Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Wallis sat up, and clumsily, with frost-stiff hands, made another fire: and even after he got it going, it was a long time before he could feel warmth from it. He ate a couple of handfuls of snow, pretending they were ice cream, or frozen melons in the summertime, and lay back down to rest. The snow was landing on Matthew’s face and not melting, so Wallis reached up and snapped some boughs from the tree and laid them over Matthew’s face like a screen. After a time the fire burned down and Wallis let it go. He was thinking about rotting logs: about how rich the soil was in a forest where old trees toppled over and were then eaten by the soil. It was nice to lie there on the mountainside with his body consuming itself and the snow burying them, and burying also the jagged, random trail of blackened campfires they had left behind them.

  It was later in the day—early afternoon—when Wallis awoke again. There was a foot of new snow down, and it was still snowing. He felt better—light and empty, but better—as if the mountain had taken away some of his weakness. He went up the hill toward the ridge to see if the elk were still bedded down above them.

  He came over a ridge and at first did not recognize them, covered with snow. Only their heads were visible, seeming suspended like puppets, in that world of white. Some of them were looking down the hill in his direction, but Wallis realized that in the falling snow they could not see him. Or perhaps they too were giving up. They were huddled together, twenty or more of them, looking shell-shocked, and the bull was with them.

  The bull looked like something from the imagination: as if he did not belong in this world. His antlers rose six feet above and behind his head. He looked weary, but at peace. He looked almost glad that the rest of the herd had come to see him.

  Wallis went back down the hill to wake Matthew. There was a moment of panic when at first Wallis could not find his tracks back, but then his eyes adjusted to the whiteness and he was able to tell, faintly, where he had been.

  It was hard to wake him. Matthew appeared confused by the whiteness of sky and whiteness of the mountain, and he seemed longer in coming up out of it than Wallis had been. Finally, however, he sat up. Wallis told him the bull was just up the hill.

  Matthew held his gloved hands under his armpits to warm them and looked uphill into the snow. When his hands were warm he took his knife out and began carving on the tree they were camped beneath. He carved a picture of an elk—a bull. When Matthew was done he sheathed the knife, warmed his hands again, then rose stiffly. His clothes had frozen and he twisted and stretched, bending them back to the shape of his body. He picked up his rifle, tapped the snow from it, cleaned the scope, opened the bolt, and blew through the barrel, covering it with his hand so that the flesh of his lips did not freeze against the metal. Then he started up the hill, tracing Wallis’s old tracks. It was still snowing hard. Wallis followed.

  It was strange to Wallis how the idea of killing had been kept focused and separate in his mind; how there were no thoughts of what might need to come afterward: no thoughts of the work of gutting and cleaning the elk, or the long pack out. There were not even any thoughts of the coming moment, the coming first moment after the killing when all the other elk would leap up in alarm, spraying snow everywhere, and run off into the snow, into the storm, as if forever pursued. The disruption of beauty.

  There was only the thought of the immediate killing. Beyond that was nothing. There was only the image of the bull.

  They stopped below the ridge and peered over. There was nothing in sight and at first Wallis thought the elk had moved—had heard or sensed or smelled the men coming—but then he realized it was only snowing harder. Matthew looked at Wallis with doubt and Wallis held his hand up for him to wait.

  They stared back out into the snow and now sometimes through the swirls they could pick out a glimpse of ear, or the darkness of a muzzle. A spike’s antler. The bull’s antlers, briefly, like a ghost, quickly hidden by the storm.

  “Yes,” Matthew whispered.

  There was no way to get closer. They were already too close. There could be other elk, sleeping cows, all around them; if they spooked even one of them, the whole herd would explode.

  They had to pick out the one thread—the bull—without disrupting any of the others. Wallis shuddered from the cold and the anticipation as the bull’s antlers appeared against the sky briefly, then shrouded out again. There was the momentary temptation—if Wallis had had the rifle—to measure down blindly below where the antlers disappeared, and to shoot at nothing, on faith.

  Matthew crouched lower into the snow. He laid the rifle beneath him to keep the snow from it and lowered his head like an animal and waited. It started to snow harder. Wallis burrowed down too. They could see nothing now. Forty yards up the ridge, on the flat, the elk rested. Wallis emptied his mind of them, as he knew he must, so they would not know he was among them.

  It was warm down in the snow. After an hour or so, he slept.

  When they awoke it was late afternoon and the storm was clearing. There was patchy fog, spits of snow still falling, but milky blue above them, and a new sound in the world, the loud sound of snow-not-falling: a brittleness.

  Another half-foot had fallen and as they sat up from their snow caves they saw that the elk were gone. Wallis felt despair and failure—felt that the elk had cast a spell on them, to send them down into sleep, when they had been so close to killing—but Matthew held a hand up to caution him, to tell him to keep hunting.

  They eased up to where the elk had left their snow-beds. The ice sculptures of where they had been had six inches of snow in them, indicating the elk had gotten up and moved out just as the men had gone to sleep. Wallis wanted to go back down to their camp and gather their packs and sleeping bags and snowshoes, if they were going to follow them, rather than wandering blindly off into the mountains—the elk’s tracks were sealed over and hidden by the new snow, as were the men’s own tracks leading back to camp. It would be night soon, and seemed a recipe for disaster, a kind of willful death, to go pushing off into the late afternoon, directionless and unequipped—but Matthew said that he thought he could smell them, that they would be just a little ways upslope, and feeding, because they’d be hungry after having bedded for so long. He started up the mountain, with each step punching through up to his waist.

  Wallis turned and started to go back down to camp. But the lure was too strong. He followed in Matthew’s snow-churned wake. More clouds were breaking apart; an immense sky was opening above. The sun was striking the new blue and white world but gave no warmth, and Wallis knew how cold it would be when the sun went down.

  Matthew cast slowly up the hill. After half an hour they had finally broken a sweat. He paused at another ridge, having lost the scent, and looked up the hill, which led toward nothing but blue sky. Wallis turned and looked below and saw the elk moving slowly and in single file through some timber below. The bull was still with them, but was so much larger that he looked like some kind of monster. They had seen the men and smelled them, and were trying to sneak away. Wallis didn’t see how the bull could move so much mass through such timber without getting tangled. He pointed them out to Matthew, who had already seen them and was raising his rifle. There was a lot of timber below and Wallis thought that if Matthew did not get a clear shot he would rather die than spend another week chasing the elk.

  The bull was at the back of the herd. All the elk knew the men had spotted them now and they picked up their pace, accelerating to a trot: leaping over logs like show horses, the whole herd moving into that powerful, flowing motion. Some of the cows and calves were already out of sight, disappearing to safety, and still Matthew did not shoot, waiting for the perfect chance.

  Finally, long after Wallis thought it was too late, Matthew fired. The sound of it seemed to break the mountain open, and the bull made only a small stumble, as if he had tripped over a stone, and then moved more quickly, broke into a run, as did the rest of the herd ahead of him. They all disappeared.

  Wallis felt an i
mmense emptiness.

  “I got him,” Matthew said, though his voice had a bit of doubt in it. “You’ll see. I got him.”

  They sat down and waited. If the bull was dead or mortally injured, their pursuing him wouldn’t change what had already happened; and if he were untouched, there would be no rush either, because it would be a long time—the middle of the night, perhaps, or the next day—before the herd calmed down again.

  It was too cold to sit still. Wallis and Matthew dug through the snow, pawing like horses, until they found some grasses and twigs. They built a tiny fire, trying to warm themselves, but it was useless, and they began to shiver. The sun went behind the mountain and the light turned orange. The grass and twig fire burned out and now only the lichens on the rock burned, flaming briefly then glowing incandescent in the dusk.

  “Okay,” Matthew said. “He’s dead now. We can go get him. It won’t be but a couple hundred yards at the most.”

  They went down to the spot where the bull had been when Matthew shot. At first they couldn’t find any blood and Wallis thought it had been a clean miss, but then Matthew found a spray of blood farther off the trail where the bullet had passed through, and a few hairs that had been cut during the bullet’s exit.

  They followed the herd’s tracks through the timber in the dimming orange light. About every twenty or thirty yards they would find a drop or two of blood, but it wasn’t enough to kill a mouse, much less an elk.

  “I hit him in the lungs,” Matthew said. “In a minute his lungs will collapse, and he’ll go down.”

  After a couple hundred yards, the herd’s tracks continued parallel across the mountain, but the bull’s veered suddenly, sharply, downhill, and for the first time Wallis believed that they were going to find him.

  They came across a tangle of fallen and leaning timber. Now there was more blood: some was smeared against the fallen logs.

  “I got him in the heart, too,” Matthew said with satisfaction. “The heart and the lungs.” He was not excited, only pleased.

  The elk traveled another three hundred yards before dying. They found him by a little creek, hung up in a jumble of blown-down timber that he’d tried to leap. He was caught in the nest of it, the latticework of it supporting his huge body above the ground so that it looked as if he were still alive, and only in mid-leap. There was more of him, it seemed, than there had been when Matthew had shot, and even the antlers seemed larger, so that for a second Wallis wondered if there had been some mistake: if this were not their giant elk, but some even greater creature that had died of natural causes, and which they had merely stumbled across.

  The blue light of snow at night began to glow. They went up to the elk and touched it—leaned in against it. It was warm and unmovable. It floated above the ground, suspended by the latticework. Wallis started to laugh, not knowing why. Matthew smiled. Years, and all errant choices, seemed to vanish.

  The bull had a ripe smell that reminded Wallis of horses, of dark cool stables—the kind barn cats like to nap in in the summertime. The odor was rich enough and strong enough that it seemed you could ignite it: could strike a match and have the air all around leap into blue flame. It was a good smell. Wallis laughed again—took a glove off and pressed a bare hand to the elk’s warm side—and did not know why he laughed, only that he wanted to. It was a feeling to him like standing in a garden in the spring, with the earth all turned and ready. “Shit almighty,” Matthew said, still grinning.

  “What?” Wallis asked. He wanted to know the name for this happiness. That incredible scent of musk, down in the woods.

  “I forgot my pulleys,” Matthew said. “We’d never have been able to budge him—wouldn’t have even been able to turn him over to clean him. But this way”—he laughed—“this way I can just crawl under him, open him up, and let it all fall out.”

  They lingered, not yet wanting to leave the elk and go get their packs and equipment. It was getting colder quickly under the clearing skies, but the elk was warm, like a stove with a bed of coals still inside it, and they were reluctant to depart, to leave that brush of air against them, which was the space, the distance, between body and spirit. It wouldn’t last—or rather, they wouldn’t be able to discern it much longer—and they sat there and waited for it to leave, or for the point where they could no longer feel it. It was gone soon enough—quickly—and only when the woods grew still and lonely again did they go up to their camp and pack up without saying anything.

  They built a fire down in the woods next to the elk to warm them as they worked. There was plenty of dry wood and it was easy to make a roaring fire with flames that lit the woods for some distance. The orange light danced slowly against the elk’s hide and faster against his antlers, which made it seem as if he had come back to life again. Matthew crawled under the suspended bull—if it fell it would crush him—and began cutting. Hair drifted upward on the fire’s currents as he cut. The knife made a rasping sound against the coarse hair and thick skin and cartilage. From time to time Matthew would have to stop and sharpen his knife with a whetstone.

  “Nothing in the world dulls a steel blade like elk hair,” he said. He was doing a neat job and no blood had touched him yet, though that would soon change. “I’d like a stone knife someday. Black obsidian,” he said. He went back to cutting. Wallis added wood to the fire. He would not have believed he could skin such an animal. It seemed like surely enough meat for the coming year.

  By morning they had the hide and antlers sawed off—Matthew had brought a small wood-handled folding saw, whose blade was now ruined, and which he tossed in the fire—and they had the hindquarters and shoulders cut and hanging from trees.

  Their packs were filled with the loose meat—the roasts, tenderloins, and lengths of backstrap like anacondas. They were covered with blood from where they had labored to lift the hindquarters and shoulders into the trees and Wallis was glad that the bears were sleeping.

  The fire had sprawled and wandered through the night. Ashes, and charred half-lengths of timber, lay in a circle thirty feet across. They roasted some of the ribs over the coals of the fire and ate on them for a long time. They ate one whole side of the trimmings—stripped the bones clean and gleaming—and the other side they broke in half with the hatchet and tied to their packs like a frame, to help hold in place the ponderous shifting weight of all the other meat, which was still warm against their backs.

  Matthew carried the antlers—settled them over his shoulders upside down, with their long tips and tines furrowing the snow behind him as if he were in a yoke—and Wallis carried the wet hide atop his pack of meat, sending the weight of his pack up to around a hundred and thirty pounds.

  It began to snow again. Wallis wondered where the other elk were: if they knew that the chase was over, and if they were glad that it was over.

  They stayed on the ridges when they could. They had to take small, slow steps under such a load. They would travel a mile, drop their weight, then backtrack to where they’d left the other meat, then pack the second load back to that point—each of them carrying a hindquarter on their back, and dragging an elk shoulder behind them like a sled across the snow.

  In that manner they moved across the valley, continuously giving up all progress that they’d made, working hours to move the first load only one mile, at which point they were then ready to start all over again with the second—and the winter-short days passed quickly, and they slept soundly through the nights, though in their dreams they were still walking, forever hauling the meat across the frozen landscape.

  Ravens followed them, after the second or third day, even through the falling snow. Wallis and Matthew dropped off one ridge down into a creek, ascended another, and Matthew said he knew where they were. The ravens landed in front of them and strutted with outstretched wings, drawing little tracings in the snow, barking and cawing in voices that alternated shrill and hoarse, as if they were hurling different languages at the men. Sometimes the ravens would dart in and peck at w
hatever elk quarter they dragged, but usually they pecked only at the fragments that were left behind. There was a moment of startling beauty on the third day. Wallis and Matthew were walking on the lee side of a wind-sculpted snow spine, the storm’s fog so thick they could see no more than a few feet. Four ravens followed them, walking behind them in their penguin strut, as if grounded by all the snowy weather. Wallis and Matthew continued along the ridge.

  To their left—to the west—a slot appeared in the fog. They could see pale blue sky above, and gold light fell through the slot and illuminated with ancient copper light the forested canyon below. The lens of gold light fell through that slot—the only thing they could see, in any direction—then traveled north, tracing itself down the canyon, paralleling them. As the cloud rent moved away from them—as it passed over the dense forest far below—it kept revealing more of the uncut, untouched forest. The impression it gave was that the uncut forest would never end—that the light could travel forever and always stay above uncut forest.

  In less than a minute the gold light had moved out of sight—the wind was blowing thirty miles an hour—and neither Matthew nor Wallis said anything about it to each other, though they did stop and watch it, as it was leaving, as if unsure of what they had just seen.

  It had turned cold again. They ate on the elk as they traveled. Wallis wanted bread, or potatoes; he was tired of all the meat. He wanted an apple pie, dense with sugar, and a hot bath. He wondered if the parts for the rig had arrived; if Dudley was drilling again—if even, perhaps, the oil had been reached, and the hot scented steam of its success would be waiting for them when they returned.