Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  The antlers had sunk lower on Matthew’s shoulders, so that the yoke of them was cutting deeper in the snow. Sometimes the heavy tips of them would strike a rock far beneath the snow and make a clinking sound. Matthew had cut a small strip of hide to use as a cushion over his shoulders, but the length of the journey and the weight of the antlers had worn his skin raw and then bloody, so that a thin red Y ran down his back.

  The furrows in the snow behind him, wide as the antlers were, looked like the narrow borders for a small road, and within them were the tracks of the creatures that were following them: ravens, coyotes, and lions. The wolves still had not come back.

  Wallis and Matthew moved down out of the high country and into the trees again. It was growing warmer at the lower elevation, so that rather than snow there was sleeting drizzle, which chilled them worse. They came across a dropped moose antler, resting upright on the snow—they could read the moose’s tracks leading to it, and leading away from it—and the upturned antler was full of water and slush from the sleet. They knelt and took turns drinking from it. They were almost home. One more night, and the next day. A year’s worth of meat, put away for good.

  The Y on Matthew’s back widened, but he was moving stronger again. Wallis was shivering hard. For a long time the effort of hauling and skidding the meat had been enough to keep him warm, but now that that balance had been lost, he needed help from the outside; his body could no longer hold off the mass of winter.

  “Do you want to stop and light a fire?” Matthew asked, watching Wallis’s slowing movements as the clumsiness of hypothermia came hurrying in. Wallis nodded, lucid enough to know that it had arrived. He felt as if Matthew were some great distance away watching him, now—evaluating him as Dudley sometimes did. Wallis no longer felt that they were brothers in the hunt, or brothers in anything, and as his mind began to close down, with even the hot chambers of the brain beginning to chill, he had the feeling that Matthew was going to let him freeze: that he had run Wallis into the ground, had let him haul out half the elk, and now, only a day’s journey from town, he was going to let winter have him; that Matthew would carry the rest of the meat out himself on this final leg of the journey, leaving Wallis to disappear beneath the snow.

  Matthew waited as Wallis knelt and slipped out of his pack. Wallis lost his balance once and tipped over in the snow. Not thinking clearly—not thinking at all—Wallis searched through his pack for matches, shivering. He found them, held the small box of them tight in his gloved hands, then remembered that he needed wood.

  Matthew just stood there, watching; he hadn’t taken his pack off. Wallis moved into the trees and began fumbling with branches, snapping and gathering twigs indiscriminately, dropping some while holding onto others. Matthew was drenched—and the antlers were covered with ice—but he was different: he had a fire in him that Wallis could see he himself did not have.

  Wallis heaped the branches, some green and some dry, into a small pile, and began striking matches, barely able to light them; and the sodden pile of wood would not light. He tried until he was out of matches, then rose and went back to his pack to look for more. He was moving slow and was to the point where he wanted to lie down. He knew he had to keep going, but knowing it and doing it seemed vast distances apart.

  At first Matthew didn’t say anything. It was evident as Wallis rooted through his pack that he wasn’t going to find any more matches; and that even if he did, the results would be the same.

  “Watch,” Matthew said, taking a cigarette lighter out of his pack. “Look,” he said. He walked over to the nearest dead tree, an old fir, shrouded dense with black hanging lichens. “This is what you do,” he said. His words were breaths of steam rising into the rain. He stood under the tree’s branches and snapped the lighter a couple of times. On the third snap the lichens caught, burned blue for a moment, then leapt into quick orange flame.

  The whole tree, or the shell of lichens around it, metamorphosed into crackling fire: the lichens burning explosively, and the sudden shock of heat, the updraft, in turn lighting those lichens above, accelerating the rush of flame as if climbing a ladder. It was a forty-foot tree, on fire from top to bottom in about three seconds.

  “That’s how you do it,” Matthew said, stepping back. Wallis had stopped shivering, his blood heated by one last squeeze of adrenaline at the sight, but now even as he watched the flames, the chill, and then the shivering, returned.

  “You’d better get on over there,” Matthew said. “They don’t burn long.”

  Wallis walked over to the burning tree. There was a lot of heat—the snow in all directions around it was searing and then glazing—but Wallis knew it wasn’t a heat that would last long, and so he sat under the tree, as much to get out of the rain as to feel warmth.

  Flaming wisps of lichen floated upward in curls and then descended; by the time they were landing on him they were almost out—and a few of the tree’s branches burned and crackled, but then the fire was gone.

  “Come on,” Matthew said. “Let’s go find another one.” He set off into the rain, the antlers behind him plowing a path.

  That was how they came out of the mountains and back into town, in that last night and the next day: going from tree to tree, looking for the right one, properly dead and set off a ways from the others. They moved through the drizzle, from one tower of flame to the next—Matthew probing the dead trees with his cigarette lighter, testing them.

  They went on through the dark night—the trees sizzling and steaming after they were done—and on into the gray rainy day. They were into country that Wallis recognized and knew well now, even beneath the snow, and they were back among the deer. They were seeing lion tracks, finding lion kills. They cast their way down the mountain, bearing left and right, left and right, correcting their path each time back toward the valley’s center.

  The rut was on as they approached town the next day—the giant bucks chasing any receptive doe—and though they were exhausted there was still more work to be done; they still had to shoot a deer.

  As they drew nearer the village—the scent of the forest ripe with musk—they could hear that the rig was running again, could hear the groan and clatter of it—could see the black clouds of diesel against the rainy skies—and they quickened their pace, as if afraid of being abandoned.

  They saw dozens of bucks prowling the woods, some bucks larger than others—a swarm of antlers moving through the forest, with all the bucks mesmerized by sex—and they were almost to Helen’s burial site when they saw the buck they wanted.

  They saw him because he had seen them and was coming up the hill toward them. The buck was watching the giant antlers strapped to Matthew’s back, and came forward with aggression. He was wet from the rain, and with every step twin streams of fog-vapor trailed from his nostrils. His antlers were black brown from his having lived in a dark forest and not having ventured out in the daytime, and they rose three feet above his head and extended a foot on either side beyond the tips of his outstretched ears. It did not seem possible he could carry such a weight on his head.

  Matthew dropped to his knees. The deer stopped, then came closer, still entranced only with the antlers, and ignoring the man underneath them. Matthew raised his rifle and shot the deer through the neck as it faced them directly, not twenty yards away.

  They saw a thin pattern of blood spray across the snow behind the deer—saw the deer’s head and antlers snap back—but the deer did not buckle or drop. Instead it whirled and ran down the hill, running hard and strong.

  Other deer—smaller deer—stood around watching them. It started to rain harder. Wallis and Matthew stood in the hissing, steady rain, breathing their own milky vapors. Wallis knew in his heart that he was almost ready to quit, and that, strangely, Matthew was too—as strange a thought as if a stone were to quit being a stone.

  The snow was deep and slushy. There was little, if any, blood trail to follow, and the big buck’s tracks merged with hundreds of others: the
carnival of the rut.

  Looking down toward the river in the direction the buck had run, Matthew dropped his pack in the snow—the bloody Y on his back identical to the one on his chest, like the delicate, perfect, world-shaped markings on the wings of some obscure tropical butterfly—and Wallis did the same. A blood trail was beginning to form on Wallis’s own back and chest in a pattern not that different from Matthew’s.

  They carried the antlers through the woods toward Helen’s tree. To not be wearing the packs after having carried them for so long was a feeling like flight; as if now they could have gone another hundred miles.

  That feeling soon left them. The rain and slush beat them down again. They began lighting trees once more—moving from tree to tree.

  Ahead of them, through the drizzle, they saw Helen’s tree. Wallis let Matthew carry the antlers by himself, from that point; he stood beneath a burning tree and watched Matthew labor the large antlers through the woods toward Helen’s shrine. He had begun building a rock wall around her. How long would her markers last? He had not gotten very far on it and he might not have enough years left in him to do it the way he wanted—to build one as he had for Mel. Wallis wondered: How many chances do we get?

  Matthew knelt beneath her tree and positioned the elk antlers against the base of it. He stayed there praying, or thinking, for a long time. Wallis took a few steps forward and lit another tree, which roared; a twist, a crack in it, resin-rich, able to catch the lichen-flames and spread the fire throughout its core, throughout the rotting heartwood—and that tree burned until it was a charcoal spar, smoldering, and then tipped over, snapping about halfway up and falling to the ground to form a leaning awkward letter A.

  The sound of it brought Matthew out of his reverie, and he looked over at Wallis as if not recognizing him at first—but then he rose and made his way slowly back to where Wallis was waiting.

  They went back up through the woods. Already the ravens had found their meat and were resting atop it. A coyote stood next to the cache, but turned and ran when it saw them.

  Matthew shooed the ravens away with waves of his arms—at first Wallis thought they were not going to leave—and as they finally flew off, they croaked and grunted not as if with laughter, but as if with encouragement, urging the men to go on, to never quit.

  Wallis and Matthew loaded up and pushed on down the hill, trying to sort the wounded buck’s tracks from all the others. A drop of blood here; a loose hair there. Wallis very much believed the deer could run to the horizon: that he was only nicked.

  They found him down near the river in a backwater slough, thrashing around in six feet of water, having broken through a skim of thawing ice as he tried to cross; but even if he had succeeded in crossing, where would he have gone? Out into the river itself, and downstream, then, like a log? It seemed to Wallis as fair, as fitting, for him to die in this pond as in the river, fifty yards farther. They watched him for a moment as he swam in circles with only his head and the tower of antlers above the water. The deer was choking on his blood, coughing sprays of it across the water with each exhalation and swallowing blood with each breath. The bullet had missed an artery but severed a vessel. His face was a red mask of blood.

  The buck glared at them as he swam—a red king, defiant. Matthew raised his rifle, waited for the deer to swim back around—waited until it was closest to them.

  The deer continued to watch them as it swam toward them—head held high, drowning in blood. Matthew shot it in the neck again, breaking the neck this time, and the deer stopped swimming immediately. The antlers sank.

  They sat and stared at it for a long time—watching it motionless through the refraction of water—as if expecting it to come back to life.

  Another buck, following the scent trail of the giant’s musk, appeared on the other side of the pond: lowered its head, trying to decipher the cone of scent that had drifted its way—wondering, perhaps, where the deer had gone.

  Rain was dimpling the surface of the pond. It was now more than ever like a dream and Wallis felt as if he had to come back up into the real world or be lost. They could hear the steady pounding of the rig in the distance. They left the elk meat by the pond and traveled upriver to where they’d left the canoe; pulled it out from under its shell of snow, and paddled downriver to the slough. They loaded the elk meat into the canoe until the canoe was low in the water. Dusk was coming on and they could see a few lights across the river. Wallis stayed on the far shore while Matthew made two crossings with the meat; then Matthew came back for Wallis. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing to stars and Matthew said they had to go back and get the deer out now as the pond would freeze thick if they waited until the next day.

  They waded out into the pond together. The water was warmer than the air around them. The deer was lighter underwater and they were able to muscle him to the shore. Then they scrambled out and dragged him over to the canoe—gutted him quickly—and trembling, they loaded him into the canoe and set out across the river one more time, riding lower than ever. It did not matter to Wallis whether they tipped over or not, for freezing was more imminent than drowning; but they reached the other shore, sledded the canoe up onto the gravel, and finally they quit; abandoned the meat, hundreds of pounds of it, only a short distance from home, and ran stumbling and falling up the hill toward town. There was a fire burning in the rig workers’ camp but they did not veer that way, wanting to make it all the way home rather than to yet one more temporary place among strangers; and they knew also that no fire would warm them—that they had to be dry, and enclosed by four walls.

  Lights were on in the bar. They went straight in and lay down next to the wood stove, shivering. Artie and Charlie brought them blankets and hides, and he helped them out of their wet clothes and wrapped hides around them. They heated water on the stove for baths and for hot tea for them to drink; the first fluid they’d had in days that was neither snow nor cold creek water. The heat of it made them vomit as the tea hit their stomachs. Artie looked at what they had spat up, and at the blood stains on their shirts. “They got an elk,” he said.

  Matthew tried to stay awake—tried to head back out to find Old Dudley—but he had not gone ten steps before he lay down exhausted, in the middle of the street, and fell hard asleep, with the evening’s sleet turning to slow-falling snow. Steam rose anew from his wound. The men from the bar went and lifted him up and carried him back inside and laid him down by the fire again.

  Wallis left for Mel’s, carrying a load of meat on his back. She was still awake as he drew near—he saw her lantern through the window—but she had turned the lights out for bed when he was still some distance from the cabin, so that falling snow and darkness suddenly separated him from her. It was a sight so startling, after so long an absence from her, that his legs buckled, and he felt tears leap to his eyes.

  He hurried the last hundred yards to her cabin and dropped the meat on the porch and, not wanting to alarm her, knocked on the door.

  She came out and held him for a long time. “I’ve gotten so weak,” was all she said. “I missed you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back.”

  They spent the rest of the night hauling the rest of the meat home and hanging all the quarters from the rafters. When it was finally done they stood there amongst the chilled mass of meat, and felt as rich as pirates.

  “Another day and you’d have been snowed out,” Mel said.

  “We cut it pretty close,” he agreed. “No kicks from the baby yet?”

  Mel laughed. “Two more months for that.”

  “January,” said Wallis, and they both stood there, imagining it.

  “I guess y’all will go out to the well in the morning,” Mel said. “He’s been getting really anxious for y’all to get back. Really anxious,” she said. “He hasn’t been acting right,” she said, and Wallis laughed out loud. He said, “How would you know?”

  “No,” Mel said, “he’s been different. I’m worried.”


  “Churchy-different?” Wallis asked. “You mean that golden rule stuff?”

  “No,” Mel said. “Unhappy, maybe even frightened.”

  “Shit,” Wallis said, trying to imagine it. “He’s not sick, is he?”

  “No,” Mel said, “he just looks weak.”

  “He’ll perk up when he sees Matthew,” Wallis said.

  Mel slept. Wallis went back to town in the snowy dawn and began fixing breakfast over at Helen’s. He went across the street and woke Artie and asked Artie to help carry Matthew over to the mercantile, so that Wallis could feed him and get him lucid and presentable before Old Dudley showed up. They hauled him through that falling snow as if rescuing him from a burning building—though it felt strange to Wallis as if there could be no rescuing of him, that they might as well have been carrying him out of one burning building and into another. They sat him up in a chair by the fire, and Wallis fed him bites of pancake as one would feed a baby. Matthew’s eyes kept rolling to their whites and his chin kept tipping down to his chest, but slowly, they summoned him from his depth. Artie had three plates of pancakes and asked all about the hunt.

  They stared across at the bar through the falling snow. Artie had strung Christmas lights in candy-cane striping all around the porch. He said that it was the first time there had ever been Christmas lights in the valley and that Dudley had said Artie was turning into a sissy and that the valley was going to hell.

  Artie said maybe not; that he had seen two swans earlier that day, flying downriver right before dusk. He said he hadn’t realized what they were for a moment—that with their seven-foot wingspans, and their solid white bodies, he had thought they were angels, or ghosts. He said it had been almost thirty years since he’d seen a pair in the valley.

  Matthew roused—surfaced a little higher; found himself capable of speech.

  “Helen said there used to be a shitload of them come through here,” Matthew said. “They’d pass through late in the autumn, then come back in the spring on their way back to the Arctic. They’d raise their young here.” He began to eat from his plate—eating on his own, now. “Helen said the wolves would lie in wait all along the shores of the little ponds and lakes, and watch the swans. The wolves would kill them one by one—would grab them by the neck whenever the swans came too close to shore.”