Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  They went out to backtrack the wolves together one day. He couldn’t remember if it had been his idea, wanting to see how she spent her days, or if it had been her idea; wanting to show him.

  They packed as if for a picnic. It had snowed several inches the night before, so that soon Wallis would have to get back to shoveling—it was time for him once more to shovel Helen’s mercantile—but Mel said the wolves had been hunting not far from town, and that though they might not find any tracks in the new snow, it was also possible they would find some fresh ones. The wolves hadn’t eaten in three days, she said, but she had seen long lines of ravens heading toward the river, and believed that the wolves were hunting again and would kill something soon.

  They packed apples, oranges, boiled eggs, and venison sandwiches on thick bread. It seemed strange to Wallis that they were packing venison sandwiches in order to give them the fuel, the strength, to snowshoe into the woods to find where the wolves themselves had also killed and eaten a deer: as if the deer were a shared currency between two countries, or even a common language.

  As ever, she skied too fast for him, so that often she had to stop and wait, though when going up steep hills, he would gain an advantage, so that it was she who had to work to stay up with him. She pointed out things for him to see—explained to him things it had taken her twenty years to learn, and which she was impatient for him to know.

  Her mind that day was on snags, and diversity: on the different species of dead trees in a forest, and the different heights and ages and angles of them. Were they standing upright, were they leaning over at a forty-five degree angle, or were they parallel to the ground? Were they newly dead, not yet hollowed out and being used by woodpeckers, salamanders, beetles, martens, fishers, owls, brown creepers, and thrushes—or were they already rotting, being grubbed and gnawed by bears and giving sweet relief to the soil, and to the seething invertebrates that needed them?

  The short, wide snags of ancient larch trees, their tops blown off by lightning or windstorms; the taller, more elegant snags of the cedar trees, in which were gouged out, in hieroglyphic patterns, the oval excavations from the giant pileated woodpeckers probing for insects . . . Mel said that cedar trees seemed to be the most valuable snags—that she believed the birds and mammals liked the way the cedar wood repelled mites and insects.

  She pointed to a place where one tree died but remained standing, or fell only slightly—leaning, tipping—and explained that it braced the others around it, and it opened up new gaps of light that allowed different, smaller, younger trees to utilize that light which had previously been unavailable to them: allowed them to be “released,” is what she called it; and how the leaning tree also cast new shadows, providing a cooler temperature in a certain spot and allowing the seedling of a shade- and cool-tolerant species—fir, spruce, cedar, hemlock—to germinate, and begin its slow journey to the canopy.

  Following her, listening to her explain it in stream of consciousness—simply reacting to whatever she encountered—Wallis saw that it was like the workings of some engine, valves opening and closing, and with a power being generated from that compression and expansion.

  It was similar to where Wallis went in his maps: the surface, the skin of the world, was no different from its depths. He had known that intuitively. But it was a source of great awe, to realize now that her forest above was like his subterranean oil fields.

  He suspected the similarities did not stop there; that if one stretched the time scale out far enough—expanded it—all things, at one point or another—wolves and humans, forests and mountains, dead people and living ones—became similar, and that it was only in the compression of things—the moment—that there appeared to be any significant flutter of individuality.

  He understood how such perceptions would lead one to shun, even fear, the future. Whatever peace or beauty existed in the moment would always be at risk—either attenuated, drawn out into nothingness by the future’s assimilation, or compressed into the past, all massed into one forgotten gray block.

  If he loved Mel, for instance—would it be like loving Susan? And if she loved him—would it not be the same as loving Matthew?

  That day, however, they did not feel trapped by sameness, trend, recurrence. They heard the ravens not too far in the distance, sounding like roosters in a barnyard, and skied toward the sound of the kill. They drew nearer, and still had not crossed any wolf tracks, so that Mel wondered if the wolves were still feeding, and that perhaps that was what the raven furor was about: the wolves not letting the ravens join in the feast.

  They crossed a marsh, so close now that they could hear wingbeats, could see the ravens circling just above the treetops. They could taste the excitement in the air, the pandemonium, and could smell the meat, too; and now finally they cut tracks and joined in on the trail, reading the wolves’ tracks.

  “A moose,” Mel said, placing her hands in the tracks. There was blood everywhere, still bright crimson.

  The troughed-up snow trail was as red with blood as if someone had been running down it with buckets of red paint, spilling it as they ran, and they saw now that the trunks of all the trees were sprayed bright red. There were craters in the snow where the moose had stumbled and gone down, but had then somehow managed to get up and go farther: though anyone could read the tracks and understand that it was futile—that the moose had never had any real hope of making it to a point beyond where the ravens were now calling.

  There was so much blood. The alder bushes were bright red from where the moose had crashed, in her panic, over the tops of them—dragging her slickened body across the brush, painting the landscape as she crawled. Wolves hanging onto her, tearing at her.

  She had broken free and gotten up and run again. More blood.

  Now they could hear the wolves’ snarls as they fed—fighting one another for a place at the carcass, a dominant wolf growling whenever a subordinate encroached too closely or bumped shoulders in the feeding process. Fifty yards away. The ravens spied Mel and Wallis and called out their alarms and flew away with heavy wingbeats and raucous shouts, bits of hide and flesh hanging from their thick beaks.

  “Shouldn’t we go back?” Wallis asked.

  “We’re already here,” Mel said. She unclipped her skis and crawled forward on her belly—following the blood trough, the tracks, in that manner. Wallis lay down behind her and did the same.

  More ravens flew away, startled by their approach. The wolves knew the humans were coming, could read the voices and movements of the ravens clearly, but were too intent upon feeding to run. They kept watch for whatever was coming, but continued to feed.

  When they were thirty yards away, Mel and Wallis could see the wolves—five of them, two black and three gray, gathered around the bulk of the moose carcass; and behind the wolves, like attendants, stood two large bald eagles, fiercely yellow-eyed, and an even larger golden eagle: each awaiting their turn, should it come, but unwilling to challenge the wolves, with the wolves so hungry.

  Now the wolves spied them, saw their plumes of breath rising, saw the round shapes of their heads amidst the trees, saw the tone of their eyes, though not the color—and the wolves saw that it was Mel and the stranger, whom they had known was in the valley; and for two or three seconds the wolves—faces masked red with moose blood—stared across the distance at them, evaluated them directly—surprised that Mel for once had not backtracked—then whirled and sprinted into the woods.

  The three eagles hopped over to the carcass and began tearing at it. Mel and Wallis watched for a moment, hoping the wolves would circle back, but when they didn’t, they crawled to their skis and turned back. For both of them it was the strangest feeling to be so willfully and intentionally moving away from the thing they were after—the thing they desired, and which they had, for a moment, tasted.

  Neither of them spoke, feeling that to do so would tarnish or even betray that which they had seen and shared; and feeling, too, a slight guilt, as if they�
�d done something deceitful, but were thrilled by having done so.

  Mel measured and recorded the chase—mapped the wolves’ movements, estimated the blood loss from the moose, and counted the number of times the moose had gone down; and her notes reflected an unraveling, a widening, as they traveled away from the source—working all the way back to the point where the first blood had been drawn, and then even farther back, to where the moose had not even been running, had been unaware of the gathering wolves—but this time the map work felt hollow to Mel, as if she were working to phrase some useless question for which she already had the answer; and in the distance behind them, they could hear the ravens circling back in and calling to one another, as if laughing at her retreat.

  THEY STOPPED BY THE BAR. COLTER CAME BY TO SHOW THEM the grouse he had shot that day. It was the first bird he had hit with an arrow in flight; it still had the arrow in it.

  Everyone admired the bird and bragged on Colter, though even the praise seemed listless, sluggish, not commensurate with the accomplishment. Wallis handled the bird the longest, examining it more carefully than he would any work of art. The arrow had passed through both wings and the breast.

  “That’s fine,” Mel said. “That’s a good shot. But how’s your reading and writing going?”

  Colter looked to be sure Amy had not come in. “The hell with that,” he said. He looked around the bar. “Who in here has it done any good for? My pop got by just fine without it. I know how to read. Too much of it makes you soft in the head.”

  Colter took his bird and went over by the fire. He pulled the arrow out of it, then began plucking feathers, dropping them in a paper sack to take back out into the woods. Wallis sat with him during the ritual. When he had the bird plucked, Colter cut open the bottom of the bird and pulled out the entrails, fed them to one of the dogs that was sitting at his feet, then rinsed his hands in the sink.

  “What about Matthew?” Helen whispered to Mel while Wallis was busy with Colter. “What about my boy?”

  Mel didn’t answer; just set her lips and plucked at the label of her empty beer bottle.

  By the fire, Colter had the grouse skewered on a branch and was roasting it over the open flames. Already it was making fat-sweat. Grease spattered into the fire, burst into flames. The scent of meat soon filled the bar, but even then, the bar’s lethargy remained—seemed immovable, as if the world had slowed to a halt.

  Wallis picked through the bag of feathers to find the bird’s crop to see what it had been eating. Wet green fir needles, and snowberries like pearls. Wallis held the snowberries in his palm and studied them, thinking what a shame it was that they were of no use to humans: not as edible as domesticated berries, and ill-suited for necklaces of any durability. By firelight, he had never seen anything more beautiful.

  They sat up visiting until midnight, unwilling to put a close on the day.

  “I’ve been thinking about helping out at the school,” Mel said.

  Up until that moment, she had been thinking nothing of the sort—had only been considering the heaviness of all the sameness in her life. But now that she had said it, she liked the way it sounded. She could picture being of immediate, and daily, use.

  Wallis was stricken. “What about your maps? Your data? Who would pick up where you left off?”

  “Probably no one,” Mel said. She shrugged. “Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s better if no one’s really certain of where they go and what they do. Maybe it should just be like a secret.”

  She got up and poured a glass of wine: took a sip, then set the glass on the windowsill. She stood before Wallis then, not knowing what she wanted—whether she wanted to kiss him good night, or talk longer, or take his hand again for a moment—and so in the end all she could do was say “Good night”—the thinness of language like a mockery, the words being forced to substitute for all that she did not know—and she went down the hall to her room.

  Wallis sat by the fire a bit longer, listening to the hammering of his heart—the terrifying lift and leap of it. A thing like the possibility of joy, which was almost like joy itself. He had never imagined such a race of heart could return—nor had he imagined he would ever go looking for such a return.

  He slept hard. He woke only once in the night to the sound of the wine glass falling inexplicably from the window ledge—pushed over by a scampering night mouse, perhaps, or a barely felt earth tremor—a shifting or stretching below the snow—and he got a towel and cleaned up the spill, then went back to sleep, and was hopeful. He felt good things approaching, though he could not have said what they were.

  In the morning, Mel did not go into the woods, but instead went to the school. She was unsure of how to go about presenting her offer, and when she arrived at the school early, the teachers—Belle and Ann, in their early fifties, were surprised to see her standing at the door. They invited her in for a cup of coffee—they lived in a cabin behind the school and had been up since four, grading papers and preparing lesson plans—and when Mel told them she wanted to teach the students about the woods they looked startled, as if a wolf or deer had come through the door and begun to speak.

  “We’ll have to reschedule things,” Ann said. “What time of day would you like to teach?”

  “Morning,” she said. “First thing.”

  “All right,” said Ann.

  “After I’m done each day, can I stay?” Mel asked. “Can I sit in the back and watch, and listen, and see how you do it?”

  “It might get awfully boring,” Belle said. “Aren’t you going to want to get on out into the woods after you’re done? Won’t you want to get back out to your tracking?”

  “I’m going to take a break from it for a while,” Mel said.

  “All right,” said Ann. “Do you want to start today or tomorrow?”

  The first students were beginning to trickle in—some on skis, some on snowshoes, while others came riding in on ponies.

  “Today,” Mel said.

  The Reptile Monarchies

  Mesozoic Events

  The storm is cleared, and a new sky overhangs the scene. We seem to be in another world. We glance over the territory lately covered by luxuriant coal vegetation, of which Cycads and Voltzias now hold possession. The Cycads are palmetto-like in form, fernlike in foliage, and pinelike in affinities; the Voltzias seem a progenitor of the cypress. No Lepidodendron or Sigillaria raises its green crown in all the wooded landscape. The reeking marsh has disappeared, and an undulating upland occupies the continent.

  We glance over the great flat. Dark-wooded ranges of mountains frown down on us. We search for the old shoreline which had set the bounds to the empire of the sea, and see now that it is removed. Far southward it lies, within two hundred miles of the Gulf border of the human epoch—so much more of the ocean’s domain has been wrested from his possession.

  We range over this new bright landscape. All the old Paleozoic forms of animal life are displaced. Strange tenants have moved in. Instead of the feeble, lizard-shaped amphibians which housed themselves in a hollow stump, we find great quadruped-like labyrinthodonts crawling like enormous toads under shelter of a fringe of forest. Their ponderous bulk impresses deep footprints in the sand along the beach—four-toed and handlike—destined to remain and become a wonder for the human age.

  But the amphibians have yielded empire to another dynasty. Great was Archegosaurus, but Deinosaur was greater. An extraordinary and amazing figure reveals itself stalking along over the beach. Evidently this monster, tall, scale-covered, erect, with diminutive head, swollen abdomen, and massive, trailing tail, is a representative of the ruling family. He reveals massiveness without elegance; strength without grace. He marches on two feet and leaves a footprint three-toed, like that of a bird. His jaws are armed with strong, sharp-edged, and pointed teeth. His long bones are hollow like those of birds; the pelvis, as well as the foot, is birdlike; and his lower jaw has lateral motion for triturating food, as in the ox. Shape like a frog; head,
tail, and scales like a lizard; feet like a bird; sacrum like a mammal—what shall we call the creature?

  We watch him through his seaside promenade, and follow him to the dank and peaty jungle where he finds his home. We see him browse from the lower tufts of foliage, and grind the fibrous twigs with the jaw movements of a herbivore, wearing away and blunting the crowns of his teeth. But he meets his enemy—another Deinosaur of blood-thirsty disposition, a flesh-eater, and armed with sharp and lacerating teeth.

  Between the two a bitter feud exists, and they have, at former times, clenched in the struggle for prowess. The herbivore recognizes his superior; but unwillingly subject, fierce anger flashes from his dark eye, and with a defiant, unchristian growl, he makes room for the contemptuous and bloody, wolfish carnivore to pass.

  We stand upon the slope of a western shore and survey the shining expanse. The tide is out, and the smooth sand beach is laid bare. Over its surface lie squirming and crawling and shrinking from exposure, the sundry forms of marine life which the last tide brought up. This is the opportunity for the land marauders. Now they hurry to the scene in search of a meal. There, most conspicuously, strides the tall uncouth Brontozoum, a three-toed Deinosaur, standing fourteen feet high. Its foot is twenty-four inches long. At times it drops on four feet to seize a dainty morsel of crab, and leaves, for a space, the footprints of a quadruped. But the forward feet are comparatively diminutive in size. In the distance, Otozóum paces along the beach—another bipedal Deinosaur, but with four toes behind. With foot twenty inches in length, he has a stride of three feet, in a leisurely gait: Otozóum is partaking of his meal. Now and then he picks up a stranded fish. Among these gigantic figures more humble Deinosaurs are seen mingling. One of these leaves a footprint but three inches; and we notice one wee pet of a reptile which makes a track but a quarter of an inch in length. They are all engaged in refreshing themselves. This is the regular symposium of the reptiles.