by Rick Bass
“How come you and Mel never come into town?” she asked.
Wallis shrugged. “She’s always out tracking. I . . .” He shrugged, gestured to the books on the shelves, and to the woods. Did not have the nerve to tell her the truth, that he was simply too tired: that it was too far.
“Do you mind if I stay this evening, to watch and be sure?” Helen asked.
“To be sure of what?”
“That you’re not in love with her.”
Wallis smiled. There was no way in hell Matthew would be coming back, but he could not say that to the old lady. Her own entrapment was like anyone else’s, like everyone else’s, even here in the center of this free valley. He thought of the freedom he found at twenty thousand feet, and would find one day again.
When Mel got home, she went out to the smokehouse and gathered several grouse for dinner, which pleased Helen; it was her favorite food. They basted the birds with butter and salt and pepper and roasted them in the wood stove until the scent filled the cabin fully.
Once again the coyotes appeared—Wallis could see their moonlit shadows moving around in the blue woods at a distance—and one coyote suddenly appeared at the picture window as if he had been hiding beneath the sill, and had leapt up solely with the purpose of startling them, which he did.
The coyote had a large gray ruffed grouse in his jaws—its wings were still flapping furiously—and the coyote stood there in front of the window, his mouth full of struggling grouse. They could see terror in the grouse’s eyes as it flapped. Loose feathers floated in all directions. Then the coyote disappeared, taking the grouse with it.
It was hard not to believe that the coyote had performed some magic—that it had transformed one of the autumn-dead birds in the smokehouse back into the living—and Mel had to go down and be sure she had closed and barred the door.
They sat down to dinner at the long table. The flames of the candles reflected themselves against the bronzed, bare breasts of the grouse.
They ate until only bones remained: no bread, no vegetables, only grouse. For dessert they tried to peel the grapefruit Matthew had shipped in, but the rinds were frozen. They ended up peeling them with pocketknives, as if carving wood, and spooning out the frozen pulp, which was still sweet.
“How many wells?” Wallis asked. “How many have they drilled so far?”
Mel thought for a moment. Helen and Wallis leaned back in their chairs, sated. “Seventeen?” she said. “Eighteen, maybe?” She got up and went over to her desk, pulled down some old hide-wrapped journals, scanned through the pages; then she unrolled a hide map and spread it out on the floor.
It was the most beautiful map Wallis had ever seen, tanned nearly as thin as the linen on which he drew his own maps. The hide was cream-colored and bore the charcoal smudges of age on it. It was as large as a rug and had the valley shown on it four different times: a map for each season. The four maps showed the paths of the wolves, and other landmarks: kill sites, dens, and places where Mel had glimpsed the wolves: places where the wolves had allowed themselves to be seen by her.
Mel counted the well symbols, which she had marked with tiny skulls and crossbones. Wallis touched the hide, the well locations, with his hands. “How deep was this one?” he asked—a location along the river. “And this one?”—farther up in the mountains.
Mel was still counting. “Hell, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t care about any of that. What does it matter? They drilled them,” she said. “They were dry holes, they went away, but they’ll come back.”
“Nineteen,” she said, when she had finished. She sat back and touched the hide: followed, with her long fingers, some of the wolves’ passages from the winter of that year. There were more data on that map; less on the summer map, when it was so hard to find their tracks. Usually she had to follow them in summer and fall by mapping the flocks, the calls and gatherings, of the ravens above, who followed the wolves from kill to kill; the ravens riding above the paths of the wolves.
Helen hunkered down on all fours and also touched the map, so that all three of them had their hands on it. “Is this the deer that Matthew shot up on Waper Ridge last year?” she asked.
“It is,” said Mel.
They could all smell the smoke in the hide: the way it had absorbed the odor of wood burned in the fireplace. “Where’s my store?” Helen asked, trying to orient herself.
Wallis wanted to know more about the wells, but Mel said Old Dudley had told her not to let Wallis know anything about the wells: which, said Mel, was one of the reasons she was showing him.
“Do you have the logs?” Wallis asked. “The electrical logs, the well logs—the paper printouts, the drill rates, anything?” Mel shook her head, looked back at the map. Her fingers rested at the site of a moose kill dated September twenty-fifth.
“The drill cuttings—the ground-up chips of rock,” Wallis said. “Where are they?”
Mel studied him a moment. Did he think she was as willing and eager to help him find oil as he was to discover it?
“Take, take, take,” she said. “What do you have to give?”
At first he thought she meant a trade, a price for the information, but then he understood what she meant: that desire, even ravening hunger, was permissible in her home, but not to cross over into the territory of greed. To rein in, if he could at all help it.
“Some they sent down the river,” Mel said. “They pumped the slurry straight into the river. Others, they buried in big pits. It was all mixed up and gooey with mud—you wouldn’t be able to make anything of it anyway,” she said. “It would drive you crazy.”
“I need that old data,” Wallis said. “The old well logs.”
Mel shrugged. “That’s your business. But my guess is that if Old Dudley wanted you to have those things, he would have sent them up here with you.”
Mel folded her map and stored it in a cedar chest. Helen rose and went over to one of the bookshelves and began touching the spines of the books. “If you’ve read all these books, you’re one smart cookie,” she said.
“I’ve read them,” Mel said. “Most of them I read a long time ago, but I read them.” She went over and stood next to Helen and stared at the books as if they were both watching animals in some meadow: deer, perhaps, or elk. “It’s not so much as if I’ve quit reading,” she said. “It’s more like now I’m reading stories out on the land—stories tucked under the snow, stories running from me, just around the next bend. It still feels like I’m reading,” she said. “I just don’t get to open a book much anymore.”
“That’s a little like how it is for me,” Wallis said.
“That’s what it was like for Matthew, too,” Mel said.
Helen watched them, satisfied they weren’t in love.
“How can you not fall in love with her?” she asked Wallis. Mel blushed slightly. “She is like a daughter,” Helen said, taking Mel’s arm in her hand.
Mel shook her head, patted Helen’s old hand. “I’m a fanatic, Helen,” she said. “One-dimensional. It’s like I’m always falling,” she said, “tumbling down some deep chasm. Falling forever.” She shrugged. “Who wants to go down with someone like that?”
Helen’s eyes were large and worried, behind her thick glasses.
“Why, shoot,” she said, “almost anyone would, honey. Men don’t care about any of that. They’ll fall in love with almost anything, when the time is right for them.”
Mel laughed.
She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out another deerskin, tanned and folded neatly. There were holes in it—tooth marks—and only a few data in the winter quadrant: that year’s map, still in progress.
“This is a deer the wolves killed,” she said. “I went in after they’d been eating on it and saved the hide before they ate that, too. I don’t know if it was right or not, but it was a thing I’d been wanting to do for a long time. Isn’t it strange,” she said, pointing to her ink marks—the black dashes and dots of the tiny
pawprints she’d pricked, like tattoos, into the hide, “to think that the wolves are still traveling across this deer’s back, while the rest of the deer has been consumed by them, and has become a wolf?” She touched the soft hide as if for balance, or solace. “It’s as if everything else cancels out, and this is all that’s left,” she said, studying those ink tracks. “The story of it.”
IT WAS SNOWING IN THE MORNING. WHEN WALLIS AWOKE, there was so little light, and with such odd blue cast to it, that he wondered if up in this part of the world daylight was like some animal that traveled a short distance on some days, and farther distances on other days.
There were no leftovers. He made toast. He listened to the snow fall, and to the crackling of the fire. He stared out the window, trying to gauge when Mel and Helen might have left, but their tracks were already buried.
He watched the yard for the sight of some animal—a deer, coyote, raven, anything—that might hold his interest—but there was nothing, no movement, only the snow falling.
He read:
When I was a young boy, I hied away from authority for a while and rode on the deck of a steamer between Kansas City and St. Louis, and higher up that valley. All are merged together; but we can be sure that, if upstream, the water and the mud from our own village—our own farms—are there with the rest. The stream moves on—it never rests—and it grows as it moves. It courses across a state; it marks a boundary between states. Men had made it a vehicle for floating logs; a highway for skiffs and barges. Now, the more pompous stream styles itself a river. It hastens to join the Ohio and share in the dignity of floating steamboats and carrying on the commerce of a populous valley. The Ohio has even surpassed the tributary by which we have been led, in taking on its cargo of mud. We stand in the middle of the suspension bridge at Cincinnati and look down on the yellow surface of the great stream. There go the contributions from half a dozen states. There goes the soil filched from our garden or torn from our new-made road, two hundred miles away. We know it is there.
Look on the map and notice how many rivers are bringing their sediments to the Ohio. Trace these tributaries to their sources. Notice that the Ohio carries its burden to the Mississippi. Look again upon the map and see how many other great rivers bring the mud from other far-off regions to concentrate it all in the mighty Father of Waters. Here in this restless tide floats the identical soil which was washed from Farmer Jones’s potato field.
In this view, consider the great Missouri. It pours its yellow stream into the clearer tide of the Mississippi a few miles above St. Louis. I have stood on the deck of a steamer between Alton and St. Louis and looked down on the Missouri’s turbid volume pushing far into the Mississippi, and retaining for miles a distinct boundary between the waters of the two rivers. It appears that the contributions from the far northwest exceed all those from the east.
Follow the whirling tide of the Missouri farther upward toward its sources.
There stand great cities of men, some good and some evil, on its alluvial banks. The crumbling bluffs slide into the river. Above the limits of city populations the river is already gathering in the mud destined to journey to the Gulf of Mexico—mud which has already been floated from some remoter region and deposited here at times of overflow.
Here comes the Niobara, with slime from the prairies of Nebraska; the Cheyenne, with washings from the mining camps in the Black Hills; the Little Missouri, Platte, and Yellowstone, with sands worn from the Big Horn, the Wind River, and the Snowy Mountains; here, on a grassy plain, unite the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin tributaries, which bring the dust of the continent from the high watershed of the Red Rock Mountains, which parts the continental drainage to opposite points of the compass.
It is a bewildering breadth and complexity of operations! Over every foot of this wasting expanse the land is yielding to the corrosive actions of rivers and rains and frosts. The proud mountain domes and pinnacles are coming to acknowledge the supremacy of its powers of domination. The Rocky Mountains have begun their journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Cubic miles of their granitic substance are buried in the delta of Louisiana and the bar of the Mississippi.
Every river, in its search for a resting place, has cut a way of even grade across the inequalities of the land, and the rubbish has been dumped somewhere.
We have not seen how any of these works began; but we see them in progress; and we feel bound in reason to infer that the rivers have worked in the distant past as they are working before our eyes. But when one thing dies, another must live. Observe a wall of mountains, a ridge of stone. We have not detected Nature anywhere raising such a wall in the night, as we sleep. Such mountains must instead be remnants of distant, buried civilizations of stone; once stretching far away north and west. The forces of erosion have worn away the formation on both sides, creating the wall, exposing a basilica of relief in the same fashion as the statue emerges from the block of stone under the chisel of the sculptor.
Across this country, and buried in all places beneath us, are great formations and walls such as these, like the boundaries around civilizations which never existed, or have yet to exist. For the most part these formations have been carried away, save here and there the isolated remnants which lie like islands in the midst of geology of an entirely different matter.
We shall have other occasion and opportunity to talk about these savage places of remnancy and the powers they retain; for they are burial places of the brute populations which held possession of America before the advent of man.
The two great processes, erosion and sedimentation, must be vividly and simultaneously appreciated. The whole history of the land has consisted chiefly of upbuilding and destruction, rebuilding and disintegration, by the action of forces which have left gigantic monuments of their former power, and are even in our time worked on a scale large enough to illustrate how the foundations of the land were laid and how the face of the earth has been carved into the fashion it presents to interested eyes.
In another walk we must follow the sediments under the sea, and try to learn what goes on in the mysterious abysses through which no highway has opened.
There wasn’t a damn thing Wallis could do. He wanted to dive, but there was nowhere to dive to. He put on his coat and coveralls—Matthew’s coat and coveralls—and skied to town, to consort with people, as if taking medicine. As he had been instructed to do each day, he first went down to the smokehouse and checked to be sure the door was barred. He peered in through the window. There was enough food in there for an army, it seemed—though also, he suspected, with the amount of country Mel ranged over, following the wolves (or rather, moving away from them), it would be just barely enough.
Wallis checked in on the giant salmon skeleton, too, before leaving—as if examining the boundaries of his compressed territory before traveling to some other place of dubious security—and he watched, and was comforted by, the cold waters passing over the salmon’s hollow ribs and skull. The salmon seemed to be waiting patiently for some signal, perhaps still hoping to begin its migration. The illusion of the ripples over its back made it look once again as if its tail were moving back and forth, steadying its position in the current.
He traveled to town, tense at first, but loosening as the snow kept coming down. He said Susan’s name out loud once and felt better for it. He watched the dark spruce woods all around him receiving their snow, and yet in the same moment he recalled sitting with Susan on the porch in the hill country in the yellow summer twilight, watching bats flitter over the thin-trickling creek and feeling the reflected heat of the pink-polished granite boulders all around them finally beginning to cool slightly—and it was strange, like having some kind of double vision, or a mild schizophrenia, to be carrying two such disparate images at once within him: reality, and yet, just as strongly, the echo of reality.
The snow was so soft and deep that even on his skis he sank into it up past his ankles. It was mesmerizing to watch it pile up around him like surf as he
plowed through it, encountering no more resistance than as if in a dream.
Out on the main road, which was a tunnel of untouched white beneath the giant trees—a road to nowhere, he thought—he turned toward town as if it were his home.
Along the way he passed deer standing beneath the great tamaracks, feeding on the mosses still attached to fallen branches. Wallis stopped and watched for a while, resting—hot as a firebrick amid that falling snow—and as he watched, he saw how the heavy snow accumulated on the moss-covered branches, causing them to snap; and while he stood there, several branches broke free from high up and came floating slowly down—falling not much faster than the curtain of snow. The branches’ descents were buoyed by the long airy trellises and streamers of the black moss, and though the branches fell soundlessly, the deer would look up and wait for them, would watch them fall, and then would converge wherever the branch landed and begin pawing at it, tearing and chewing. From time to time they would look up with long black beards hanging from their mouths, so that it looked as if they were wearing costume mustaches: a comedy made more poignant by the fact that they were standing belly-deep in snow and soon on their way to starving to death.
The bucks still had their heavy antlers—antlers that were easily twice the size of any Wallis had seen before—though when one group of them turned and ran, made uneasy by his staring, a buck’s antler fell off, tumbled from his head like a man having his hat knocked off, and Wallis knew all the antlers would be falling off in the next several days, like brown leaves in the autumn, or like the mossy branches that were falling and drifting down from the trees.
Wallis watched as the bucks floundered, thrashing through powder, stumbling and lunging—up past their shoulders in show sometimes. Seen from a distance, they appeared like swimmers navigating a turbulent ocean, though the waves were frozen, and it was only the deer that were moving, not the waves.
