For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  I walked on farther, past the yellow lights of Billy and Amy’s cabin, up the hill. I had assumed Billy was at home, that they were both at home, maybe sitting in bed and playing a hand of cards or two before going to sleep, as Amy had told me they often did—playing cards, that is, if Billy could still remember how.

  So I was surprised to see him come driving slowly over the hill, his truck slipping on the fresh snow a little; and he stopped, recognizing me in the glare of his headlights—recognizing me, I could tell, but not able to remember my name.

  “Hop in, bub,” he said. “I was just out looking at things.”

  I did not believe this was so. I was certain he had forgotten which cabin was his, and I tried to think of a way to tell him when he passed it—wondering if I should say something like, “Is Amy still baking tonight?” and point up the hill toward the yellow squares of light, piecy-looking through the trees.

  It was a full moon, and I was surprised to see that Billy was driving with the heater on, and that his windows were rolled up. It was hot and stuffy in the truck. A shooting star streaked in front of us and then disappeared over the trees, and Billy, who was driving with both hands on the wheel, leaning forward and watching the road carefully, looked up at it but said nothing.

  Deer kept trotting across the road in front of us, red-eyed in the glare of the headlights—some with antlers, some without—and Billy would turn the lights out immediately whenever he saw a herd of them—in November and December, they were beginning to bunch up and travel together, for protection, and for warmth—and I sat in my seat and gripped the high dashboard, certain that we were going to plow right through the herd.

  “What are you doing, Billy?” I said.

  He drove intently, slowly, but not enough for my liking. I kept waiting to hear the thud of bodies, and to feel the jolt—and then when we were past the spot where we should have struck the deer, he would turn the lights back on, and the road in front of us would be empty.

  “Sheriff told me to do that,” Billy would say each time it happened. “The noise of the truck scares ’em off the road. If you leave the lights on, you blind ’em, and they can’t decide which way to go—that’s how you end up hittin’ ’em—but if you turn your lights off, they can think straight and know to get out of the way.”

  I had never heard of such a thing and did not believe that he had either—and it is something that I have never heard of since—but it seemed to give him a distinct pleasure, hunched over the steering wheel and punching the lights off and gliding toward where we had last seen the herd of deer in the middle of the road. He seemed at peace, doing that, and I decided that he was not lost at all, that he just enjoyed getting out and driving at night, and so when we passed the lights of his cabin, I looked up the hill at them but said nothing.

  “Take care, Billy,” I said when he let me out at my place. It was dark, and I felt that he was frightened of something.

  “Take care,” he said back to me. “Do you need a light?” he said, rummaging through the toolbox on the seat beside him. “I’ve got a flashlight, if you need it.”

  It was only about a ten-yard walk to my cabin.

  “No, thanks, I’ll be all right. You take care now, Billy.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Take care,” he said again. “Take good care.”

  He drove in a circle in my yard, found the driveway again, and headed up the road toward his house. I stood there and watched him disappear around the bend.

  I watched then as Billy’s lights came back around the bend—he was driving back to my house in reverse; gears groaning.

  Billy backed up in my driveway but didn’t get out of his big truck, just leaned out the window. He seemed embarrassed. “Can you show me how to get home?”

  He got all the way home in January. He was still trying to cut and load stove wood, as if trying to lay in a hundred years’ supply for all of his and Amy’s fires, on the day that he did not come back—a short winter’s day, as if the apogee of waning light had finally scooped him up, had claimed him.

  Amy and I went into the woods with lanterns. A light snow was falling, flakes hissing when they landed on our lanterns. Billy was lying on his side in the snow (having shut his saw off, but with his helmet still on), looking as if he had stretched out only to take a nap.

  Amy crouched and brushed the snow from his face. There were lengths of firewood scattered all around, wood he had not yet loaded in his truck, but already the snow was covering it.

  We lifted him carefully into my truck. I drove, and Amy rode with his head cradled in her lap. She removed his helmet and covered his bare head with her hands as if to keep it warm, or perhaps summon one last surge of force, or even the memory of force.

  I glanced at the tall trees above us, tried to guess which ones would be the next to fall, and wondered if the forest felt relieved that Billy was gone now—if those trees would be free now to just rot, once they fell.

  We rode past the swans’ pond. It was a cold night and earlier in the day Amy had lit a few fires around the edge. The fires were beautiful in the falling snow, though diminished and not putting out much heat. The swans had moved in as close to the small ragged orange fires as they could get without leaving the pond. Their beauty was of no help to them, it seemed; they were cold.

  They watched us, silent as ever, as we passed, the swans graceful and perfect in the firelight, and I rolled my window down, thinking that as we passed some of them would cry out at Billy’s death. But then I remembered it was only for their own death that they sang, and only that once.

  Elk

  It was Matthew who killed the elk. I was only trying to learn how it was done.

  My first year in the valley, I knew next to nothing, though when only a week of hunting season remained and still I had no meat, I knew enough to ask Matthew for help. People told me he didn’t like new people coming into the valley and that he wouldn’t help me, wouldn’t help anyone—but when I went to his cabin and asked, he said he would, just this one time, and that I would have to watch and learn: he would only hunt an elk for me once.

  We canoed across the Yaak River and went into the wilderness. We found a bull’s tracks, and followed the bull for three days, killing it on the fourth.

  Afterward, Matthew built a fire in the woods next to the elk to warm us as we went to work. There was plenty of dry wood and it was easy to make a roaring fire; its flames grew almost as tall as we were, and lit up the woods. The light danced against the elk’s hide and antlers, making it seem as if he had come back to life. In his final death leap he had gotten tangled in a gridwork of blowdown and now hung there, several feet off the ground. Matthew crawled underneath and began cutting. His knife made a rasping sound against the coarse hair and thick skin and cartilage, and from time to time he had to stop and sharpen the knife with a whetstone.

  “Nothing in the world dulls a steel blade like elk hair,” he said. He was doing a neat job. “I’d like a stone knife someday, obsidian,” he said. I added wood to the fire. I would not have believed you could skin such an animal. It was surely enough meat for the coming year.

  By morning we had the elk skinned and the antlers sawed off. Matthew had brought a small folding saw—its blade was now ruined—and he tossed it into the fire. The bull’s immense hindquarters—heavier than a man’s body—were hanging from trees, as were the shoulders.

  We filled our packs with the loose meat: all the neck roasts, tenderloins, neck loins, and lengths of backstrap like deep red anacondas. In lifting the hindquarters and shoulders, we became covered with blood. I was glad the bears were already in hibernation.

  The fire had sprawled and wandered through the night. Ashes and charred half-lengths of timber lay in a circle thirty feet across.

  We roasted some of the ribs over the coals and chewed on them for a long time. We ate a whole side of the trimmings from the elk skeleton—the bones were stripped clean and g
leaming when we were done—and then broke the other side in half with the hatchet. We tied the rib cages to our packs like a frame; they would help hold in place the shifting weight of the meat, which was still warm against our backs. I gathered a few stones as we were about to leave and, not knowing why, stacked them where the elk had fallen, now a pile of hooves, shins, and hair.

  Matthew carried the antlers—settled them over his shoulders upside down—and with their long tips and tines furrowing the snow behind him, he looked as if he were in a yoke, plowing the snow. I carried the wet hide atop my pack of meat, increasing the weight of my pack to well over a hundred pounds. Matthew said it was important to carry out the extraneous stuff first—the antlers, the hide—before our resolve weakened and we were tempted to leave them behind for the wolves.

  It began to snow again. I wondered where the other elk were, if they knew that our hunt for them was over.

  We stayed on the ridges. Under such a load, our steps were small and slow. We packed for a mile, dropped our weight, then went back to where we’d left all the other meat, and carried it to the point we’d gotten to before—each of us carrying a hindquarter on his back, or dragging it behind like a sled.

  And so we moved across the valley, as if in some eternal meat relay—continuously undoing the progress we’d made, working hours to move the whole mass only one mile, at which point we then started all over again. The short winter days passed quickly, and we slept soundly through the nights.

  The snow kept coming. We dropped off one ridge down into a creek and ascended another, and Matthew said he knew where we were. After the second or third day, the ravens appeared. They landed in front of us and strutted with outstretched wings, drawing little tracings in the snow, barking and cawing in voices alternately shrill and hoarse, as if hurling different languages at us. Sometimes they landed behind us, darted in and pecked at whatever section of the elk we were dragging, but usually they picked at the meat fragments in the snow.

  On the third day there was a moment of startling beauty. We were walking in a fog so thick that we could see no more than a few feet in front of us. We knew to stay on the ridge. Four ravens were following us, walking behind us in their penguin strut. And then to our left, to the west, a slot appeared in the fog, a slot of pale blue sky, and through the slot there was a shaft of gold light illuminating the forest below us. The shaft was the only thing we could see in the storm. The wind was blowing north, the direction we were going, and for a while the shaft traveled with us. As it did, it kept revealing more of the same uncut, untouched forest. The impression it made was that the uncut forest would never end. In less than a minute, the shaft had moved on—the wind was about thirty miles an hour—but the sight has stayed with me, and neither Matthew nor I said anything about it to each other, though we did stop and watch it, as if unsure of what it was we were seeing.

  We ate more elk as we traveled, a lot of elk, but after four days I wanted bread or potatoes. I was tired of all meat. I wanted an apple pie, dense with sugar, and a hot bath.

  The antlers had sunk lower on Matthew’s shoulders, and the plow they made cut deeper in the snow. Sometimes their heavy tips struck a rock beneath the snow and made a clinking sound. The weight of the antlers was starting to wear Matthew’s skin raw, even though he had cut a strip of hide to use as a cushion. A red “Y” now ran down his back, merging just below his shoulders. The furrows in the snow behind him, wide as the antlers, looked like the boundaries of a small road, a lane, and within them we sometimes noticed the tracks of the creatures that were following us: the ravens, coyotes, and wolves.

  We were descending, and were beginning to see the tracks of other animals again—deer, moose, and elk, though the elk tracks were those of cows and calves, not bulls.

  We were down out of the high country now and into the dense forest. It was growing warmer at the lower elevation, so that rather than snow falling, there was a sleety drizzle that was more chilling than any storm or blizzard. We came across a dropped moose antler, resting upright on the snow—we could read his tracks leading to it, and leading away from it—and the antler, upturned, was full of water and slush from the sleet. We knelt and took turns drinking from it, without disturbing it. We were almost home. One more night, and the next day. A year’s worth of meat, put away safely.

  The “Y” on Matthew’s back widened, but he was moving stronger again. I was shivering hard by now. I was drenched. For a long time the effort of hauling and skidding the meat had been enough to keep me warm, but that effort was no longer enough. I was cold and I needed help from the outside. My body could no longer hold off the whole mass of winter. I was without reserves.

  “Do you want to stop and light a fire?” Matthew asked, watching my slowing movements, my clumsiness, my giving-upness. I nodded, still lucid enough to know that hypothermia had arrived. Matthew seemed to be a great distance away, and I felt that he was studying me, evaluating me. We were no longer partners in the hunt, brothers in the hunt—brothers in anything—and as my mind began to close down, chamber by chamber, I had the feeling that Matthew was going to let me freeze: that he had run me into the ground, had let me haul out half the elk, and now, only a day’s journey from town, he was going to let winter have me. He would carry the rest of the meat out himself, leaving me to disappear beneath the snow.

  He stood there waiting. I knelt and slipped out of my pack. I lost my balance and tipped over in the snow. Not thinking clearly—not thinking at all—I searched through my pack for matches, shivering. I found them, held the small box tightly in my gloved hands, then remembered that I needed wood.

  Matthew continued watching me. He had not taken his pack off—as if he had no intention of stopping here anyway—and the antlers had been with him so long that they seemed to be growing out of him. I moved off into the trees and down a slope and began snapping twigs and gathering branches, dropping much of what I picked up. Matthew stayed up on the hill above, watching. The rain and sleet kept coming down. He was drenched, too—there was ice on his antlers—but he seemed to have a fire and a hardness in him I knew I didn’t have.

  I heaped the branches, some green and some dry, into a small pile, and began striking matches. The sodden pile of wood would not light. I tried until I was out of matches, then rose and went back to my pack to look for more. I was moving slowly and wanted to lie down. I had to keep going, but knew I wasn’t going to find any more matches.

  “This way,” Matthew said, taking a cigarette lighter out of his pack. “Look at me,” he said. “Watch.” He walked down to the nearest dead tree, an old wind-blasted fir, shrouded dense with black hanging lichen. “This is what you do,” he said. His words came in breaths of steam rising into the rain. He stood under the canopy of the tree’s branches and moss cloak and snapped the lighter a couple of times, holding it right up against the lichen tendrils.

  On the third snap the lichen caught, burned blue for a moment, then leapt into quick orange flame.

  It was like something chemical—the whole tree, or the shell of lichen around it, metamorphosed into bright crackling fire, the lichen burning explosively, and the sudden shock of heat, the updraft, in turn lighting the lichen above, accelerating the rush of flame as if climbing a ladder. It was a forty foot tall tree, and it was on fire from top to bottom in about five seconds.

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

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

  I walked over to the burning tree. There was a lot of heat, and the snow in all directions glistened. Flaming wisps of lichen separated from the tree and floated upward in curls before cooling and descending. By the time they landed on me, they were almost burnt out—charcoal skeletons of the lichen. A few of the tree’s branches burned and crackled, but that was pretty much
it; soon the fire was gone.

  I wouldn’t say I was warm, but I had stopped shivering.

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

  And that was how we came out of the mountains, in that last night and the next day, moving from tree to tree—looking for the right one, properly dead—through the drizzle, from one tower of flame to the next, Matthew probing the trees with his cigarette lighter, testing them, always choosing the right ones. That was how we walked through that night—the trees sizzling and steaming after we were done with them—and on into the gray rainy day. We were back into country I knew well, even underneath all the snow. We were seeing the tracks of wolves, and finding some of their kills. I had stopped shivering, though we continued lighting tree torches—leaving a crooked, wandering path of them behind us.

  I suspect that in twenty years I will still be able to trace our journey backward, back up the mountain from torched tree to torched tree. Some will be fallen and rotting black husks, others might still be standing. In twenty years, I’ll be able to return to where it all started—that point where we first saw the elk, and then lost him, and then found him again, and killed him. From among the stones and ferns and forest, there will be a piece of charcoal, a fire-blackened rock, an antler in a tree, a rusting saw blade, even a scabbed-over set of initials where Matthew marked his kill, although as the years go on, those initials will be harder to find, until finally you will have to know exactly where they are, or have someone who has been there before to show you.

  The rut was on as we approached town the next day—the giant bucks chasing the does—and though we were exhausted, we could see that we had to shoot a deer.