came a blast of cold air, made colder to those inside by their having become accustomed to the warmth, and in the doorway stood a tiny old woman, tottery not from the cold or the wind, but from age. She had wild thinning white hair, and there was snow on her back and shoulders—a blizzard was coming, the season’s first big storm—and someone shouted, “Close the door, Helen!”

  She was wearing old wooden snowshoes, and she clumped across the floor in them, sat down at Mel’s and Wallis’s table, and began unbuckling the leather straps, glaring first at Mel and then at Wallis in a way that told Wallis the old woman was a fan of Matthew’s.

  Mel introduced them. “Wallis, this is Helen—Matthew’s mother. Helen, this is Wallis—Old Dudley’s other geologist.”

  Wallis stood and reached out his hand to shake. Helen didn’t wa
nt to take it, but had to. “Where are you staying?” Helen asked.

  “In Matthew’s cabin,” Wallis said, and she scowled.

  “Helen runs the mercantile across the street,” Mel said. “We couldn’t get along without her.” She patted Helen’s arm, and there was some immediate softening. She looked like she was a hundred years old. “Helen raised Matthew since he was four years old,” Mel said. “She didn’t take delivery of him til she was forty-two.”

  Wallis didn’t want the second drink, but the first one was gone. Artie came over and sat at the table with them, bringing everyone a new round, and there were still stories to be told.

  “By took delivery of, she means adopted,” Helen explained. “His real mother got pneumonia. She fell through the river while she was deer hunting. Matthew’s father pulled her out and rescued her, but she got pneumonia and died. Matthew was three. She’d been pregnant again, but of course the baby didn’t get born. Matthew’s father died a year after that. He just quit living. You ever see anybody do that?” Helen asked Wallis, and he looked away, didn’t answer.

  “Grandma Helen,” Artie said—not a salutation or a question, simply a statement, a naming. “You raised a good boy.” Artie stared down for a moment, then turned to Wallis. “What does he do down there?” he asked, and for a moment Wallis thought he meant, What is it like, beneath twenty thousand feet of stone? But then he understood that Artie meant only Texas, and the Gulf Coast—and that furthermore, “down there” or “out there” could just as easily be anywhere in the world, as long as it was on the other side of these mountains.

  “He’s happy,” Wallis said, a little defensively. “He loves it more than anything.” A glance at Mel to see if it hurt her, and he saw that it hadn’t.

  “Yeah, but I mean, what does he do?”

  “Well, he sits at his drafting table and makes maps,” Wallis said.

  “Maps,” Artie said. He looked around the bar and seemed on the verge of a philosophy lecture, but in the end only took another drink and shook his head.