Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Wallis and Matthew pulled the sled behind them like horses; Helen and Mel skied along behind Dudley, flanking him, so that as they skied off into the storm, it looked not as if they were transporting a passed-out old drunkard, but were escorting, with regal bearing, a fallen dignitary of exceptional prominence, one who still had something vital or worthy to offer the world.

  As they skied, the snow piled thicker and higher atop Old Dudley, until he was buried beneath it, and the sled grew heavier from its weight. In helping load him into the sled, Wallis had been amazed at how heavy Dudley was—at the density of him. Though Dudley was not a large man, it had felt like loading stacks of iron. Wallis had wondered how the hell the old man even moved around—how he could move his own weight forward. He would have guessed Old Dudley to weigh about a hundred and fifty, just looking at him; but after lifting him, and then hauling him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told him he weighed three hundred—as if his blood was made of mercury.

  They skied past a herd of elk that had bedded down at the edge of the road beneath a large fir. They passed within yards of the elk, and were puzzled, because they could smell the elk distinctly—like a stable of horses—but could not see them—but then Mel saw the branched antlers of the bulls rising from out of the snow, and she saw the twin plumes of breath from each of the elk, like the smoke from a hundred tiny fires, rising all along the road.

  The elk watched them pass, and Mel and the others kept waiting for even one of them to panic and leap up in a cascade of loose snow, causing the rest of the herd to then bolt in similar fashion—half-a-hundred elk erupting from beneath the cover of snow, as if born not from any mother’s belly but straight from the earth—but the elk stayed motionless, save for their chimney breaths, believing they were hidden.

  At one point Old Dudley stirred and leaned his head over the side of the sled to vomit, but he did so quietly, still unconscious, and Matthew and Wallis kept on skiing, pulling him along as he retched, and Mel and Helen skied up to the front to escape both the sound and the odor.

  The coyotes that had been following them, shadowing them unknown, fell in quickly behind them now and began tasting the vomit, laboring to eat the sweet-sour entrail juices before the leavings were covered by the snow; and the snow kept coming down, coming so relentlessly that it seemed it was endeavoring to cover everything in the world, regardless of whether a thing was moving or standing still, and regardless of whether it was dead or alive: as if, in winter, the distinction between the two thinned to almost nothing.

  At one point farther into their journey, Old Dudley woke briefly and began wailing, believing that he had been given up for dead and buried alive. He fought the ropes that had him lashed to the sled and leapt to his feet, throwing off the heavy layers of snow that had blanketed him—he had been choking on snow, riding with his mouth gaping open, and his eyes were crusted with it, so that he could not see—and with the sled still lashed to his legs and arms, he ran blindly toward the woods, the sled on his back looking like a tortoise’s shell. Such was the panic and strength of his flight that he pulled Matthew and Wallis along behind him for a short distance, until he ran headfirst into a tree and was knocked backward, stone-cold unconscious again, at which point they untangled themselves and righted his sled, with him still lashed to it, and began pulling once more without comment.

  “He has never been at peace with the world,” was all Helen had to say.

  They stopped at the last creek before the trail up to the cabin and dipped Dudley’s head in it upside down to clean him off, and to awaken him. But still he kept sleeping, as if drowned at the bottom of the sea, and now the water from the creek froze over his head and face like a mask, or shield, so that he looked like some horrible alien, all the more surreal for the dapper business suit he was still wearing.

  At the cabin, Mel wanted to chip nostril-holes in his ice helmet for him to breathe through and then put him out on the porch until he awakened, but Matthew said it was still too cold, and that he would freeze; so they untied him from the sled and brought him inside, laid him in front of the fire, and watched with some interest, even fascination, as the ice mask polished itself bright before the heat and then slowly melted, so that like a chrysalis a normal human face emerged again: a face which, compared to what it had been moments ago, was—despite the tong marks—almost a thing of beauty.

  Old Dudley kept sleeping through it all, and Mel made more pallets for Helen and Wallis, and everyone went to sleep; though at some point in the middle of the night, Wallis awakened and heard him creeping once more, crawling around and around the cabin’s perimeter, and saw his silhouette, each time he crawled past the fire; and Christmas slid past them, was pulled into the vault of the past along with all the other days, as if it—that day, and all days—were a thing, a test, they had somehow failed, and that they would not be allowed to move fully and confidently into the future until they had somehow addressed that failure.

  In their dreams, they all felt it, and Mel felt it most strongly of all: that the end of failure would yet someday be revealed to them by the presence—when it finally arrived—of an unquestioned, almost unnoticed, grace.

  She moaned in her sleep. They all did, off and on, through the night, so that to anyone listening from outside, it would have sounded as if the cabin were full of suffering—as if it were some ship, some ancient wooden ark, drifting lost and full of curses: though for what reason of punishment, the tenor of the groans gave no indication, nor did, in their restless slumber, the dreamers know.

  IN THE MORNING, THEY DRANK TEA AROUND THE TABLE AND admired the sunlight. They could see the frost crystals glittering, hanging suspended in the blue sky. Helen asked Matthew point-blank when he would be coming back to the valley to live.

  “Well,” Matthew said, glancing at Old Dudley, “it may be a while yet.”

  “He means not while he’s alive,” Mel said.

  “Oh, he’ll come back,” Helen said. “He will. After he’s found enough oil—after he’s had his fill. And he’ll be a better person because of it.”

  Old Dudley brayed.

  “He will,” Helen said. “You don’t think he will. You’ll see. Everything happens twice.”

  “Everything happens a hundred times,” Dudley corrected her, “or ten thousand—but you won’t see him in this valley again.” He nodded toward Mel. “Like she says, not in our lifetimes, anyway. I own him, and I say no.”

  “No one owns me,” Matthew said.

  They sat and watched the sunlight some more. Already, each of them could feel Dudley’s itchiness to be leaving. Matthew stared unblinking not at the sunlight outside, but at the window pane of the stove.

  “Listen to this,” Mel said, and she got up and went over to a bookshelf and pulled down John Niehardt’s transcription of Black Elk Speaks. She sat down with her back to the fire to read to them, and Old Dudley groaned.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said, “poetry.”

  Mel read: “He said that Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world. He was on his horse in that world, and the horse and himself on it and the trees and the grass and the stones and everything were made of spirit, and nothing was hard, and everything seemed to float. His horse was standing still there, and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow, and that is how he got his name, which does not mean that his horse was crazy or wild, but that in his vision it danced around in that queer way.”

  “Oh, God,” Dudley said, “worse than poetry. Indian shit,” he said, but then was seized by a sudden pain in his chest so sharp that he spilled his tea. The pain passed almost immediately—just a cramp—and Mel nodded and said, “You see, God was punishing you.”

  “Bah,” Dudley said. “It’s just that my procreative system is backing up and toxifying my blood. It needs spillage.”

  �
�Stop it,” Mel said.

  They went out that afternoon to play the coyote game. Mel packed a lunch of apples and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches—bright red strawberry jam spread across the chunky, crumbly slabs of her bread. She put a bottle of beer in each of the packs.

  “A picnic,” Dudley said. “A picnic at forty fucking below.”

  “We haven’t played it in a long time,” Mel said, rolling up five deer hides and putting them in a couple of larger backpacks.

  “Not since—” Helen paused, barely able, or not wanting, to count the years. She looked at Matthew and then at Mel, and for a moment saw them as they had been almost twenty years ago, when they had played the game often, and when she had played it with them.

  “Come on,” Mel said.

  “Is it going to hurt?” Old Dudley asked, but he would not be shamed into holding back, or asking more questions. “The coyote game,” he muttered, as if he were long familiar with it.

  They crossed the creek single-file on snowshoes, with the sky blue above them and the woods shrouded with the night’s snow, illumined in gold winter light.

  They climbed steadily in switchbacks up the side of the mountain through old fir and spruce, hemlocks and cedars, with Mel breaking trail and Matthew behind her, then Wallis, then Helen. Old Dudley and Helen had to stop often, but they did their best to stay with them. A rattling, fluttering sound came from Helen’s chest whenever she caught up, and when Mel asked her if she was all right, Helen couldn’t even speak, but waved approval with her hands, told them to go on, go on. Even Dudley, for all his creeping, was huffing and puffing, rivers of sweat coursing down his neck and the tong marks pulsing as hot as anvils.

  Mel went higher up the slope, then stopped ahead of them and waited for the hearts of the others to stop fluttering. Old Dudley hawked phlegm and spat. His glasses were fogged over and he wiped them clean. Helen’s rattley lungs, the catch and clatter of them, was a sound above all others, but gradually, the rattling slowed, then stopped. The sweat began to chill on them again, and they pushed on.

  Another fifteen minutes and now Helen, unable to speak again, was holding on to the back of Matthew’s belt, being pulled by him; another fifteen minutes after that, and he was carrying her.

  She rode in his arms with dignity. Her thick glasses, always opaque from their sheer density, were even misty from the steam of her efforts.

  They reached a meadow after another half-hour of climbing. It was a small, sloping meadow that led to the edge of a short cliff. Mel took a bottle out of her pack and began dousing their ankles with doe urine. Old Dudley started to howl in protest, but Mel told him to ssshh. She pulled the hides out of her pack and handed them each one. She hung her pack in a tree. Their breath was coming from their mouths and nostrils in milky clouds. Wallis imagined he saw a reddish tinge to Helen’s clouds.

  Below them the valley lay flat. The river wound slowly in some places, while in other places it ran straight and fast. They could see the smoke coming from each chimney—they counted thirteen fires—though they couldn’t see the chimneys themselves.

  It did not seem they could get there again, from where they were. They watched the valley for some time without speaking. It glittered beneath its frost.

  “None of you have to be anywhere in a hurry, do you?” Mel asked. She took Dudley’s and Wallis’s hand and led them into the center of the meadow; Helen and Matthew spread out on their own. “Just make yourself comfortable,” Mel said. “Lie down in the snow and carve out a little burrow. Lie down on your stomachs, on all fours, so that only your head’s sticking up.”

  Wallis and Dudley began tunneling into the snow as if they were old hands at it. In less than a minute they had burrowed beneath it. “Okay,” Mel whispered. She threw the deer hides over them as if putting children to bed. “Only your eyes showing,” she said. She got down in the snow between them and pulled her hide over her.

  She didn’t do anything for a long time. She let them get settled—she let the silence, and the cold, and the world, seal itself back in over them. There was nothing to do, nothing to hear or feel, other than snow. The tops of their faces were cold where they squinted out at the meadow, but the rest of them was warm. It was not so much a silence, down there in all that snow, as it was the sound of quietness. There were pulses going on—waves, like the beats of a heart—but they were muffled.

  Wallis could feel the snow filled with the day’s yellow light. He could feel himself resting on that light—the sun’s rays penetrating dully two feet below the surface of the snow.

  Softly, Mel began to blow on her deer call—a length of what Wallis realized was a deer’s esophageal tube. She’d put a flat piece of cedar in it to imitate the deer’s tongue. The sound that came out when she blew was a gentle grunting.

  They waited. The snow, and the hides above them, trapped and held all of their heat. Wallis felt that he could float there forever. There was yellow light all around him, and icy, subterranean blue light farther below. He wanted to lay his head down and go to sleep and listen to those slow pulsings.

  After what might have been fifteen minutes, Mel blew again. Immediately, Wallis heard a tiptoeing through the snow—a snow-crunching sound. A coyote’s legs passed in front of him, not five yards away. The coyote circled them twice.

  A raven called once from above them—a warning, it seemed, though perhaps it was calling the coyotes to dinner: to the strange, injured deer lying below.

  The coyote peered down so that its eyes were level with Wallis’s. Wallis could see their amber light, could see the frost on its whiskers. It sniffed once, backed away, then shied over to Mel. The coyote seized Mel’s deer hide by the ears, gently at first, and pulled on it, but Mel had hold of the hide with both hands and wouldn’t let go. The coyote growled and shook his head, like a puppy. Wallis heard Mel trying to stifle a laugh; heard her blow on her grunt tube again.

  Now Helen and Matthew began swimming through the snow toward them, coming up from behind, drawing abreast, and Wallis saw more coyote legs, four and then eight and then twelve, edging in—not entirely sure of their prey, but confident they could take it. Wallis saw their long bushy tails floating behind them, heard them yip with puzzlement and excitement.

  One of the coyotes pulled at Wallis’s hide and dug furiously at the snow beneath him. Mel snorted with laughter, then cried “Shit!” as one of the coyotes got her hair tangled in its jaws and backed away with a mouthful of her hair.

  The coyotes scattered in four directions when she shouted, and Wallis saw that one of them had pulled Helen’s hide off and was running with it, dragging it like a kite that would not quite get airborne.

  Mel jumped up in a spray of snow, and Matthew did too, throwing back his hide, and Old Dudley and Wallis did the same. They floundered up out of their lairs, and now the coyotes were more terrified than ever—as if, in pulling Helen’s hide off, they had pulled some terrible ripcord that had given birth to the humans, and the coyotes tucked their tails and galloped away looking back over their shoulders, streaking back into the woods. It was cruel, Wallis supposed, but he had to laugh at what must have been going through their minds: wondering if that was where humans came from—if they came up through some vent in the earth.

  They laughed and shook the snow from their chests and shoulders. Dudley’s eyes were bright. “Damn, I liked that,” he said. “That was all right.” He knocked the snow from his arms. His face was a healthy winter-cheeked red. The pulsings of his tong marks seemed pale and very far away—as if they would never pulse again, and were only old scars. Even Helen’s cough was better. She patted her chest, gave one tiny hawking-clear of her throat, but that was it.

  “They came right in,” Mel said, glancing at the sun. “Sometimes you have to wait a couple of hours, or half a day, or even longer. Sometimes you have to live down there, take a canteen and sandwich with you down there, and wait until the ravens land and start hopping around, before the coyotes will get bold enough to come right
in,” she said. “It’s especially nice if it’s snowing. The snow mounds up over you.”

  “Remember the time Matthew and I got Danny?” Helen asked. “We’d been lying there for three hours during hunting season, and had about a foot of snow over us. Danny was out hunting and walked right over us,” Helen said. “We stood up and roared. He thought he’d stepped on a bear that had just gone into hibernation,” she said.

  “Shit his britches, as I remember,” Matthew said. “He couldn’t speak for a couple of hours.”

  “I remember,” said Mel.

  “That was a long time ago,” Helen said.

  They spread the hides out and sat down on them. Mel handed out sandwiches, and they opened their beers and drank. The clouds were stained with light, a luminous purple and pink and rose red and gold to the east—a bank of them resting on the mountains—and the valley below was illumined with a slanting shaft of light, so that where the beam landed in the valley’s center was gold, while all the woods around that blaze of light were already touched blue with the deepening shadows.

  Gray smoke still rose straight from the chimneys below, and they knew that they could go down into any of those cabins and be invited in with warmth, and to food—to whatever food there was.

  Mel’s hair caught a little of that sun, the last angle of it, and there was an incandescence to it, as when a filament is ignited with electricity. She ate her sandwich thoughtfully. The oddness of that jaw, giving her an almost horsey look, except for her eyes—the steadiness and depth of them, and the greenness—an electrical greenness, almost. Wallis felt pretty sure she was considering the wolves.

  Dudley’s eyes still had that clearness, an unguardedness to them. He didn’t look like Dudley.