Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Artie came up to Wallis that night and set a beer before him, on the house, and said, “Thanks for not drilling the well.” It was the only thanks he’d received from anyone following his decision to bail out of that old life, but he understood that no thanks were needed—that it was simply the only thing, the right thing. Still, he was glad for it, and he smiled at Artie, lifted the mug to him in a silent toast.

  “How’s Helen?” Artie asked. Mel was across the street, seeing if she needed anything.

  “Not good,” Wallis said.

  “I can’t believe she’s leaving,” Artie said.

  Mel and Helen came in the door—Helen rallying, a good night, leaning on Mel’s arm, and immediately, all bittersweetness left the room, all sense of abandonment, as they realized Helen had outlasted the geese one more year.

  “Has Joshua been in?” she wanted to know. No one had seen him for some time—a sign that he was hard at work. Helen went over to Amy and lifted up her maternity dress and put her hand on Amy’s belly. “I sure would like to see that baby,” she said.

  The baby stirred, seemed to jump, then kicked. “I think you’re going to,” Amy said, looking straight into Helen’s eyes. What she saw there was fright—a flightiness, a worry—her old blue eyes like small gems seen underwater in sunlight. Any hour. Any second. “I’m sure you’ll see it,” Amy said, taking Helen’s hand in hers.

  Mel wanted to tell Helen her own news, yet hoped also she would not have to.

  Later that evening, Mel carried Helen back across the street. Wallis went with them. Helen fell asleep in Mel’s arms, but woke once more inside her own home, and insisted on fussing about in the kitchen and preparing a dinner for the bear, who had not been back for three nights in a row. She scrambled some eggs and mixed pancake batter; when the pancakes were made, she spread huckleberry jam on them and set them on two plates. Mel and Wallis thought she had prepared the meal for them, but then she told them they would have to leave now, or the bear would not come.

  They didn’t know what to say—feeling the edges of a sorrow that was nearly infinite, believing that Helen’s mind was being taken from them before the earth took her body.

  They watched her carry the plates of steaming food out into the cold night; watched her sit down at the picnic table and light two candles; watched her wrap the elk hide around her and hunch forward, nodding off, settling in to wait.

  “We can’t leave her out there on a night this cold,” Mel said. “It would finish her off.”

  “She’s got to go sometime,” Wallis said.

  “We can’t,” Mel said. “Not before the baby. And not before Matthew . . .”

  The candles wavered wilder in the breeze; one tipped over and snuffed out. They thought she was asleep, and were about to go back out and get her, but she lifted her head, picked up the fallen candle, and relit it, then sat there, waiting, while the flames fluttered.

  The bear—a big one, black as the starry night itself—appeared so gradually, so slowly—blackness appearing from out of blackness—that at first they did not understand what they were seeing: the bear moving so carefully, so stealthily, as to seem like a man in the costume of a bear. Helen had drifted back into sleep for a moment, but she awakened when she felt the bear settle his heft so gently onto the seat across from her.

  The bear watched Helen intently for long moments, perfectly motionless, so that now it seemed like a stuffed bear—Mel and Wallis could see that beneath the elk hide Helen was shivering, and whether with fear or cold, they could not tell—and then slowly, the bear lowered his head to the plate and began to eat.

  With her hands trembling, Helen took up her fork and picked at her own food.

  The bear finished his—a few crumbles of egg fell from his mouth, and cautiously, he licked them from the table—and Helen blew out the candles and pushed her plate with the remaining food across the table for the bear to eat too, which he did.

  When it had finished, it looked at her a moment longer—woman and bear illumined in blue starlight; the bear’s damp eyes and nose gleaming, and its claws shining at the table like silverware—and Mel whispered “We should go,” as the bear turned and climbed down from the table and went back off into the darkness.

  Mel and Wallis were out the front door and walking down the dusty road by the time Helen gathered the candles and empty plates and went back inside.

  They all three slept hard that night, dreamless.

  WALLIS WAS OUT IN THE GARDEN ONE DAY, WHILE MEL had gone to town to check in on Helen, when he felt the ground trembling. He looked up to see a horse gallop through the yard, followed closely by a silver wolf.

  For a second, as the horse raced by, Wallis focused solely on the percussive sound of steel-shod hoofs clipping and clattering occasional stones. Such was the horse’s speed that the hoofs made sparks against the stones, and so dry was the tall autumn grass that many of these sparks found flame, flaring into smoking bright wisps of orange that raced outward; and after each spark-fire burned out it left behind a smoldering black scorch ring in the same shape as a horse’s hoofprint, only larger—as if something giant had just passed through, and the horse and wolf were following that.

  The wolf struck the horse hard with his teeth in the horse’s haunches and sheared off a slab of muscle. The horse snorted and bucked but made no other sound, and kept running as if nothing had happened. The wolf rolled, dropped, and was up and running again: racing low through the hoof-struck patches of burning grass. Blood gushed bright from where the horse’s haunch had been. The horse was almost to the trees—almost into the woods. Wallis could see that was where the wolf wanted the horse to go, to tangle it amongst fallen logs; but the horse in its panic could not know that.

  The wolf closed the distance and moved in for another strike—this time leaping high, whether for the thick neck or the face, Wallis couldn’t tell—and just as the wolf lunged, the horse ducked his head and skidded to a stop, then reared up and kicked the wolf as the wolf went sailing in front of it. There was the sound of steel hoof against bone, and the brittle sound of bone snapping.

  The wolf yelped, and then the horse was rising and striking again, trampling the wolf as it tried to crawl away. Blood gushed from the horse’s haunch each time it reared.

  Before Wallis could get there and try to calm the horse, the horse went suddenly weak. It stopped its trampling, stared at the ground as if it had forgotten where it was or what it was doing, and then collapsed, the back half going down first, sinking, and then the front half followed.

  The horse’s ribs were heaving, but otherwise it looked calm. Wallis went past it and into the timber, searching for the remains of the wolf. Everywhere at the woods’ edge the grass was trampled, but he could not find the wolf. He found fur, but no blood.

  Wallis went back into the grass, thinking he must have stepped right over it. The horse watched him, docile. Wallis walked around the horse, searching. There was blood back in the grass, lots of it, wet and red, but it seemed to be the horse’s blood.

  He walked into the woods a short distance and found more fur; then he saw a line of blood smeared on a log where the wolf had slithered across it.

  Wallis turned and went back out into the bright heat of the field to examine the horse. The little fires were still crackling but had nearly burned themselves out. The smoke drifted past Wallis and the horse in thin threads. The horse flicked her ears, turned and looked back at the smoke, and laid her head down.

  Wallis ran to the cabin for a bucket of water. He found a piece of straight wire to use as a needle and some string for catgut. He went back to where the horse lay, its head outstretched, and washed the massive wound. Then he began sewing as best as he could. The horse sighed and made nickering sounds as Wallis worked the wire and string through the flesh.

  The sun blazed directly overhead. Flies landed in the wound and bit at it, and they bit at the blood that was smeared on Wallis’s hands and arms. He swatted at them, crumpled them, but there
were always more.

  When he finished stitching, Wallis went back up the hill, searching for the dropped haunch. He found it lying in the sweet green bunchgrass next to a hoofprint-shaped ring of ashes. The meat was partially cooked, seared gray by the flames. He picked it up, took it to the creek, rinsed the grass and twigs off of it, and hung it from a hook in the smokehouse. Then he got a cotton sheet from the cabin and went back to the horse. She was now thrashing her head and trying to get up, as if believing the wolf was coming back.

  Wallis erected a tent over the horse to give it shade, then poured water over the wound. He left a large bucket of water by the horse, and a note for Mel, and walked away, to try to clear the trouble from his mind. He got Matthew’s fly rod and took off through the woods. All his life he had cared for horses, had slept in the barn with them whenever one was sick or giving birth. He had handled, shoed, and trimmed ten thousand hoofs. He had wormed them, pierced them with trochars, and even killed them to put them out of their misery, but he had never walked away from one—had never left one to the wolves.

  He was pretty sure that while he was gone the rest of the wolves would find and finish off the horse.

  Deeper in the woods Wallis came upon a speck of dried brown blood on a kinnikinnick leaf. No hair, no fur, no feathers, and no more blood—just the one mysterious drop. It could have come from a marten catching a squirrel, or from a hawk hitting a grouse; from a wounded deer, lynx, or hare, or wounded wolf. It could have come from the cough of an aging bear. Anything.

  He fished upstream, fishing into new country. Before the sun had gone beyond the cliffs, dropping the canyon into an early twilight, he had caught half a dozen trout, and he kept them all, thinking, Another three days’ worth. He cleaned them, put them in his pack, and headed home.

  Once he was out of the canyon, he came back into the sunlight, but he could see that the quality of light was changing, compressing and becoming enriched as more and more minutes were being stolen away. He quickened his pace as if suddenly believing he was running late. A feeling like having overslept.

  When he got back to the cabin, he found that the horse had managed to stand up and had pulled against the lead rope, broken it, and hobbled over to the creek, and now she lay collapsed in the creek with the blood-soaked sheets furled around her like Japanese flags. Minnows darted in and out of the cavern of the wound. The horse’s eyes were closed, her face half beneath the water, the creek riffling past and around her.

  Wallis walked to the creek’s edge, wondering how he was ever going to get the horse out of the creek if it was dead. I’ll have to pull her with another horse, he thought—but then he saw bubbles coming from her half-submerged nostrils. Wallis waded out and lifted the horse’s head, rolled a boulder beneath her chin, and propped her head up above the current. He untangled the sheets and hung them around the cabin to dry.

  Wallis worked in the garden, waiting for Mel. Some carrots were ready; he picked and washed them. His thoughts turned to Helen; he hoped that she had not died that day.

  In the creek, over the light sound of the drought-stretched riffles, the horse moaned occasionally. Wallis wondered if the wolf was dead.

  He was just breaking time down into smaller units until Mel returned. He could sense how it was weakening him, and yet how wonderful that weakening was, and he wondered, Is this how it is for the wolves? How sometimes desire can make you weak, instead of strong?

  There was still a little sunlight. It had been one of the warmest days all week. Wallis decided that at dusk he would build a fire next to the horse and sleep outside to keep the coyotes away.

  In the yard, where the wolf had caught, and then been kicked by, the horse, the ashes were cold and blue. He gathered them in a bucket and spread them across the garden soil. He wondered how it would look to Mel when she got home: scorched-earth pockmarks running in a trail down through her yard, and a bloating horse sprawled in her creek, and blood flags bannered around her house, stirring and furling in the breeze.

  He went inside and thumbed through more of Old Dudley’s journals.

  . . . Each phase is derived, from the precedingphase through a material continuity. The developed embryo is made of the very yolk-stuff which existed in the beginning. If the living gradation is derived from the embryonic, there must be a material continuity or relationship among living animals—as we already inferred from their resemblances. If the palaeontological gradation is derived from or determined by the embryonic, so there must have been a material continuity running through the palaeontological series, as we could easily infer from their successional resemblances. Each new species is derived from a predecessor. The highest and the living forms are only the last terms of a long series of generations. It took us a long time to get here, nearer the crown.

  Do not be alarmed at the conclusion. If it is true, it is precisely what we are interested in finding out. If it is not true, then science himself will disprove it. Our fears of consequences, our unscientific objections and prejudices count for nothing, except as complaints against God’s method in the world, and our own God-likeness.

  Wallis leaned back and watched the sun set below the mountains, the cool purple light of dusk rolling in like a tide.

  The horse had moved again—had gotten up and walked out of the creek—had gotten halfway down toward the smokehouse, as if trying to save Wallis the trouble of hauling it there when it died. A trail of blood ran from the creek to where the horse lay. It was hard to believe there could be any more blood left inside it.

  Wallis built a fire to keep the horse warm, laid an elk hide over it, and spread one for himself to lie on as he waited for the horse to die, and for Mel to come home.

  Further into the night—Orion had crossed half the sky—Wallis awoke to a faint splashing, something crossing the creek, and then a few moments later, Mel was back, and she said that Helen was all right, or rather, was still alive, and that after visiting Helen she had gone for a long walk in the woods to look at the little fires. She asked what had happened in the yard.

  Wallis sat up and explained about the wolf and the horse, but was surprised to see that the horse was gone; that it had gotten up and walked off as he slept (carrying the elk hide still on its back). They could find no further sign of it, nor did they ever see it again, and never knew whether it—or the wolf—had lived or died.

  Everyone was waiting for the fires, now. Sometimes the firewood that men and women were cutting with their chain saws would ignite simply from the heat of friction. But none of the fires ever went anywhere. A branch rubbing against the eave of Helen’s store caught fire and burned a hole in her ceiling, but Charlie, drinking on the porch across the street, saw it, and was able to run over with a bucket of water and put it out: though now as Helen lay in her bed she could see the stars through the hole in the roof.

  The Human Factor in the World’s Vicissitudes

  Man in the Light of Science

  Now that we have traveled over the entire course of terrestrial history, we seem to have attained an eminence from which we can take some comprehensive glimpses of the whole in its relations. Now that we find man to stand at the end of that history, we are able to comprehend the relation which he sustains to its successive steps. Let us look over the fields and see what it suggests.

  We learn, first of all, that man is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the ages. The first step of organic progress led toward man. It determined the direction of the course of organization, and now that we know man was destined to stand at the end of that progress, we understand that the law of progress contemplated man. Striking illustrations of progress are distinctly traceable in the history of vertebrates. Even the first vertebrate was but a prophecy of man. In the skeletal structure of the humble Devonian fish, man existed in potentiality. The whole general plan was destined to endure through the history of life and unfold in man. The amphibian, the reptile, the bird, and the quadruped are only successive modifications of the vertebrate conception embo
died in On’chus and Onych’odus.

  Still more striking are the successive modifications of vertebrate limbs. In the pectoral fin of the fish, we have a number of bony, articulated rays, which answer to digits; and above, are carpal and metacarpal bones, and finally, radius and ulna, humerus and scapula, exactly as in all other vertebrates. When, with the commencement of the purification of the air, the situation was suited to low air-breathers, the pectoral fin was modified into a five-toed forefoot. When, later, the situation demanded a more perfect air-breather, the reptilian limb appeared. If the reptile was appointed to swim in the sea, its hand was shaped into a paddle, sometimes with six digits and many phalanges, as in the fish. If it was destined to fly, a finger was enormously elongated and a skinny membrane was stretched from finger to hind limb and tail. When the time came for the fitting of a vertebrate to make its home in the air, the bones were made hollow, to combine lightness and strength. The hand and fingers were abbreviated and consolidated; cartilage was attached alongside, and in this were inserted the broad light quills which form the expansion of the wing. But here we find all the structures contained in the reptilian foot, except so far as changed function demanded modification.