by Rick Bass
Praise for Platte River
“Marvelous … The title story is stunning.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Powerful … [Rick Bass] reminds me of D. H. Lawrence, who also relied on the power of his own voice to mesmerize the reader.… Lyrical, vivid, engaging.”
—USA Today
“Spellbindingly articulate … [A] compassionate exploration of what learning to love feels like, smells like, and sounds like.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Mythical … Bass creates a clear and luminous world where legends are still told.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“This collection shines.… You get the feeling you’re seeing how Rick Bass dreams.”
—New York Newsday
“Bass has written some of the finest short stories in the land: terse, haunting, often near-mystical tales that have brought comparisons to Hemingway and the late Raymond Carver.”
—Oregonian
“A literary titan … Bass is, hands down, a master of the short form, creating in a few pages a natural world of mythic proportions.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A warm, introspective read, filled with lush imagery of beautiful natural wonders.”
—Midwest Book Review
Reading Rick Bass offers the deep pleasure of reinhabiting an older world, one that’s not lost so much as latent and usually unnoticed … Each line of Bass’s extraordinary prose brings you more awake.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Bass is an acknowledged master of the short story… . His greatest gift, what makes Rick Bass one of the very best writers we have, is his understanding of the soft hearts within even the hardest people.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Rick Bass joins the pantheon of contemporary masters.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Rick Bass writes fiction with almost mythic plot devices that unfold with an authenticity that is startling … [He] can lift a common moment into a shared experience that is universal.”
—Seattle Times
“Impressive … What makes this a compelling book are his finely detailed, complex characters, simple men and women crafted with sympathy and understanding.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Delectable … Within this rich blend of naturalism touched by mystery, the exhilarating landscapes of Montana, upstate New York, and northern Michigan inform the book as fully as the human principals… . Bass demonstrates here his mastery of longer fiction.”
—Library Journal
“Three fascinating long stories from a greatly gifted writer avatar of the outdoors… . Beautifully written and filled with radiant imagery and a powerful sense of the mysteries of nature—human and otherwise.”
—Kirkus Reviews
BOOKS BY RICK BASS
NONFICTION:
The Deer Pasture
Wild to the Heart
Oil Notes
Winter: Notes From Montana1
The Ninemile Wolves
The Lost Grizzlies:
A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado
The Book of Yaak
The New Wolves
Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism
Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd,
Gwich-in Culture, and the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge
Why I Came West
The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana
The Black Rhinos of Namibia
The Heart Beneath the Heart
In My Home There Is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda
The Traveling Feast
NOVELS:
Where the Sea Used to Be
The Diezmo
Nashville Chrome
All the Land That Holds Us
SHORT STORIES:
The Watch
In the Loyal Mountains
Fiber
The Hermit’s Story
The Lives of Rocks
For a Little While: New and Selected Stories
NOVELLAS:
Platte River
The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness
The Blue Horse
The Heart of the Monster (with David James Duncan)
ANTHOLOGIES (EDITOR):
The Roadless Yaak:
Reflections and Observations About One of
Our Last Great Wild Places
Falling from Grace: A Literary Response to the Demise of
Paradise (co-editor, with Paul Christensen)
Copyright © 1994 by Rick Bass
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First Arcade Edition 2019
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
Visit the author’s site at www.rickbass.net.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930447
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover illustration: Winslow Homer, Leaping Trout
ISBN: 9781948924047
Ebook ISBN: 9781948924054
Printed in the United States of America
For Mary Katherine, Amanda,
Stephanie, Mary, and Mollie
CONTENTS
MAHATMA JOE
FIELD EVENTS
PLATTE RIVER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAHATMA JOE
How many memorable localities in a river walk! Here is the warm wood-side; next, the good fishing bay; and next, where the old settler was drowned when crossing on the ice a hundred years ago. It is all storied.
— THOREAU, January 1860 journal
In February, after the chinook blew through, thawing people’s faces into smiles and making look happy again, and making the men look like men again, rather than pouting little boys — in February, the preacher for the Grass Valley, Mahatma Joe Krag, began a rampage not unlike those of other springs.
It had been a hard winter in northern Montana, so hard that ravens sometimes fell from the sky in midflight, their insides just snapping, it seemed, and like great ragged clumps of black cloth they’d fall into the woods, or into a pasture, landing a few weeks shy of spring.
The stave-ribbed horses — those that the coyotes and wolves had not gotten — would go over and pick the crows up with their teeth and begin eating them, chewing the shiny black feathers.
There was nothing else.
People were so short-tempered that even the saloon closed down. In past winters they’d gone in to gather, socialize, drink, and complain collectively, but now people got into fights, pistol-pulling duels out in the snow, duels which never killed anyone, not at thirty yards with the .22 pistols the saloon kept on the counter for that purpose. The snow was
usually swirling and blowing, which further lessened the risk, though often one of the duelists would injure the other, hitting him in the thigh or the shoulder, and even once, in the case of One-Ball Boyd, in the groin.
It was a bad winter, even for Grass Valley. The valley was long and narrow, and ran northwest-southeast along an old mountain range, the Whiteflesh Mountains, the first inland range off the Pacific. Storms came hauling off of the Siberian Peninsula and crossed the Bering Strait, kicking up eighty- and hundred-foot waves; they crashed into Alaska and then Washington, worked their way over the northwest passes, too strong to be stopped, and hurried over three hundred miles of prairie in eastern Washington, building up speed.
The Grass Valley was the first thing they hit. The valley was shaped like a bottleneck, slightly curved in the middle, and the storms slammed into it and rounded the curve, accelerating.
But it worked the other way during chinooks. Winds from the south raced up the same funnel, blowing hot air through the valley even in winter, melting all the snow in a matter of days, and launching new hatches of insects, buds in the fruit trees, and the smiles of women. Once February came around, the chinook could happen at any time. It became a race between south winds and north winds to see what got to the bottleneck valley first. The temperature could change almost a hundred degrees in twenty-four hours, going from twenty below to sixty or seventy above.
The chinook would last only a week at most, but it was a sign that there would be just one more month of hard freezes left. A long time ago, the town had had a celebration called Naked Days, where no one wore clothes at any time, not even when they went in for groceries, not even when they went into the saloon. People fed their horses naked, slept naked for the first time in six months, and checked their mailboxes naked. There was hardly anyone around, and everyone knew everyone else. It was hard to describe the sense of freedom chinooks brought, after the entrapment of winter.
It had been great fun, that one week each year, the week of warm washes of wind against the bare chest and across the back, warm winds passing between bare thighs. The women all shaved their legs for the first time since the fall and lay out in the melting patches of snow down by the thawing river and got suntans. The men sat at picnic tables in the meadow behind the mercantile, also down by the river, and drank beer, wore dark sunglasses, and told stories. And there were no more duels — but that had all gone on in the old days, before Mahatma Joe Krag came into the valley, down from Alaska, angry and ambitious at not having converted anyone up there to Christianity, not even an Indian, in over six weeks. And now he hadn’t scored big in Grass Valley in over twenty years: not since the day he left Alaska. He’d run out of souls up there. Little did he know that those six weeks would be the beginning of a rest-of-his-life drought.
Mahatma Joe put an end to Naked Days almost single-handedly, and it took him only a short time to do it.
He was mortified, during his first chinook, when he went into town and saw naked men and women walking down the streets, naked children playing catch, and was greeted by a naked storekeeper when he went in for his groceries. He was horrified but challenged, and sometimes, at night, delighted: he had found a valley more wicked than any of the mining camps in Alaska, and it was in the continental United States.
Mahatma Joe began to write articles about Naked Days for various evangelical magazines, inviting his fellow preachers to come to the valley the following February, during the next chinook, and witness “an entire valley of naked unsaved savages, and right inside our own country!”
The response was significant. The evangelists would watch the weather fervently in January, sometimes arriving early, anticipating the chinook’s passage, calling it correctly even before the weather forecasters did. The evangelists prayed to the sky for the chinook to arrive, so that their business could begin.
The tradition faded. With all the visiting strangers, people in the Grass Valley began to keep their clothes on — around town, anyway.
Mahatma Joe pressed on to other, lesser matters.
He wanted the town to have rules, ever more rules. He wanted to stop the winter fights. He wanted to have a town church, a town Bible study, and a town vegetable garden in the rich meadowland along the Grass River. In summer he wanted the fruits and vegetables all picked and canned and bottled and sent to distant, savage lands. Joe believed that vegetables could calm angry souls, that meat — flesh! — was a temptation of Satan’s creation.
Moose grazed in the fertile river meadow during the summer, and ducks floated on the slow blue waters. Elk, with their antlers in velvet, slept in people’s yards in the high heat of the afternoon, and tried to get into the hay barns at night. The animals were unafraid of people in the hot windy months, and they would roll in the river’s shallows like dogs, trying to escape the biting flies. Small children would walk out and touch the elk’s antlers and feed them sugar cubes during those warm spells when rules dissolved.
Men and women would gather back in the saloon shortly before dusk to watch the sunset and discuss the day, telling of what they had seen. Ospreys. Nuthatches. Western flickers. Varied grosbeaks. Pine siskins. They knew all the names, though often would argue about which bird it was that had the crossed bill for cracking seeds. They loved seeing the western canaries, which were a bright yellow but had no song, made no noise.
There was hemlock, too, along the river in places, hemlock that would kill a man in half an hour. It looked like watercress, which some people used in salads. Every now and then someone would mistake hemlock for watercress, and it’d be the end. Everyone knew there were dangers still left to living up in Grass Valley. There were mountain lions, wolverines, bears, and wolves; it was one of the only places like that left.
Besides wanting to turn the entire river meadow into a town farm, a working, thriving plantation for the export of sweetness, Mahatma Joe wanted to get rid of the hemlock.
He spent the silent white winters huddled in the little office behind his cabin, writing venomous letters to editors of the many sinful newspapers across the country, and writing and rewriting various tracts on religion, sex, and education. He drafted and redrafted proposed ordinances. Joe had always imagined the little valley, ringed by snow and glaciers even in summer, as a new place to build something, a new place to get it right. But he needed help. He was sixty-eight by the time he had his final vision.
·
Sometimes people would move into the valley: young couples who filled in the places of the old-timers who had not made it through the winter. Occasionally they were young singles, a man or a woman running from some piece of extraordinarily bad luck, or a whole life of such luck; or sometimes they were young men and women who had just looked at a map, had seen that there were no paved roads leading into the valley and no towns within forty miles. They had seen how close it was to Canada, and they had wondered if, finally, this might be a place to rest.
They brought guns, traps, saws, books. They always brought a dog, and sometimes two or three, especially the single ones, and always the single women: hardy young women from Illinois and California, Texas and Arkansas, who had seen the name Grass on a map in some city or town library, on a day late in the fall, with end-of-day September light fading and flickering through the windows, with the library closing in half an hour and nowhere to go, no boyfriends, and life over too soon — everything over too soon, and somehow, too, everything just beginning. These women showed up every year, two or three of them, and asked around, found out who had died — who had fallen through the ice, who had been thrown from a horse, who had just disappeared — and they moved in, learning the old ways of the valley, quickly and hungrily, and staying, changing, learning.
One such woman moved to the valley in the fall of Joe’s sixty-eighth year, his twentieth year in the valley. Her name was Leena. She had no money, and she came unaware, came in from the South, and put an ad on the bulletin board outside the mercantile asking for a place to stay in exchange for labor — clothes
washing, gardening, fence building, horse feeding, whatever. There were no vacancies, no empty cabins when Leena came. She lived in a tent down in the field behind the mercantile for three weeks, frying bacon and washing her hair in the nearby river at night, babysitting children in their homes and running the cash register in the mercantile.
Across the road from the mercantile, at the Red Dog saloon, the patrons played a game called Shake-a-Day: you rolled five weighted dice at once, and if you had three of a kind, you won a free drink. If you rolled four of a kind, you got a free six-pack, and if all five were the same number, you won half of the pot, which was all of the quarters that had been paid in since the last pot was won. The pot usually built up to six or seven hundred dollars before someone finally won it.
Leena would walk into the bar with her dog Sam, buy one drink and sip it slowly, enjoying the talk and learning things about the valley: the names of birds, the names of plants. Everyone sat on a stool with their dog beside them, and watched the dogs.
Leena would finish her drink, find a quarter, pay for her roll of the dice — you could roll only once a day — and lose, always. She never won a drink to take with her across the street and down to the river — a free drink that she could sip by herself while sitting on a boulder over the river, where she could watch the spry bats racing across the top of the current snapping at bugs, and the big trout beginning to leap, and night coming in, her new life in this bowl of a valley. She never won.
She bathed in the river at night. The water was frigid, with blocks of ice bobbing downstream like dirty heads of lettuce, floating past her as she scrubbed her body hard with the washcloth, fighting for breath, the cold taking the air from her lungs and turning her numb. The stars above her when she was in the river, gasping, seemed brighter than when she was not in the river. She had left the most selfish man in the world back, in California. Each day of being away from him was a day of happiness, of getting stronger — feelings she never thought she’d have again. Leena would take a deep breath, dunk her head under the water, disappear from the moonlight, like one of the great trout that rose and then splashed back down. She would rinse her hair, scrub under her arms, open her eyes under water, look up at the wavering bright moon, and imagine that she was going to live all her life under the cold river, looking up. The gravel beneath her feet felt good.
