Blue Mountain

by Martine Leavitt

  One morning a ram stepped princely into the meadow, sporting a great crown of horn. He stood still, wary and proud, his nostrils quivering. All the herd lifted their heads to acknowledge him.

  Kenir approached the lambs and said, “He is here for the rut, the mating time. His name is Churo, and once he was my lamb.”

  The ram bent his head to graze. The great muscles in his shoulders moved like a river of water under his sleek coat.

  A short time later two more rams emerged from the border of trees onto the ridge, and over time four more, each with three-quarter-curl horns. The rams drew together, when they were not grazing, and wrestled with one another.

  “For now it is spirited and playful jostling,” Kenir explained to the band. “But the rams are also testing one another’s strength. In play they are establishing rank.”

  “You mean soon they will fight?” Tuk said.

  “They will battle, yes,” Kenir said. “Not to kill or to maim—only to establish which of them will father most of the lambs. When the rut is over, the rams will resume their friendship and travel together again in small bands.”

  Tuk and Rim and Ovis shoved and jostled one another playfully as the rams did.

  At last came not a prince but a king of rams. He was alpha and old, with full-curl horns. The moment he stepped into the meadow, the other rams stepped away.

  “He is Dos,” Kenir said. “The king.” Behind him came another ram, almost as large as Dos, and just as beautiful. “That is his friend, Tragus.”

  The rams became more active and aggressive as the moon fattened. Each morning they huddled. The smaller rams nibbled at the horns of the larger ones, rubbed their faces, and were permitted liberties. Sometimes, for no reason, a ram would suddenly whirl about and bound downhill. Another would follow, and a mock battle would ensue.

  The battle began in earnest, however, when Dos walked regally down into the meadow to claim Sham as his ewe. Tragus challenged him.

  “You are old, Dos, my friend,” Tragus said. “A year older than I.” He spoke as if it were a game or a sport. “Surely you are too tired to fight for ewes anymore.”

  “Let’s see!” Dos said, and he lowered his horns.

  Tragus rose up in a threat stance and charged.

  Clash!

  The sound of horn on horn rang across the meadow and echoed off the cliff face. Tuk thought it was the most magnificent sound he had ever heard—greater than the sound of a tree falling, or a waterfall, or thunder.

  Threat stance, clash!

  Threat stance, clash!

  Tragus reeled away.

  “Next year, Tragus,” Dos said, panting.

  But after a short rest, Tragus rose up on his hind legs and again charged.

  Clash!

  Clash!

  Clash!

  The sounds burst against Tuk’s ears like great boulders falling from the heights to the rocks below.

  For hours Dos and Tragus fought. All day and half into the evening Tuk watched.

  At last, when the whole sky was filled with fierce color and the meadow glowed gold, Tragus turned away and Dos claimed Sham as his ewe.

  “Someday we will be rams and fight,” Tuk said to Rim and Ovis, and they looked at one another with pride.

  “Yes,” said Balus behind them. “And I will beat you.”

  THE PUMA CHILD

  That evening, just as the herd was bedding down, came the cry: “Puma!”

  “Climb! Climb the cliffs!” called the rams.

  As though he had heard it many times before, Tuk knew the sound of the puma’s soft step into the meadow.

  “Climb!” called the ewes and the yearlings.

  “Climb! Climb!”

  Alongside Rim, Tuk ran to the cliff, but he slowed when he heard Mouf’s cry behind him. He would not allow the puma to have his bandmate Mouf as he had allowed the eagle to have Sto.

  “Go ahead of me, Mouf,” Tuk said. “Climb fast!”

  She leaped ahead onto a ledge of the cliff face.

  “Keep climbing!” he called. “I’m right here.”

  Tuk heard a snarl and turned to see the puma and her child not far behind him. The kitten had faint spots and was not much bigger than himself, but the puma, softly golden as sunbaked grass, looked as heavy as a ram.

  He could climb no higher because Mouf had stopped and was blocking his way.

  “Climb higher, Mouf! Their footing isn’t as good as ours. As we go higher, the ledges get narrower and they will stop following us.”

  Behind him, Tuk heard the puma say to her child, “Hunt.”

  The puma child sprang up onto the outcropping below Tuk.

  “The mountain is mine, too,” he said, baring his teeth.

  “Jump higher,” Tuk said to Mouf. She jumped up and Tuk took her place on the cliff face.

  The puma child followed, leaping to the ledge Tuk had just left. He swatted at Tuk’s hind leg.

  “Again, Mouf,” Tuk said.

  She leaped again to a ledge a little higher. Tuk stayed between her and the young cat. Still the puma child followed, leap for leap. The cliff face became steeper. The rock wall was in Tuk’s left eye, and the black sky and the moon in his right eye.

  Tuk wished he had been born with teeth for breaking bones. He wished his small budding horns were bigger. But all he had was his agility on the mountain. Above, he could see the herd reaching the top of the cliff one by one, gathering together on the ridge. Again the young cat swiped at him and snarled.

  “Mouf,” Tuk said, “if you don’t move, I am puma food.”

  She looked back for the first time and saw the puma child close. Her eyes rolled in fear and she leaped—to a wider, lower ledge.

  “Not lower!” Tuk said. “Higher!” He could see the young cat studying his advantage. He was no longer looking at Tuk at all—his eyes were wide as a mouth.

  Tuk leaped to a higher ledge. “Mouf, you must get higher than the puma child.”

  “I’m almost as high as the moon, Tuk,” she said.

  The puma child crouched to pounce on her.

  “Mouf, do what I say.” Tuk saw the muscles ripple under the young cat’s fur. He lowered his voice. “I will jump down to your spot, and you jump up to mine—at the same time. Switch!”

  He jumped down. Mouf jumped up—just as the puma child leaped to where she had been.

  Tuk and the puma child were together on the ledge. Tuk scooted backward, away from the cat’s sharp teeth, as far as he could go. His hind feet were on the vanishing edge of the shelf. The puma was a good climber, but not as good as a bighorn, and he did not have firm footing. He batted a thick paw at Tuk’s face.

  “Kill,” hissed the puma mother below.

  “I will fight you,” Tuk said.

  “Bighorn don’t fight.” Again the puma child swatted at Tuk with his heavy paw.

  Tuk thought of the eagle. “I fight,” he said.

  He butted the puma child with his lamb horns. He butted as if the puma child were the eagle, as if he were Balus saying I will beat you, as if he were man and wolf and winter. He butted the puma child hard.

  The puma child scrabbled at the rock with his claws, scrabbled for foothold on the ledge, and fell.

  He fell

  and fell

  into the deep well of the dark

  and landed with a thud onto the black below.

  Tuk’s left side was pressed against the stone wall. The rest of him was in air, trembling. Slowly he moved his back feet onto the thickest part of the ledge. He saw the mother puma below, sniffing at her dead child. She looked up at Tuk, her green eyes turned white, reflecting the moon.

  “You killed my kitten,” she said. Her voice was measured and purrful. “I will specialize. I will raise my next kitten on this herd, and the next kitten, and the next. I will hunt your herd, and especially you … Tuk.” She opened her mouth wide to show all her teeth and slunk away into the dark.

  “The puma knows your name,” Mouf said quie
tly.

  Bighorn never felt dizzy, but Tuk was dizzy now, looking down at the puma child broken on the rocks below. He could not be sorry that it was the puma child and not him, that it was the puma child dead in the dark and not Mouf. But he remembered what Balus had said, that maybe he was not a bighorn, that maybe he was some other kind of creature.

  More slowly now, and with much urging and assuring, he helped Mouf reach the top of the cliff. Once they were onto the ridge, Mouf and Dall and Tuk’s other bandmates pressed him and licked his face, nudging closely.

  “Is Tuk saving us now?” asked a ewe.

  “Only Mouf, and she is so small she hardly counts,” said another.

  “He pushed the puma child,” Balus said. “I saw.”

  The herd looked at Tuk in silence, waiting for him to deny it, but Tuk said nothing. One ewe sniffed him. “He smells like a bighorn,” she said.

  Gradually the herd made their way slowly back to the meadow.

  “Come, Tuk,” Mouf said. But he did not come.

  “Come, Tuk,” Rim said.

  But he would not come, even when Dall led his bandmates back to the safety of the herd.

  Tuk stayed alone at the top of the cliff in the dark, and the puma child stayed still at the bottom of the cliff, and if the white light of the moon touched them both, neither of them knew it.

  NOT TODAY

  In the morning Tuk awoke on the ridge. He opened his eyes only a little, without moving, and then closed them again quickly.

  Dos, the king ram, and Kenir were standing beside him.

  “Kenir, I have traveled to the south of this mountain, but there the mountains are all trees and no meadow. I have traveled to the east, but there the mountains are all rock and no meadow. This past summer I traveled to the north, but there the mountains gradually flatten into territory that is good for elk and deer, but not for bighorn. All that is left is the west, and that way is closed in with thickly treed mountains.”

  “This one says he has seen a mountain to the west,” Kenir said. “He calls it blue mountain.” Tuk felt they were both looking at him now.

  “Story mountain?” Dos said. “All my life they said it was like the fog we wade in at daybreak, like the clouds that vanish with the sun. It was not made of stone and earth like this mountain, they said. It was a dream, a wish, or a tale you tell in a storm to keep you warm.”

  Tuk could not pretend to be sleeping any longer. He stood up, and said, “I have seen it!”

  Dos fixed his golden eye on Tuk.

  “Tuk,” Kenir said. Tuk remembered his manners and performed a low-stretch bow to Dos.

  “You’re big,” Tuk said to Dos.

  “Big enough to eat a lamb in a bite or two,” Dos said.

  “I’m big for a lamb,” Tuk said.

  “Three bites, then,” Dos answered.

  “Our kind doesn’t eat flesh,” Tuk said.

  “So that’s what was causing my indigestion.”

  “I have seen blue mountain, sir. Can you lead us there?”

  “It is the matriarch who leads the herd, west or otherwise,” Dos said.

  “But it is for rams to explore,” Kenir replied.

  After a pause, Dos said respectfully to Kenir, “I would speak with this Tuk alone.”

  Kenir nodded and walked away.

  When they were alone Dos asked kindly, “Is it true you pushed the puma child?”

  Tuk was high enough to see the whole herd below, his bandmates and Balus and the yearlings looking up in wonder to see him talking to Dos. Tuk was high enough to see the barren ewes that had been like mothers to him, and the proud rams. He was high enough to see how the bighorn lived gently on the mountain, graceful on the steeps, strong on the tough alpine grasses, and how they found safety in fellowship.

  He looked down at the puma child far below on the rocks. “Yes,” he said. “I fought.”

  Tuk wondered if Dos had heard him, because for a time he did not speak.

  “Someday, Tuk,” he said at last, “you will have big horns. With them you could fight a lone wolf, but wolves are seldom alone. My horns cannot protect me from a hunting pack. Even if they could, I cannot protect every weak or sick or aged bighorn in the herd, or every lamb. My horns do not protect me from man, from their hunger for our territory or from their guns. But the mountain gave us gifts—feet to climb the steeps and teeth to find forage on the heights, and strong bodies and thick coats so we need not fear the cold, and noses that can read the wind, and, most of all, our stories that we pass down through the generations so no trail is lost, no lesson unlearned. As a herd, we are strong.”

  Tuk lowered his eyes. “When I did not save Sto from the eagle, I wished to save Mouf from the puma.”

  “Ah. Yes, I heard of the eagle. I was very sorry.”

  “Maybe I am not the usual kind of bighorn.”

  Dos looked down to the rocks below. “You stayed here all night to be alone, to be ashamed. Are you done being alone and ashamed?”

  Tuk could not answer that question, so instead he said, “Let’s tell Kenir that we should go to blue mountain today!”

  Dos stared west, and then he laughed and shook his head. “Not today, Tuk. Today the sun shines. Today the ewes want courting, and I am the king. But perhaps tomorrow—”

  Bang!

  The air cracked with a noise like rock on rock.

  Dos leaped one way. Tuk leaped another, the taste of metal in his mouth.

  Bang!

  Below, the rams and the whole herd scattered and ran.

  The ringing sound of gunshot filled Tuk’s mouth and echoed off the cliffs. He sought the safety of the cliff and stayed there a long time, perched above the body of the puma child.

  EARLY SNOW

  Men came to the meadow, but Dos and the other rams had run to where they could not find them. The men tromped about and called, but eventually they left and Tuk lost the sight and the scent of them.

  The sunlight was slantwise when Tuk and his mates returned to the meadow. Kenir and Pamir and a few old ewes had already wandered back and were grazing as if everything were usual. The wind had picked up by the time the rams also began to creep back from where they had fled.

  At twilight Dos limped into the meadow. His right foreleg was black with blood. Kenir hung her head and stopped grazing. The great ram stood tall on three feet and held the other off the ground, quivering. After a time he lay painfully down, and Tuk went to stand beside him. Dos seemed not to see that Tuk was near, and Tuk remained silent and still.

  A short time later the wind began to blow hard and cold. The herd and Tuk’s bandmates walked around Dos and away, heading toward a bit of shelter amid the rocks. Tragus came last and stood silently beside Dos for a long time without speaking. Finally he gave Dos a low-stretch bow and walked slowly away.

  Soon snow was falling fiercely, blowing over Dos and through Tuk’s legs, and Tuk saw that Dos would not be able to stand up and paw away the snow to get his food. He would starve.

  As the snow began to accumulate, Kenir called for Tuk to come. When he did not, she came and bowed before Dos. “Tell Tuk to go to shelter,” she said.

  Dos looked at Tuk as if he had not known he was there all along. “Go, Tuk, before you are trapped by drifting snow,” he said. His voice had lost its power.

  “If you go, I will go,” Tuk said.

  Kenir stamped her foot. “Dos is waiting for Lord Denu.” When Tuk said nothing she nodded to something behind him. “Come for his sake, then.” Tuk turned and saw Rim waiting a few steps behind him. “He won’t come until you do.”

  “Go, Tuk,” Dos said, and this time his voice was commanding. “It is not the way of our kind to disrespect the elder.”

  “Come with me,” Tuk said.

  Dos looked away, in the direction of blue mountain.

  “I am for the puma,” he said softly. “After she finds me, she won’t be hungry again for a long time. You must find a way west from the winter valley to blue mou
ntain before she hunts again.” The old king held his horns high to the wind. “Son, it is the only way to save the herd.”

  Tuk thought about that word son for a time. It could be true that the son of a king could do such a thing, could find a way to blue mountain.

  The wind blew snow into Dos’s face and eyes, but he lay still as stone, still as the mountain, and as silent. The high grasses around him bent and bowed before the wind, and then lay quietly under the snow.

  Tuk knew Dos would not speak to him anymore. “I’m ready, Rim,” he said softly to his friend. Together they trudged through the snow toward the shelter.

  * * *

  At the shelter, a place where two rock walls formed a wedge, the bandmates pressed close to one another. Still they suffered from the cold.

  In the dark, Tuk thought he saw, in his half dreaming, the puma child’s eyes, hungry and afraid, just before he fell. In the place where Tuk’s horns had begun to grow, where they itched and were tender, he felt the warmth and softness of the young cat’s fur when he pushed. In one horn he was glad, but in the other he was sad. Half of him belonged in the herd, among the peaceable, and half of him was a strange creature who did not belong. He wondered what a man would feel like against his horns.

  At some point in the night, the snow stopped. Tuk awoke, listening. He looked into the dark for Dos, but the old ram had not come. Again he dozed, but even in his sleep he was aware of the cold. He woke early when the wind began to blow again, but now it was a warm wind, and the snow was melting.

  “A Chinook,” Kenir said. “The mountain sends the warm wind in tribute to a king.”

  When light came, the herd slowly walked to where they had left Dos. Puma tracks surrounded the body of the old king, and the herd wandered away—all in silence.

  The rest of the day the lambs were solemn with their first snow. They did not speak of Dos. They knew something of the mountain they hadn’t known before, and something of themselves.