Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “I guess you can make a fair amount of money, in a good year,” he said. “Do you have any plans—”

  “Ma wants me to go to a Bible school,” Colter said.

  “But you don’t want to?”

  “Hell no,” Colter said.

  They skied on without speaking after that, their skis cutting fresh powder, and the antlers in the bag thrown over Colter’s shoulder clunking together and rattling. Sometimes bucks who still had their antlers would hear the dull sound, and would suddenly appear a short distance from them, eyes bulging, nostrils flared, and they would stand there as if planning to stop the skiers’ passage, wanting to fight: believing that the sounds they heard were the rattlings from two bucks fighting over a doe. The first rut had occurred a month ago, but now there was the secondary estrus, twenty-eight days later, and whenever the bucks that still had antlers would appear before them—just standing there, plumes of frost jetting from their nostrils—Colter and Wallis would have to stop and wait for the bucks’ adrenaline to subside before they could pass safely.

  Sometimes in the dense-falling snow the bucks would be unable to see clearly that Colter and Wallis were humans, and would walk closer, and Colter and Wallis would have to shout in order to break the deer’s procreative trance.

  Colter pointed to one large buck that was watching them from back in the forest. “I’ll come back for that guy.”

  They followed the slender paths the deer had beaten and packed in the snow, their tiny hooves compressing the snow to blue ice. Those trails now lay beneath the night’s new snows and would have to be cleared out again and again. They could see only faintly the old paths the deer had beaten down. The snow before them was rolling, like the slow rolls of waves at sea, as yet uncut by the day’s passages; and as he skied, Colter probed with his poles as if wading, searching for clams in the surf, and occasionally struck the tip of a fallen antler with the end of his pole. He would crouch down, grope barehanded for the antler, and would dig it up and examine it briefly before usually tossing it back farther into the woods.

  “The squirrels and porcupines chew on them in the spring for the minerals,” he said, “which is when they need nutrients, because they’re pregnant. But the hawks, owls, and eagles have their little ones to take care of then, too. They can’t eat antlers the way a rodent can. So they pound on the squirrels and chipmunks, and get the antlers’ minerals that way. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty wild,” he said. “This spring when you see a hawk flying through the forest, it’s going to have part of one of those antlers inside it.” He picked up another small antler, which had been shed so recently—perhaps in the night—that it still had a ring of blood and damp flesh around its base. Colter tossed the antler into the woods. “Think of it,” he said. “A flying antler.” He spoke not of his toss, but of the hawk carrying the rodent carrying the antler inside it.

  “Did you think that up, or did your father tell you about it?” Wallis asked.

  “You don’t have to think it up,” Colter said. “Hell, you look around and you can just see it.”

  Wallis wondered if Old Dudley would be drawn to Colter—if he would try to recruit him as well. He didn’t think Colter would go willingly.

  Wallis also thought Colter might be a little wild, a little too rank, for Old Dudley’s use; though from what Wallis understood, that was how Matthew had been when Old Dudley had first swooped down on him, long ago.

  They skied into the opening where Wallis had seen the deer lose its antler. The big trees all looked the same, and with the paths buried by the new snow, he couldn’t be sure where it had been, but he stood and tried to remember—the landscape looking so different only two days later. He finally decided on one tree, then headed toward it. They circled that tree in wider and wider circles, plunging their poles into the soft snow, and finally Wallis came upon the antler, as if it were a ring or a set of keys he had dropped, and he was amazed by the pleasure he felt at having connected and found that for which he had been searching.

  He handed it to Colter. Colter smiled, said thank you, and dropped it into his sack. They spent some more time searching for its mate, though they could not find it, and were not even sure if it had fallen off yet.

  “Do you keep notes of where you find one antler, on any given day, so you can go back later in the spring and look for its match?” Wallis asked.

  “No,” Colter said. “I don’t have any problem remembering it.”

  Colter took Wallis down into the woods toward the river. It was hard going on the skis, and they spent much time sidestepping and herringboning over fallen lodgepole; using deer trails when they could, but often creating their own; and whenever they looked back, they could sometimes see, through the swirling curtain of snow, one or two bucks still following the sound of them.

  “The wolves lay trails like this, in winter, to trap the deer,” Colter said. “They know the deer have to stay on these little paths—they can’t venture off even a step to the left or the right or they’ll sink to their necks in the snow, and the wolves, with their big feet, can run across the top of the snow and catch them at will—so when the wolves find a winter-range herd of deer they’ll carve out a new trail that leads past a good ambush spot. The wolves will run up and down that new trail, packing it down good, so that the deer will be tempted into using it. The wolves will leave the area then. More and more deer will start using that trail, cutting it deeper into the snow—heading right past that ambush spot, just the way the wolves want it—and then pow! The wolves come back a week or so later, and they’ll just have a feast. They’ll kill and eat a deer off that trail two or three times a week, before the deer decide to get the hell out of there and go look for a new winter range; and the wolves kill the hell out of them then too, once the herd abandons the trail system and starts floundering into new territory, trying to cut new trails. The wolves follow them.”

  “Have you seen this?” Wallis asked. “Did you figure this out, too?”

  “No,” Colter said, “my father told me that part. But I’ve seen it.”

  Wallis wondered what in God’s name he had to offer or teach Colter. He figured the lone antler might be all he had to give.

  They were nearing the river—close enough that they could see the bright space ahead of them. They were still on one of the deer trails.

  “By the end of winter, the trail will be six feet deep,” Colter said. “It’ll be like a tunnel. The lions can sit above these trails and wait for the deer to pass below. It’s like the deer are trapped in ice burrows or something; like they’ve become a different kind of animal.”

  “A different species,” Wallis said.

  “Yeah,” said Colter. “People think all animals are always the same. Hardly anyone understands how different they are, each month of the year.”

  They followed the trail into the willows. A grouse leapt into the air, wings beating furiously—it was gone in an instant—and Colter flinched, and Wallis understood they were nearing the spot where his father had drowned.

  “You’d never know any of this was ever here—this trail system—in the spring, after the snow’s gone,” Colter said, and Wallis looked around and nodded, imagining how it must be: the ice highways, so unavoidably noticeable—you could travel nowhere else—melting and relaxing, sliding away into sheets of water, leaving nothing except perhaps a few strand lines of dropped antlers, and deer scat, and leftover bones from the wolf- and lion-kills—antlers and bones marking the old paths like the residue of seafoam from a recent tide.

  “Have you been seeing those antlers in the trees above us?” Colter asked. Wallis stopped and looked up and at first saw nothing, but when Colter pointed it out to him, he saw a large antler wedged between the forks of a larch tree, about fifteen feet off the ground. The antler had been placed there so long ago that the cambium had grown clutching around the antler.

  “Squirrels?” Wallis asked, and Colter smiled, said nothing. And they went farther down the trail,
and Wallis kept staring up into the trees, and now he began seeing antlers up in the trees all along the trail. Often the antlers looked just like branches, but other times they were silhouetted against the snowy sky. A brace of elk antlers spanned the narrow trail in one place, twenty feet up, between two lodgepoles.

  “Indians?” Wallis asked. Colter smiled and shook his head. “Matthew?” Wallis said, and Colter nodded.

  “These ice trails were here in these same places, when he was a kid?” Wallis asked.

  “More or less,” Colter said. A hallway of antlers, is what it seemed like to Wallis, and he said, “Why’d he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Colter said. Something clinked in the snow beneath him, and he stopped and dug up another antler.

  They came out into the brightness of the clearing at the river. The river lay sheeted with ice. A moose stood on the other side, watching them, snow piling up on its back.

  “There,” Colter said, pointing to a snowy mound of rocks at frozen river’s edge: a cairn, about four feet high. They skied over to it and Colter set his bag of antlers down and with his gloved hands began brushing the snow from the stones. Strings of feathers began to appear—raven, eagle, snowy owl—as did the sightless skulls of martens and weasels, beaver and deer.

  The tips of antlers bristled everywhere from beneath the rocks. Colter kept having to brush the snow back; no sooner had he cleared a glimpse of the cairn than the snow began covering it again.

  He took several of the larger antlers out of his bag and began wedging them into the cairn. Wallis helped him. When they were finished, they looked back across the river. At first they thought the moose was gone, but then Colter’s eyes picked out the shape of the moose’s ears; it was lying down, bedded down for the storm’s duration, watching.

  “Would you like to see him?” Colter asked. “I’d like to see him once more, before winter closes him off.”

  They began gathering branches and limbs: snapping twigs, gathering dried black wisps of old-man’s-beard, and soon had a fire crackling out on the ice above the river. They had scraped away three feet of new snow, down to the blue ice below, and beneath the ice they could hear the river running strong, and could feel the tremors of it. The ice was not yet thick, and they moved carefully, not desiring to join Zeke.

  The smoke from the fire rose in sheets and twists, and the orange flames danced across the ice. And the river below seemed to run faster as the fire grew larger. They kept piling larger branches on it. They dragged a fallen larch tree over and laid it atop the fire. The ice began to grow smoky clear in the heat. Three-toed salamanders began to wriggle from out of one of the rotten logs. Colter gathered them as they exited and put them in his pocket to bury safely back beneath the snow at a later time. The salamanders were sluggish and awkward, as if not just chilled by the ice but drunk too on the wood smoke. A black-backed woodpecker crawled from one of the log’s cavities and leapt into the air with a quick, pulsing flight—as if awakened from some rude dream—and shortly after that bats began to wriggle from out of the log and took erratic flight, looking strange in the daytime, and amidst so much snow—as if the rules for some sort of normalcy had been interrupted, and things and patterns were no longer as they had once been.

  The fire wandered and wavered, extinguishing itself in some places, as sizzling, hissing snow-melt pinched it out, but enlarging in other places as they kept adding fuel. It crept across the ice like an animal turning round and round, looking for a place to bed.

  They followed the fire’s path, trying to peer down through the heat-seared, glassy ice, but could see nothing. Finally the ice began to thin and then crack, with dark waters appearing below, swallowing the coals and the flames instantly with quick burps and belches of steam. Colter and Wallis backed away and watched as the hole enlarged.

  They watched the snow landing on the dark waters and thought their own thoughts. The moose kept watching them from across the river.

  When the fire had burned completely out, they crept out on their bellies and peered down into the water.

  Zeke was still down there, his arms still reaching up. It looked almost as if he could still be saved. They lay there a long time watching him—the falling snow cold on the backs of their necks—and then Wallis got up and went back to the cairn and waited.

  When Colter finally stood and came back to the cairn, his tears were frozen on his eyelashes like little crystals. He brushed them from his face like crumbs.

  Wallis had thought Colter would want to head home after that, but instead Colter stayed with him and they headed back toward Mel’s. They did not travel on the road, but explored the woods, searching for, and finding, a few more antlers. The snow was finally beginning to let up, dispersing beneath a north wind as they neared the cabin at dusk.

  They could smell Mel’s cooking—pies and bread baking, and a venison ham. When they entered the cabin the scents deepened, and Colter paused for a moment, remembering previous Christmases. Mel, who had not heard them come up on the porch, was startled, then looked disappointed. “I don’t guess you saw them,” she said.

  Wallis shook his head. “We went to see Zeke.”

  Outside, the wind, stronger than ever, shaped and swirled the new snow into powdery drifts. The snow made a sifting, tatting sound against the windows, like thrown sugar, or sand. They could see bright stars appearing above the rivers of snow, which were snaking southward.

  “I hope they’re not out in this,” Wallis said.

  Mel shook her head. “They’ll be okay, if they don’t panic. Matthew should be okay. If they get in trouble, they can just burrow in on the lee side of a big spruce, make a nest under all the snaggly branches, and light little fires all night. They might have to share the space with a couple of grouse or snowshoe hares, but they’ll be okay.” She smiled, thinking of Old Dudley being forced to take refuge in such a manner. “Was Zeke still there?” she asked.

  Colter nodded, then turned away and went to the window to watch the wind redistributing the snow. Mel wet her thumb and rubbed at Wallis’s cheek and forehead. “Y’all are both covered with smudge,” she said. Throughout the day she had been thinking about how it had not been so bad sleeping in Wallis’s arms on the couch, and she had been worrying that once she had taken such a small pleasure as that one, it might be as if a gate had been opened: that like some kind of glutton, she might begin to desire more from him. She was relieved, as she dabbed the smudge from his face, to realize it was not this way. Still, she was surprised to find that she wanted him to look presentable when Matthew and Old Dudley came.

  “Here comes Ma,” said Colter, still staring out the window. “She’s got the carolers out with her tonight.” Now they could hear, carried on the strong wind and leaking in through the cabin chinks, the sounds of children singing, and of adults’ voices, too—among them Amy’s voice, pure and perfect.

  They could see lanterns held barely aloft above the shimmering snow rivers—and as the singers grew closer and clearer they saw that there were two great draft horses, each as large and dark as a moose, plowing the snow ahead of them, and that several of the smaller children rode atop the horses, safely above the flowing snow dunes, which were glowing now with the color of the stars. The temperature had fallen at least thirty degrees in the last hour. There was not even the warmth of a moon.

  Mel and Wallis and Colter went out onto the porch to greet the carolers, expecting them to tumble into the cabin blue-lipped, exhausted, and frostbitten; but first the carolers had work to do. They had not come this far not to deliver that which they desired to give, and they sang “Silent Night” beautifully, though it seemed incongruous with the wind still blowing and the snow hurling itself against the cabin.

  Wallis and Mel and Colter, without coats, and without the warmth of activity, found themselves wishing the song would move faster; and when it was finished, the children came inside, steaming like animals (Amy and Colter went and haltered the horses on the back side of the cabin,
out of the wind), and they kept singing, filling the cabin with their sound: more people in the cabin than perhaps there had ever been at once, and so many of them singing.

  The children finished that carol—“God Rest Ye Weary Gentlemen”—and began shedding their coats and boots. Clumps and mounds of snow lay everywhere.

  Mel hesitated only slightly before bringing out the pies and the fresh-baked bread, still warm, which she sliced and spread with honey. The children sat down and fell to the feast as if they had not eaten in weeks and would not be eating again for some time. The boys smelled the venison and asked about it, and Mel brought it out for them—it was glazed with honey and sugar—and they fell upon it, too; the entire ham was gone in less than a minute after having been cut and served.

  It was harder than usual for Mel to let go of the regret that Matthew and Old Dudley were not there to see and hear and enjoy the carolers, but she did. She had gotten good at living without regret, over the years, and she released this one as she had the others and stepped forward into the moment. She looked over at Wallis and smiled.

  The wind had died down and a great cold and a silence had settled over the valley. When all the food was gone, Mel made hot chocolate, and they drank it by the fire, warming themselves for the journey home. They sang more carols before dressing again and stepping out onto the porch into a cold so brittle that it seemed the air around them would shatter to crystals just from the act of their walking through it.

  Amy asked Colter if he wanted to go home with them—Mel’s cabin had been their last stop of the evening, and now Amy would be returning the children to their homes—but Colter said that no, he wanted to stay there with Wallis, and that he would be home in the morning. Amy looked hurt, but only for an instant, and she studied Colter for a moment as if he were going on some journey or voyage. Then she smiled and thanked Mel and Wallis and told them good night and Merry Christmas. She lifted the smaller children onto the warm backs of the draft horses, who were throwing so much heat that standing next to them was like standing next to a stove whose fire has only so recently gone out that it is still warm to the touch.