Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “There she is,” Matthew whispered, pointing to their left, to the lead cow, the matriarch, who stood watching them. She had been posted as the lookout while the herd rested, and she stood there staring at the two men, trying to decide whether to sound the alarm. It was an awful responsibility for her. The cost of alarm—of two dozen cows, calves, and young bulls leaping to their feet—over ten thousand pounds of elk—and asking them to surge with adrenaline, to sprint away in belly-deep snow—was not a cost to be weighed lightly in the winter.

  Wallis and Matthew knew the decision she was going to make before she made it—could feel it traveling in the air between them—and they scanned the herd quickly one last time for the outside chance of a hidden giant bull. The lead cow barked her alarm, whirled and ran toward the herd, and now they were all leaping to their feet and galloping with her, not even bothering to look back to see what had caused her to sound the alarm.

  It was a feeling like having broken something: like having stepped on and shattered something. Divots of black earth flew in all directions, and rocks and stones clattered beneath the snow. There was the scent of elk urine and torn earth, a violence against the sky and the snow as they ran away, deeper into the forest.

  The snow continued to fall steadily, as if already assuming its responsibility of filling in and smoothing over some wound. Wallis and Matthew went to look at the depressions in the snow where the elk had been resting. The heat of their huge bodies, though insulated by the hollow hairs of their coats, had finally melted the snow—they’d been resting there a long time—so that it had yielded to accept their shapes. But their bodies had cooled, over time, nestled in the damp snow, and the snow had begun to freeze again, to a watery, smoke-colored ice, clutching them. And still they had rested, had waited.

  Only their scent remained. An inch of snow covered their beds. Already the black earth of their hoof-flight was hidden beneath snow.

  “We’ll follow them to the bull,” Matthew said. “We’ll let them calm down a little. We’ll let them slow to a walk and get back in single file. Then we’ll follow them. They’ll know we’re behind them. They’ll hear us, and sometimes catch a glimpse of us. Sometimes the wind will swirl and they’ll catch a brief scent of us. They’ll notice how the ravens look down on us as they fly past; they’ll feel us behind them—and they’ll keep moving—not at a run, but at a steady walk. They won’t stop to rest again.

  “We’ll keep pushing them,” Matthew said. “We’ll keep just the right amount of pressure on them, until they start to crack. They’ll stop trying to outdistance us; they’ll try and lose us. They’ll go down steep ravines and then turn right back around and head straight up the steepest slopes. They’ll disappear into the thicker timber, trying to wear us out and make us give up and turn around and go home. But we’ll stay with them, always keeping the same amount of pressure on them: not too much, but not too little.

  “Finally, they’ll panic. They’ll start running. They’ll run to the biggest bull they can find—they’ll head for whatever ridge he’s hanging out on, in the hopes that he can help defend them, one more time. They’ll lead us straight to him. They’ll betray him.”

  “That’s not nice,” Wallis said.

  “No,” he agreed, “it’s not.”

  They sat there in the echo of the herd’s flight and waited for them to calm down, somewhere out beyond. Their own snow beds began to form around them. They waited for an hour—Matthew was motionless, as if in a trance—and then set out after the elk, barely able to follow the faint sign of their passage.

  Later in the afternoon the elk understood that they were being followed and ascended into an alder jungle at dusk. But even in the dim light, and then the darkness, it was impossible to lose their trail, for there were so many of them.

  The elk led them through one of the burns. The snow had extinguished all but the largest smoldering logs, around which they could still see glimpses of soil and rock—and some of the standing snags still glowed orange, sometimes breaking into sputtering flames when a breeze passed. At one point they got too close to the elk—the elk had slowed at the other end of the burn to look back and determine whether they were still being followed—and Wallis and Matthew saw them standing just back in the shadows: the faint light of a handful of lantern snags flickering through the snow against their yellow hides, and the firelight dull against the polished antlers of the young bulls.

  Wallis and Matthew stepped into the clearing of the burn, and across a distance of a hundred yards the elk watched for only a moment, as if to understand fully who and what the men were, and then they whirled once more and ran, disappearing into the night.

  Wallis and Matthew set out after them.

  Even without the tracks in the new snow, they could have followed them by scent alone. The odor was like a river winding through the woods, head-high at first, but then settling as it cooled, so that it was as if they were wading into that river of scent.

  On through the night they traveled, crossing over north into Canada. Later in the night the elk descended and turned back south, unwilling to leave their home. Now, however, the wind was at their backs, and they couldn’t tell what scents lay ahead of them; and so they had to be prudent—could no longer afford the luxury of all-out flight. Matthew felt their increased discomfort, and backed off accordingly. If he and Wallis pushed the elk too hard—if they made them panic—they might leave the area completely. They had to push them to the edge of despair, but not beyond.

  Wallis knew that at dawn the ravens would start following them, wanting to see how it would turn out: having a stake in the matter. They would follow the men for a while, and then they would fly ahead and follow the elk herd for a while—democratic, ambiguous, reading the paths of both predator and prey, waiting to see.

  The elk climbed back to a ridge before daylight. As the sky paled and a gold bow of light appeared beneath the purple-gray snow clouds, the elk descended again into the deep timber, and Wallis saw how completely they were in control. They had stranded Wallis and Matthew on that bare ridge at daylight—had put them up there to be illuminated by the rising sun as neatly as if tying off a knot. There wasn’t anything to do but laugh. Wallis and Matthew could hear their barks of alarm down in the dense timber as they sighted the men and fled once more.

  The sky was breaking into light—the cumulus clouds still spitting snow pellets—but a drying north wind was following the mountain’s spine now, and there was going to be a lot of sun, at least in the first part of the day. River fog still covered the valley below—hid everything beneath a glowing blue cloud.

  About twenty yards downslope, two blue grouse, camouflaged against wind-scoured rocks, grew nervous at the men’s pause, and tried to sneak away. Wallis and Matthew would never have seen them otherwise—the grouse had a ten-thousand-year head start, using all the time since the last glaciation to paint their feathers to the same hue as the rocks that remained.

  “Now’s your chance,” Matthew said. “If you’re hungry—if you want anything.”

  Wallis found a rock and hurled it at the closest one. Blue feathers flew, and the rock-struck grouse tumbled crippled down the slope, while the other one leapt untouched and sailed away down the mountain.

  Wallis scrambled downslope after the injured one. It was a big strong bird—he had only stunned it—and he caught it with both hands just as it was sorting itself out and about to take flight. He pinched off its head, then plucked the feathers in the north wind.

  Matthew gathered some dry grasses and juniper and made a small fire. They seared the bird, ate it rare. Afterward, when they resumed their chase, Wallis was strengthened by the meat.

  He hurried to stay up with Matthew, but whenever he could he stopped and quickly made small cairns of stones to mark the mountain where he had taken the grouse as well as to mark the path of the chase.

  “Hurry up,” Matthew said once. “Stop fucking with those rocks.”

  For a while, the tracks split
in different directions through lodgepole blowdown, where the slender trees, having put all their energy not into root production or thick trunks, but into a quick ascent to the canopy, had drunk in all the light for a few years before growing sun-scalded, weak, and wobbly, and falling, one over the other, like matchsticks in the first strong wind.

  They crawled over and through and under this chaotic spill of timber. It was a horizontal forest; sometimes the trees were stacked atop each other higher than their heads, a wooden gridlock through which they slithered. It would have been a sight to see the elk herd doing the same—to see the seven-hundred-pound animals flowing through this near-impossible maze, gangly legs pulling themselves over the blowdown—but they were fifteen minutes too late. The elk had already passed.

  BY EVENING THEY HAD COVERED ANOTHER FIFTEEN MILES, and had swung back around to the south end of the valley. Sometimes it seemed the elk knew what the men were attempting to do, and would never lead them to the bull, would never betray him: he who had doubtless given creation to so many of the herd who now wandered the mountains below.

  Wallis and Matthew stopped and drank from a creek. They passed by numerous herds of mule deer and whitetails. Often they came across the tracks of lynx, bobcats, and mountain lions. It was already a severe enough winter that some of the moose were shedding their antlers, which rested upturned and palmlike on the ground, gathering the falling snow as if with outstretched mahogany hands. Sometimes when Matthew found such an antler—the hair and blood still ringing it at the base—he would pick one up and hang it in a tree, would wedge it between branches. He would even pause to carve his initials and the date in some of the larger ones, before moving on; and as they traveled, Wallis would occasionally make small stone cairns, markers of their passage.

  Because it was a clear night, they stopped to rest on the ridge where the herd had led them that evening. There was no bull on it, and the elk had immediately gone back down into more lodgepole blowdown. The sunset was lurid red, and Wallis and Matthew broke boughs to form brief napping spots at the base of a great fir. They could see the valley some twenty miles to the north.

  Matthew no longer worried about alarming the elk: the elk knew where and what the men were and what they were after. Wallis and Matthew could hear them resting down in the lodgepole, grunting and barking as they settled cautiously, distrusting, into new snow beds beneath the frigid stars. As if wondering whether they would live another day; see the next night’s stars.

  Sometimes one of the young bulls, feeling both the pressure of pursuit and the anger of being pushed and cornered, would respond with coughs and high-pitched bugles. Wallis and Matthew knew that up on whatever mountain the bull was on—and it could have been any of a hundred—the big bull, the largest bull, could hear the younger bulls, and was made aware that something was going on below, though it also seemed likely that he could have no idea that it was humans: that perhaps it had not happened this way enough times in his genetic history—men chasing elk through waist-deep snow, instead of giving up—for him to even register concern.

  Perhaps he thought simply that a lion or wolf was skulking around. Perhaps he put his head back down, laid it gracefully against his flank—the tall antlers rising above him to catch the stars—and slept.

  In the blue snowlight of the evening, Matthew went off to try to find a grouse, a rabbit, or anything; the carcass of a lion-killed deer. Wallis stayed on the ridge and tended the fire, imagining sleep, rest, and peace.

  Matthew soon returned with two blue grouse. He had seen them roosting in a fir tree downslope, silhouetted against the stars, and had climbed up and caught them as they slept. To Wallis it didn’t seem fair, but they plucked them anyway, feathers swirling by the fire, rising on the fire-warmed currents, and then roasted them over the flames.

  They let the fire go out but were asleep before it faded to water, and steam rose to the stars. They slept in the ice and it was a sleep that Wallis did not want to come up out of, not until the long days and scent of growing things returned.

  They awoke deeper into the night—the stars had changed completely, a whole different landscape of them above, as if the men had traveled to another place; and the new stars seemed closer. Matthew knew that the elk were gone: that they had moved on.

  Matthew and Wallis dropped farther downslope, following the tracks. The snow was frozen to a crust, the temperature below zero. Their steps were cannonlike in that stillness, so they had to give even more space to the elk. Behind them, on the ridge, a few wisps of steam still rose from their dying fire.

  Wallis thought of the faint black mark the fire would leave on the stones after the ashes were blown away in the spring. The fire and boiling water from snowmelt and steam would have cracked some of the rock substrate. A juniper berry would one day get caught in one of those cracks, or a penstemmon seed. It would lie dormant in that crack, awaiting soil; or perhaps it would blossom into life, and with the brute desire of its own roots break the rock a bit farther apart, creating its own soil; and then fail and wither, having created not quite enough.

  Another seed would be carried in—perhaps in the excrement of a grouse or other passing animal, like words moving across the rocks—and perhaps there would still be some ash from the fire, down in some of those cracks, though surely the rains and snows would have scrubbed clean all trace of the faint smudge on the stone’s surface. One of the new seeds would eventually take. It would break the crack open wider. It would live, grow, and die. If a juniper, it would drop needles. It might live a few hundred years, never growing more than a couple of feet high, but spreading tenacious roots, until its success killed it as it got too large for the austere land in which it lived. The cracks would be several inches wide now, and as the juniper died and crumbled, a fir seedling would take over, able to send its roots deeper, now that the rock had been sufficiently fragmented: a fir tree blossom from the dying juniper’s heart.

  It would grow slow and wide, thick-trunked, in the near-constant winds at the top of the world. It might grow for five hundred years. Green lichens would shroud it; grouse would roost in it. One cold night two thousand years from now, an animal—a lynx, bobcat, marten, or wolverine—might creep up into the fir tree and catch one, or even two, of those roosting grouse. Feathers would float up into the stars.

  Wallis thought how his bones would be nothing more than salt in some distant ocean. Someone wrote or told the story a long time ago and will always be telling it, then erasing it—telling it, then erasing it, giving and then taking. The wide horizontal roots of the juniper read the sentences already written in the stone, Wallis thought—the roots clutching the rock, feeling it, as if reading Braille—while the vertical roots of the fir trees plunge as deep and far as they can, like reading the same words, or sentences, backward.

  It was very hard for him to accept such a thing: that a story is already written. He laughed out loud, thinking of what Old Dudley would say to such a thought.

  They followed the single-file tracks of the elk lower and lower, back down into a dark creek bottom. It snowed all day. Wallis was beginning to see green floaters in his vision. Their clothes were wet again and Wallis could feel the weight dropping from him already; could feel his body once more beginning to devour muscle and organ. It hit Matthew, too—the steep hills and unending travel, as well as the psychological weight of holding that herd in their mind, nothing but the image of that herd—and though Matthew wasn’t as trembly and weakened as Wallis, neither did he seem to have any excess left.

  In the buffered silence of the falling snow they were able to get in closer to the elk, though still the elk knew they were behind them.

  They found a spruce grouse. It too was easy to catch; again Matthew walked up to it and lifted it from the branch as if taking a bird from a cage. They made another fire down in an old cedar bottom. A cow moose walked past, paying little attention to them or to the small crackling fire. The hugeness of the animal—like a mastodon—and the blackness of t
he coat, to absorb solar radiation in winter: everything about it had been sculpted to fit the far north, and to fit this one season more than any other.

  On the next day Wallis’s tremblings got worse again, so that he was frightened. He did not see how, if they even found the bull, they would be able to pack it out. The elk were climbing again, and Matthew said he thought this might be it—that the elk might be getting tired. It was the only thing he said all day. He touched his ribs once, carefully—the wound where he had fallen from the rig.

  They spent the day climbing. It turned colder again that night—the cold rolling across the landscape like a wave—and that night, Wallis was torn between wanting to dry his clothes by the fire and going directly to sleep. In the end he settled for merely warming them—melting the crusty ice-shroud of them back into dampness—and then crawled into his sleeping bag and slept once more as if falling. He slept leaden, willing to let the elk herd get away, to empty his mind of them. He did not even think the words I quit, but simply slept.

  He grew cold further into the night and was conscious of his damp clothes freezing around him, even in the sleeping bag, but still he could not surface. The elk slept, too. If they had gotten up and moved on, Wallis would have let them, but as he slept he could feel them sleeping, as if balanced by his own sleep, and that was when he knew they would get the bull.

  He awoke at daylight to snow falling on his upturned face. On the other side of the tree, Matthew was still asleep, or perhaps dead. Wallis had a craving for pancakes, honey, bacon, black coffee. He broke off a piece of bark from the tree they were sleeping beneath and examined it, smelled it, pretended it was a piece of food: a hot biscuit with butter melting over it. He put it to his mouth and chewed slowly. His eyes watered.