A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  The fire-guts were stalled, at some point, never reaching the surface, where they finally gave up the hunt and cooled, very slowly; and as the magma cooled, the elemental minerals within began to settle, establishing certain and careful geometric arrangements that they had heretofore been unable to assume, dominated as they were earlier by the relentless force of the magma’s search for the surface.

  The magma, trapped beneath some ancient lid, cooled very slowly. The minerals—plagioclase, feldspar, zinc, silica—had all the time in the world. They floated, drifted, and spun around one another, according to ionic differentials, attractions and repulsions, as if in a waltz to some distant tinkling subterranean (or perhaps celestial) melody.

  They stacked and ordered themselves into crystalline palaces that would have glittered beyond the imagination, had any light been present to reflect upon them.

  There was, of course, none: only intense, total darkness, and a heat, a fire, cooling through the centuries.

  Up above—and how far above? Five hundred feet? A thousand? Five thousand? We have no way of knowing, will never know, it has all been swept away and redistributed to the sea and the wind—the world continued gnawing, in its achingly slow and steady fashion, at the breastplate of stone, the lid, covering these gigantic palace domes that were being built below. Rain, frost, fire, wind, time. Rain, frost, fire, wind, time.

  And slowly, so slowly—like the head of some colossus, some gargantuan thing emerging from beneath the waves—the tops of the buried palace domes crested, breached, the rubble overlying them in that manner.

  That which they had not been able to reach all the way on their own—the surface—was brought down eventually some distance to accommodate them. As if the earth truly desired that beauty to be exposed. It would have taken millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions, for the steady forces of the world, working without thumbs and fingers—no pry bars or other tools—to carve away that dense overburden.

  And now, only now, the pink glittering world of granite, friable and delicate, exposed fully, resting frozen on the shoal of the old bank, the fissure-line along which it once surged.

  The granite—rearranged now as it is mostly into wads and chunks of crystal—isn’t long for the world. It’s as if that’s always been one of the laws of the world: a thing can invest itself in style or substance, but that to do so overmuch in one area often comes at the expense of the other.

  So it is with the beautiful crystalline pink domes and pyramids and svelte hourglasses of granite that crowd the east side as if set there like giant play-toys or modern art. Without the stony overburden to protect them, and consisting of more crystal than matrix, the giant shapes are crumbling. The pink clay-rich minerals that held them together—plagioclase and orthoclase feldspars, mostly—are dissolving like sugar beneath the force of the real world; no longer supple with the life of their underground fire, they crumble and are carried in streams and runnels across the hills, as are the fantastic crystals the matrix once supported.

  The boulders will still be here, strange and round and weather-sculpted into the shapes of the heads of elephants and men, long after we are gone. But they are diminishing so fast that each year it’s possible to find a new trail of crystals leading away from one of the monoliths. It’s possible to watch smaller chunks—those the size of a fist, or even a human head, perched out in the open, unprotected—vanish completely over the course of only two or three decades, leaving behind only a loose pile of pink and black and gold crystals, and then, following another decade of wind and rain, nothing.

  The creeks glitter with the talus of these abrupt leavings. Sometimes when a crawfish scuttles across the pink graveled bottom of a clearwater creek, or a frog plunges deep to escape your approach, their impetus stirs the finer, flatter flakes of pyrite, so that left in these small creatures’ wake is a vaporous, sifting trail of fine-ground gold, shining and glittering in aqueous columns of green sunlight, like wisps of smoke.

  There are leavings of another kind, too, scattered across the hills and mountains here. Along the western fenceline, on the backside, back in the rugged red ridges of sandstone country, in one certain gully, lie the scattered fossilized leavings of what seems to me to surely be fossilized deer antlers. They are the precise shape and symmetry of the antlers of today’s deer, though slightly smaller.

  This might indicate a smaller-bodied animal, which might suggest a larger population, and/or a warmer climate, since a smaller mammal is more effective at shedding body heat, per unit of surface area, than is a larger one. Rest assured, though, that if the climate here was once warmer, it would also have been at another time cooler. Charles Darwin could just as easily have been speaking of climates and vegetative patterns when he wrote, “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of the earth.”

  These stone antlers rest now atop the bone-white sheets and folds of caliche, a clayey mixture of weathering limestone that is itself the remnant, the skeleton, of where a shallow sea once lay—the same sea that has retreated now two hundred miles southward, but that will, when the world warms further, come rising, creeping, swelling back in, like tongues of flames, lapping and flickering.

  Other leavings, in some ways less ancient, yet in others, more: the chips and flakes of Paleolithic men and women, fractures of arrowheads, stone knives, spear points.

  The best time to find the flint and chert arrowheads is following a heavy rain, when the running water will have sifted away some of the chat to reveal new arrowheads buried years earlier. How strange it is to think of the arrowheads, stone echoes from the work of men’s hands, rising and falling in this manner like the notes of music, or, more crudely, like the lift-and-fall synchrony of piston-and-valve—restless burial, emergence; burial, emergence.

  My mother, who did not hunt deer but who nonetheless enjoyed this land, used to be far and away the best at finding the arrowheads. I’ve found a few, but nothing like her finds. She rarely went out for a walk without coming back with one. It wasn’t so much that I was watching the forest for deer or the sky for birds and the direction of the wind, while she kept her eyes on the ground, for I studied the ground too, searching for the tracks and leavings of things. It was more that she knew what she was looking for, to the exclusion of all else. Again, it is one of our oldest lessons, that you can look right at a thing without seeing it.

  The way things repeat themselves, across time—not just in the replications and recombinations of family and place (“He favors his momma, she favors her daddy”), but in the accretion of like patterns—as if somewhere far below (or high above), there is one and only one rule—though heaven knows what that rule might be.

  A geologist sees it in the shapes and folds of the land; dust blown or washed away tends to be laid upon other parts of the land somewhat as a blanket is laid over the body of a person in a bed, retaining and perpetuating the sleeping shape below. But you can see it in other forms, too, on any walk in the woods. Searching for arrowheads in the fresh-washed streamside chat on the morning after a night thunderstorm, you’ll bend down to pick up what you’re certain is an arrowhead—a dark one, perfectly shaped, with concoidal flutings and rib-ridges reflecting the morning sunlight with a wet glint—only to realize, at the last moment—the moment of touch—that it is a small dried brown oak leaf.

  What joke, or grace or beauty, of the world called for the weapon that hunted the birds—the little stone arrowheads that were called “bird points”—to be shaped exactly like the foliage in which the birds hid? As if always, in the shape of our protection and nourishment lies also the shape of our undoing. Hints that the world is either far more vast, or infinitely smaller, than we have previously considered.

  I remember one morning at deer camp when my grandfather took me up into the round granite boulders above the old camp to show me what he said was a cache of “Indian jewelry.” Central to that astounding, massiv
e stonework, so suggestive of a civilization that had lived before ours (and, truth be told, suggestive too, by both the scale and beauty of the stone shapes, of a civilization somehow more grand and noble), is a broad vein of quartz pegmatite—a mysterious zone within the granite where pure silica—sand—settled in the cooling, once-fiery suspicion and then grew, as if in some garden, quartz crystals of the most amazing size and delicate complexion.

  That line of white quartz hardened, then, like some salty artery, and the granite covering that encased it began to disintegrate. And in its decomposition, the granite released those quartz boulders, cobbles, and nuggets, which did not disintegrate, but instead lay stranded more or less where they fell, stranded now by the ghosts of the gone-away granite that once housed them.

  There is one place on the pasture, above all others, that is flooded with these specimens; the forest floor is coated with nothing but beautiful shards of brilliant quartz, whiter than snow.

  My grandfather was born in 1903, not yet a full generation removed from the time when the last of the Comanches and other tribes had been killed from the state. As a young man I remember being amused by the way, or so it seemed to me, he was suggesting that the Indians, bless their savage hearts, didn’t know any better: that, lacking the superlative accouterments of our present culture, the quartz was all they’d had to make do with. As if these exquisite shards of quartz were less amazing than “true” diamonds, jade, and opal. Like children who didn’t know any better, assigning outlandish value to things clearly of no value.

  (I was a young man, in my early twenties, when he took me up there to show me the place of the Indian jewelry—which I had seen in my wanderings before, but had never considered to be the leavings of humans, but rather, the traces of some faraway geologic event: cold, beautiful, but impersonal. What interested me as much about my grandfather’s revelation was not so much the subtle satire he seemed to be aiming at the Indians, for believing quartz was a kind of jewelry, but rather the way he explained and showed the place to me—The Secret Treasure House of Indian Jewelry. I think in his mind then I was still a teenager, or even younger, and that I would have a child’s interest in such stories; that I was frozen in his mind from some earlier time—the age of ten or twelve, perhaps—as he is now frozen in time in my mind.)

  At the time, I disbelieved him, though I did not argue; what harm was there in an old man’s vision of naked red men gathering and exclaiming over crude crystals, which would never be seen by a jeweler’s appraising eye?

  Only recently have I begun to believe my grandfather’s story and have likewise pictured the residents of a place picking up any quartz crystal they found in the area and bringing it—for whatever reasons: homage, respect, tithing—to this one central place, beneath and within the overarching granite monoliths, not far from the creek’s edge, where surely they would have camped, as we do now.

  Why else would all the quartz pieces be gathered in one place? Surely so rich a pegmatite would not have been confined to one spot, not much larger than a backyard garden. I believe they were worshipped, or at least celebrated (as my mother and I celebrated the arrowheads we’d find, or crystals, or stones, by placing them on the table or windowsill of camp).

  Certainly, whatever positions in which they were arranged back then, if any, have been restructured by time’s passage—by the effluvia of a thousand, or ten thousand, rainstorms, with quick bursts of runoff tumbling the smaller quartz pieces like rolled dice down the slopes of the granite mountain, so that in their altered and changing arrangements it is as if you are viewing the cursive script of some sentence still being written.

  (In the milder oak flatland just above the creek, and above the civilization of granite, the animals often spend their winters—deer, wild pigs, bobcats, coyotes—and it is there on the shelf-land above that you will often find the loosened bones from the skeletons of the animals that did not survive the winter, with the sun-brightened curls of ribs and the spurs of vertebrae and the bowls of skulls disintegrating their brief hold on order, form, and integrity, and sliding downward, white as quartz, in sentences very similar to those of the stones’ marking . . .)

  A thing I’ve noticed we’ll often do, as my cousins and father and uncle and I wander these thousand acres, is to pick up certain fragments of arrowhead or crystal or bone or antler pleasing to the eye, when we happen across them randomly in the field, and place them, as if on display—or again, as if in celebration, and admiration—atop some larger, more permanent stone.

  Down along the creek, particularly in the area of the Indian jewelry, where it is damp and shady, rich velvet green moss grows on some of these rough boulders, though it can find no purchase on the slab-smooth crystal faces of the quartz. In particularly wet years, the moss flourishes verdant, and the luxuriant growth of it—an inch or two thick, and again, soft as velvet forest green-colored—lifts the single gleaming, tiny crystal, rain-washed and brilliant, placed there aloft on that bed of moss, atop that great table of a stone, so that it looks for all the world like the one specimen, the one gemstone, most desired of any jewelry, and on a display made more beautiful by the exclusion of any others.

  Almost anywhere on the deer pasture, one can come across seemingly improbable structures, so curious in their isolation out here in the backcountry. Lattices of dry cedar, cairns, stone walls . . . . Some I know were built by my ancestors (including the strangely Gothic pig traps, wire corrals that were built far back in the woods in an attempt to lure in and then capture the sometimes savage giant wild hogs that would occasionally terrorize the hunters at night; the corrals, the traps, are now enmeshed with vine and brush, and forty- and fifty-year-old trees are growing within the cages now, as if captured).

  Other structures I do not know. The mysterious, wandering stone wall at the south end of the property is perhaps the most baffling. The stones that have been stacked there hint vaguely of the ceremonial, of the amphitheater—they face the magnificent hill of gleaming round granite boulders—but beyond what our impulses tell us, we have no clue; no record exists.

  The work is somehow reminiscent of Europe, of white men’s work. I don’t mean this in a negative way, unless it is negative to whites—the near-lunatic mindlessness of stacking rocks—only that it seems, well, extravagant. By all accounts, there was not an overabundance of leisure time for the native peoples living here before us, and I’ve never heard of any stone wall builders in this region: only hunters, moving around here and there, following game.

  My father is of the opinion that it was a corral for the Comanches’ horses, but I’m not so sure: the wall is only knee-high. Even if it had once been chest-high, but the upper half had fallen over, you’d still see the scattered flat rocks at the fence’s base, especially after only such a short time ago—a hundred and fifty years.

  I don’t think the wall was ever much higher than it is now.

  We’ve never been able to find any artifacts: no rusting cans or nails, detritus of the white man era, nor any artifacts of stone, from the time before.

  But the rocks are definitely human-stacked, and the effort involved implies a large number of people, as does the area bounded by the knee-wall: about five acres.

  It’s possible to imagine a long-ago time of druids, a forgotten or never-known time to us—a mysterious time, washed away and vanished, never-seen. The size of the stones in the wall are larger than those of any other rock wall I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t guess that a dozen strong men could have even budged any one of those huge square stones, much less hauled them whatever distance and fitted them into place.

  And yet, they are fitted; they are erratic enough, stacked and platy enough in places, to erase any ideas that perhaps the earth just weathered in this location to erode and reveal the shape of a rock wall. It was definitely put here by someone before us, and my hunch, my gut, tells me that it was someone long before us, far before even the idea of us.

  This year my youngest cousin Russell shot a small bu
ck on the back side of Buck Hill an hour or so after sunrise; he had been walking, then sat down for a while, and the buck came walking past, feeding. Any hunter knows that there are cycles in the woods that tell you, and the other animals, when to get up and walk, and when to lie down and be quiet for a while—you can feel these waves or cycles moving in gentle pulses—and often I like to just sit there and be made slowly aware of them, in a way that I usually have not felt since the last hunting season.

  The transition is often preceded by a long stillness. Something will shift, then—something silent and invisible, but as real as the mechanics of a cog—and you’ll feel something, the world, lift; you won’t be imagining it because a moment later, birds will begin singing and fluttering, and you’ll suddenly feel an increased focus, and a slowing of your heart, a pounding. Your hearing will become sharper—the animals are moving—and sometimes, a few moments later, a deer will step into view, and perhaps it will be your deer, the one you intend to take that year.

  I heard the shot—one shot—and knew where it came from, knew who it was.

  That evening, with not fifteen minutes of light left, my middle brother, Frank, shot a spike on the east side. (I’d spent the morning not far from there with my youngest brother, B. J., rattling antlers and giving deer calls, trying to lure a deer in for him, but with no luck.)

  Frank left his deer for me to clean and take back to Montana—he’s a journalist in New York and has a very small freezer—and B. J. went back to school the next day.

  The day after that, walking quietly on a sunny morning after the fog had lifted, I happened upon a big spike who was browsing cedar. He had his neck outstretched like a giraffe—does the cedar at canopy level taste better than that below?—and the branch shaking was what caught my eye. He had long antlers and I could see the tips of them shining in the sunlight. I was very close to him but he couldn’t see me because the cedar bough was over his face like a mask, and when I shot, he crumpled without another movement.