by Rick Bass
The paddle of the whale, the shovel of the mole, the clawed foot of the cat, the cloven hoof of the ox, the solid hoof of the horse, the wing frame of the bat—all are but modifications of the same bony elements, adjusted in the same way, but modified in relative development. All this was prophetic of man. When an animal was to appear whose forward extremity should rise above the simple function of locomotion and seizing of prey—an animal that should swing an implement of civilization, ply an oar, wield a pen, manipulate a needle, make a watch, play a violin, emphasize thought by a gesture, or execute the behests of intelligence rather than of appetite and passion—then, assuredly, a different and nobler plan of structure had to be devised.
No, it was and is the same old plan. All these resources existed potentially even then in the clumsy fin of the fish. Thus is man related to the plans of the present; thus, to a plan which has persisted for millions of years; and thus, was man all the time anticipated and approached, during the progress of the transformations wrought by the ages. Man was anticipated even in the stone before life: the earth and rock beneath our feet.
I will simply recall here what has been said about the anticipation of man in the provision of beds of oil or coal laid by from the poison which once infected the atmosphere, and which temporarily barred the march of progress. No other corporeal being has been capable of comprehending the uses of oil; no incorporeal being had need of oil. It is something which stands in relation only to man; for man it was designed. We may say the same of iron, silver, and the other useful products of the mineral kingdom. It is only to man that they are useful. Again I must tell you, man is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the ages.
We understand now that man’s birth was foreshadowed. It was expressed in the formal gradation of the continents. They are graded, in the present epoch. The mammalian fauna of Australia is almost exclusively marsupial; that of South America is characterized by abundance of edentates; that of North America is predominantly herbivorous, while carnivores take the lead on the eastern continent. A similar gradation existed in the age before man. The mammalian fossils of the Tertiary are, in Australia, predominantly marsupial; in South America, edentate; in North America, herbivorous; in the Orient, carnivorous. The apex of organization in the age before man, was located in the Orient. It might have been anticipated, therefore, that when the apex should rise to the grade of man, the Orient would be the theater of its display.
Man seems signalized as the last term in the series of organic improvements. His erect attitude gives us an intimation. The first vertebrate, the amphibian, could slightly elevate his head. The reptilian head could be raised to a higher angle; and the highest reptiles could rise on four feet, or even ambulate as bipeds—though withal, in an awkward way; but all reptiles dragged a cumbrous tail prone on the ground. The bird perched in an oblique attitude and raised the head for an outlook; but when he flew through the air, he took the attitude of a swimming fish.
The ape could clumsily stand on two feet and wield a weapon with his hands; but the very shape of the foot, and the unmuscular legs show that Nature never designed him for a habitual biped. Man alone finds the upright attitude quite natural and comfortable. Here has been a progressive upward inclination of the spinal axis. Vertical in man, the progress comes to a limit. This criterion is not suited to index any further improvement. We infer that no further improvement will present itself to be indexed. We have achieved already our perfection.
The same inference is sustained by man’s cosmopolite adaptations. From the beginning of life on the earth, the range of individual species had been narrowing. The brachiopods and trilobites of the Cambrian ranged through wider seas than those of the Carboniferous. Land animals, when they appeared, were fenced within still stricter limits; and when the mammals came upon the theater of being, each species was assigned to a particular corner of one continent. Under this law of progressive restriction of faunal range, man should have been shut in a narrower field than any of his predecessors. His is not. On the contrary, all restrictions are removed. Man ranges over every continent and through every clime. No conditions are too hard; no difficulties insurmountable. Nature seems to have reached a point where a new policy is inaugurated.
The shackles are removed. Man is free to possess the earth. With man in possession of the earth there is room for no wider-ranging animal. There is place for no successor.
Nature in man seems to have reached a period. While other animals rise in steady gradation from lower to higher.; man proceeds hy one grand leap to possess a rank and dignity unapproached by his best predecessors. In intelligence, in aesthetic perceptions, in moral sense, in religious susceptibility, in theistic apperceptions, he stands separated by an unbridged gulf from his mammalian fellows. Man is the capital and completion of the long-rising column of organic life.
The structure is finished.
Old Dudley came creeping in the next day, right at dusk: crawling on his hands and knees, dressed in his black suit and covered with charcoal. He had come alone—had come to claim his map and his falcon—and his car had broken down on the summit. Trees blown over by the autumn winds were falling across the road, and because there was no traffic for days at a time, the logs blockaded the road. Some had caught fire, as the little fires began to pop up with greater frequency, like small campfires being lit by invisible campers, or invisible tribes, so that often Dudley had had to scramble over and under burning logs, coughing, his old eyes watering like a hound’s, his nose runny with black-crusted mucous, and his hands and arms and knees blistered with dozens of small burns from where he had touched live coals. He crawled up onto the porch of the mercantile and crept inside, to where Mel and Wallis and Helen were having dinner. At first they thought he was a black bear or a black wolf that had nosed his way inside, but then he stood up on his hind legs and, as if he had been invited, began to tell them his story. Mel went over and hugged him; Wallis and Helen greeted him less warmly.
It had taken him three days and he had had no water until he reached the first creek on the Swan side, coming down off the summit. Coyotes had followed him for the first two days, and on the third day—when he had done most of the crawling—ravens had circled him, laughing, all day long. All he had for a weapon, he said, was a ballpoint pen; and when he reached that first creek and crawled into it, and had drunk deeply, wallowing in it, he had looked up to see a huge fire-blackened mountain lion crouched at the water’s edge, watching him. Dudley said he froze, and that he and the lion stared at each other—it waved its tail like a snake, once—but that then the lion lowered its head, took a quick sip of water, and bounded away.
“I shit my britches,” he said. “I had to rinse off in the creek. Then it was off on my journey again, with those gott-damn coyotes walking right behind me, like some mongrel dogs down in Zacatecas or Durango.”
Mel got him a damp towel with which to clean off, and fixed him a plate of supper, but Dudley rejected it, and instead prowled the aisles of the mercantile, finding and opening cans of Spam and deviled ham and Vienna sausages, for which he had developed a fondness long ago while working on the drilling rigs in West Texas. He licked the potted meats straight out of the can, cursing whenever he cut his tongue on the can’s edges—blood trickled from his tongue, ran from the corner of his mouth—and with his fingers he scooped out the slushy gray meat.
Helen was too tired to stand up. “What’s wrong with you?” Dudley asked.
“Did Matthew come with you?” Helen asked, ignoring the question. Dudley licked his fingers, greasy-white with gelatinous slime, and said, “No, he’s a goner, he hasn’t been worth a damn in over three months. He’s all burnt out. I got to get a new one,” he said, and glanced at Wallis, still licking his fingers.
He sat down by the stove to warm himself, his charred, damp clothes steaming and giving rise to an unmistakable series of odors—mildew, shit, sweat, and ash. Mel went upstairs and looked through Helen’s closet to find something that he might wear. Hele
n had never been big on dresses, though inexplicably, in her closet, there was a shimmering emerald-green saffron one, an evening dress, covered with decades of dust.
Mel found an old pair of bib overalls, a T-shirt, and an oversized sweater. She slit the overalls wider with her knife as if slitting the belly of a fish, and took the clothes down to Old Dudley. He examined them, frowned.
“You can’t smell yourself, can you?” she asked. “You don’t have any idea how rank you are, do you?”
He looked hurt. “Hey,” he said, “I got here, didn’t I?”
While Dudley showered, Mel took his clothes out into the woods and set them on fire: just a little fire, a cautious one. When the fire was out, she came back inside and made a pot of tea.
Helen, who had not spoken since Old Dudley had told her that Matthew had not come with him, said that she was tired, and asked Wallis to carry her upstairs to bed. She was pale, and lighter than ever—as close to weightlessness, it seemed, as a person could be and still be alive. She was asleep even before Wallis ascended the stairs.
When Dudley came out of the bathroom, looking unavoidably strange in the altered overalls—like a circus animal dressed as a human, yet unwilling to perform—he looked around for his old foul clothes, almost frantically.
“I burned them,” Mel said. “You’ll thank me for it. They were deathly.”
“Did you get the money clip out?” he asked.
Mel held her breath for a minute. “How much was in it?”
He stared at her. “What there always is—as much as it’ll hold. Shit, I don’t know,” he said. “Ten, maybe fifteen thousand.”
“Was it a nice money clip?”
Dudley shrugged—not heartsick, only annoyed. “Fuck, I don’t know,” he said. “Some asshole gave it to me—some friend, a long damn time ago. It was probably silver or some bullshit thing like that. Shit, it doesn’t matter. I can’t even remember the asshole’s name, or why he gave it to me. Probably some dirt farmer whose land I found oil on,” he said. “They get pretty excited, when it happens the first time. They think you’re doing them a favor—they think you found the oil on their land because you like them.” He shook his head. He seemed already to have forgotten about the money. “Confused little bastards,” he said. “Poor bastards—so gott-damn hungry for love they try and recreate the world to make there be some in it for them.” He shook his head again. “Fuck-heads,” he said. “Fakers, liars, desperadoes. If it ain’t there, it ain’t there. But you can’t tell them that.”
Mel pressed her hands to her stomach, tried not to laugh. “Pop, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry”—but then she could not hold it back, and burst out laughing.
“Very funny, missy,” Dudley said, “but some people have to work for a living.” He stalked out the door and went over to the bar.
“Will you tell him this trip?” Mel asked, and Wallis said, “Yes, I have to.” He waited a moment, then asked, “And will you tell him?”
“About us?” Mel said. “Yes. About the baby? Maybe.”
They went down to the river, to the place where they had lain before, on the Fourth of July, and loved again, as if to lay some final bulwark of resistance against the past; and afterward they lay in the cool night, watching the same stars they had watched that night of conception; and they could see, up on the mountainsides, one or two blinkings from the little spot-fires that were cropping up.
They did not see or hear Old Dudley in the bar, when he met up with Amy. “Been up to the devil’s work, I see,” he told her, and she told him that yes, she had.
They did not hear him tell Amy—pleased as he was with this strange phenomenon—as he put it, this “unstoppering of his sperm”—that only if it were a boy, he would claim it, as he had just lost one, and needed a new one.
Amy was disgusted, but didn’t believe he meant it. They went out onto the porch and sat there with their feet hanging over the edge, watching the same stars and the same fires as were Mel and Wallis.
Amy, in her maternity dress—short of breath—slipped off her sandals and twined her bare feet with Dudley’s. He tried to remember the joy he might have felt with his wife just before, and after, Mel was born, so long ago, but he could remember nothing.
Amy was talking about God, and heaven—asking if he believed in a Supreme Being. He nodded, gripped her hand tighter, smiled grimly, and said, “You bet.” Amy was asking if he would help raise the child to believe in the power of a Supreme Being, and Dudley laughed, nodded, and said again, “You bet.”
“You can read my old journal,” he told her, “back at the kids’ cabin. It tells about all that stuff. It’s kind of like the Bible.”
“Mmm,” Amy said, and held his hand tighter. They watched the stars. Amy gave a silent prayer of thanks, for having been given a second chance.
“The Berkutsk,” he told her dreamily—slipping, falling, into the dream state of lust that was all he knew, anymore. “That giant golden eagle they hunt with over in the Middle East. I was over there doing business with the Arabs one time. They liked me. They wanted to give me another one to take back to the States, but the namby-pamby Fish and Wildlife folks confiscated him when I got off the plane in Los Angeles. I miss that bird,” Dudley said. “He rode all the way back with me, sat in the seat next to me, never bothered the stewardesses or anyone. Slept almost the whole way. Crapped once on the newspaper I had beneath him. Shat out the perfect single foreleg of a desert kit fox, clean as a whistle. So clean you could put it on a necklace and wear it around your neck.
“They thought I was a movie star,” he said, “riding up there first class with that big golden bastard, with a permit that one of the princes had given me. Damn thing didn’t mean anything when I landed, though. Damn bird was eight feet wide, when he stretched his wings. Had to give him an aisle seat.
“You should have seen that bird kill things,” Dudley said. “They used to hunt men with them, in the ancient wars—a scene like something from Revelations, is how I like to imagine it, with maybe the whole sky filled with these Berkutsk eagles, routing the opposing army—diving from the sky, their talons ripping through the flimsy metal and leather armor of the fleeing soldiers. A sky full of harpies, is how it must have looked, and maybe they thought it was the end of the world, but shit, look, that was over seven hundred fucking years ago, and the world’s still going.
“The Arabs took me up into the mountains one day. We rode on camels, for Chrissakes. We were hunting wolves. The wolves were up high that time of year, hunting these big-horned sheep. The kings and princes enjoyed hunting the sheep, and didn’t want the wolves killing any of them, was the official reason for the hunt. But I knew, we all knew, it was just to be hunting wolves, period. To see that big fucking Berkutsk in action.
“Where they hunted them was in country so steep you couldn’t fire a gun: the echo would have started an avalanche. They’d spot the wolf running from them, and turn the eagle loose. The guy who carried the eagle was always a big sonofabitch.
“The wolf, or wolves, almost always seemed to know what was going on. They’d break off their chase of the sheep and head up a canyon, trying to stay in the rocks. But the eagle got them every time—or every time I saw it hunt, anyway. It would come down from the sky like a hammer and take just one, while all the others kept running. Sometimes the wolf pack would turn and try and fight the eagle after it had nailed one of the pack, but usually they just kept running.
“The eagle would have his talons locked through the wolf’s back, or through its skull, and sometimes we’d have to ride over there and unfasten the eagle—it would get those long fucking talons tangled up and wouldn’t be able to get free of the dead wolf. In the wild when it happened like that, they’d sometimes die, death-anchored to their victim. Only the falconer could get near the eagle. It wouldn’t let anyone else get close, and it didn’t even really like the falconer being there. The eagle would spread its tail like a fan to hide the prey, covering it like a blanket, and wo
uld hunch up over the wolf, obscuring it.
“The falconer would hood the eagle then, and finally, once the eagle had relaxed, the falconer could pry open those clutched hooks, could retrieve the bloody wolf, which he would throw over the back of a camel.
“You could feel something circulating in the eagle,” Dudley said. “Something like the crackle in a neon light bulb. Even though the eagle was hooded and calm, its blood would still be revved up, and I swear to God you could hear the noise of its blood like electricity in those God-awful stony mountains, and you could feel it. It raised the hair on your arms, and on the back of your neck, even on a warm day.”
Artie came out on the porch with another pitcher of beer, a bottle of tequila, and a bottle of dark rum. “On the house,” he said, resting his hand on Dudley’s shoulder, and asked, “How’s it going, big fella?”
“Ahh,” said Old Dudley, “I’m gonna die.” Artie smiled, patted him on the shoulder.
“I’m glad you and Wallis decided not to drill,” Artie said. He looked out at the stars. “The place needs a rest. It’s changing too fast.”
Dudley’s tong marks rippled—like a fish breaking the surface—and his eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
“What’d they do with your eagle?” Amy asked. “In Los Angeles—when you landed, and they confiscated it—what’d they do with it?”
“Fuck,” Old Dudley said. “Shit. Hell if I know,” he said. “It’s just gone, is all.” He shrugged. “Maybe it got away,” he said. “Maybe it’s still out there.” Dudley poured half a glass of beer, then filled the rest of the glass with tequila and rum—a hideous caramel mixture. He drank deeply from it. “I want it all,” he said. “I want it all, at once.” He poured more tequila to replace the gulp he’d taken. “It’s good,” he said, wiping his lips. “Do you want any?”
