by Rick Bass
I’ll never walk through tall grass again without remembering that lion, and that day. Many people go all their lives without seeing a lion, but these girls got to see one before they were even teenagers, and I believe that special events such as that are like sterling, that there are only so many people blessed with such moments, and that those moments stay with them and shine within them, brilliant, while most of the other events of life fade with time.
Less sterling—more ephemeral—are the trails of deer through the woods in winter. I’m confused by what seems to be at first the paradox of my hunting them in November and then feeling great empathy for them as I fall out of the chase while they still labor on in the snows of December and January, trudging ankle-deep and then belly-deep and then worst of all, sometimes chest-deep, with never a moment to rest, never a night of safety.
Me, I get to lay the rifle aside and rest and become human again for eleven months, but the deer must keep going, must never rest, not even in the deepest snows or on the coldest nights, or the lions will get them, the coyotes, the wolves.
The woods up here seem simpler and more reduced in winter, but they’re not. The snow’s just what it seems: a blanket, hiding nearly everything, and letting it sleep. It’s still as intricate a system as it ever was. The deer must walk the tightrope, as must everything else in the woods, of too-much and not-enough. A little forest fire, for instance, is good in the summer. It promotes fresh nutritious growth for the deer. But too much fire, as has been the case in recent years due to man’s fire prevention policies (which backfire and lead to an excessive accumulation of “fuel”—dead trees that should have burned), is also bad for the deer, bad for the soil, which can get washed away by erosion following a fire, which is bad for the rivers, which is bad for man.
All of these variables are hidden in winter. The deer flounder through the snow, eventually packing down trails like highway systems through the woods. They experiment in December—cutting several trails before finally establishing a system by January that works for them, gets them to water and to feeding areas with the minimum expenditure of energy. Because I fear the terrible droughts we’ve had in the last several years, I am glad for every snowfall. “It’s good for the country,” I say, thinking ahead to the trickling, nourishing snowmelt of May and June, of wildflowers, of green rich July grasses. Too little snow can make an easy winter for the deer, but will assure them a very dry, hot, dangerous summer.
This year, however, I’m seeing what too much January snow can do to them—too much, falling too quickly. It will help make summer richer and easier—if they can survive that long. Too much snow covers their food (dry leaves and mosses), and wears down their fat reserves because it’s so hard to thrash around in. Deer have tiny hooves, of course, compared to the big snowshoe feet of the predators—bobcat, lynx, coyotes, wolves, and lions—and in deep snows such as this year’s, predators have the advantage.
So I stop hunting about the time the snow falls. But the deer do not stop being hunted.
Their trails through the woods—the further we go into the winter, the more worn-down those trails get. The deer use them every day, as does everything else in the woods—lions and wolves, predator and prey. The game, if one wants to call it that—though it is not a game; it is life and death—becomes much more focused. It would be like your trying to run from a pursuer, but having to stay only on sidewalks.
If the deer leave the trails they’ve created, and flounder in the deep snow, they’re goners—if something’s chasing them.
And yet, by January, in heavy snow years, all the food along the trails is eaten, and they must go off into the new deep snow, looking for new food, cautiously, always vigilant.
I like to think of them the way they are when I’m hunting them in November—fat, healthy, wild; not vulnerable, as they are later.
And yet, I love the predators, too—the wolves and lions.
And I love to see the snow fall, love to ski across it, and love the thought of how the deeper the snow, the lovelier the spring will be—“Good for the country,” I say, every time it snows—but there’s always that haunting ambivalence in my knowledge that after a while the snow can shut the deer down, can lead to their deaths in great numbers.
Never mind that it’s all a part of a very fine-tuned, constantly correcting system of balance. Never mind that if I’d only remember my manners, I’d realize that I’m only along for the ride.
I still can’t help it; I evaluate every snowfall, every day, with that odd mixture of satisfaction and worry—I get involved, as if nature cares one way or the other what I think.
The bucks drop their antlers in January. They’ve used them for territorial defenses in mating, and even for defense against predators, but by January survival has become such an iffy, day-by-day venture that they try and save every calorie they can and have evolved to shed the antlers to avoid having to lug that extra weight.
A thing I love to do in the spring, after the snow is gone, is to walk in the woods looking for the winter-dropped antlers of deer, elk, and moose. It is not unlike a naturalist’s Easter egg hunt, in that from the antlers you find you can determine rough life histories—sizes, sometimes age, and even temperament, if the antlers have the battle scars of combat. But mostly I like to find them because they are beautiful. The full basketball curve of the main beam, and the splaying fingers of the other tines . . . the palm antler of the moose, and the immense elk antlers . . . . Finding the giant elk antlers is as incongruous and exciting as coming upon a beached whale in the woods. The antlers speak silently to last year’s lives, which are now memories, and some not even that.
The most beautiful time to find a fallen antler is in an open stretch of woods late in the afternoon when the sun is dropping soft tiger stripes of light down through the cedars or pines, and one of those shafts of light happens to fall across the antler’s gleaming brown polished curve.
Sometimes the antler falls right-side up, like an open basket, cradled in the leaves as if to hold light and air, and other times the antler falls with the tines sticking down, like a pitchfork, so that the antler sits like a dome. And then in the cedar jungle, in that end-of-day light, with all the vertical trees and the horizontal twigs and branches on the ground, and the near-horizontal sun rays, the incongruity of that beautiful curve there on the ground, and the beautiful burnished gleam of the antler, will leap out to the practiced eye. And it is a thing worth seeing, in this life, a moment of no small consequence as you come to the spot where a deer lost part of himself but kept on going, a kind of a parting of the ways in that precise spot where you’re standing, and the deer went on into the rest of the winter, having jettisoned it all, and kept living for at least a little longer.
Deer grow new antlers each summer. I cannot grow my mother back, though I must say there are times when Mary Katherine looks at me with the same ice-blue eyes and I am confused, for they are as intent and piercing and beautiful as my mother’s, and they seem to know things that my mother knew, my mother knows.
Like the deer, I must keep going—must not succumb to the snows of winter, which is when, a year ago, I lost her, and the snows of sadness, which is, I suppose, more what this essay is about than anything. There are days . . .
Because it has now become clear to me that I have all the time in the world—for grief moves like a glacier, and sorrow like a slow river, and even memories move slowly, like clouds in the summer that seem not to move all day—because of this, I have started looking for antlers in the winter, right after the deer have dropped them.
It doesn’t matter if I find any. It is somehow the act that matters, the devotion to the pure improbability of it: like finding a contact lens that has been dropped out of a helicopter and into the ocean.
I want to find the antlers before the breach, the distance between loss and continuance—the deer moving on away—gets too great. I dream of seeing a deer with just one antler, having just dropped the one side and ripe to drop the
second. I dream of watching the antler fall from the deer’s head, being there to see it when it happens, and walking up to that spot in the snow, groping, and finding that antler, while the deer has moved off only a short distance and is still in sight, antler-less now, browsing the winter-dry leaves of alder.
I take my dogs with me, and I go out on skis. Sometimes we ski down the deer trails, further packing those thin highways through the woods, which will help the deer run faster when pursued, and I feel good that I may be helping them in that manner. It is on these trails where they often lose their antlers—ducking under a branch, the antler joint (weakened by a cessation of hormonal flow) wobbles, then falls, and the antler is cast off.
I probe the snow with my ski poles, listening for the click! of the pole’s tip striking hard antler. My dogs are hounds, with hounds’ keen noses and curiosities, and they have come trotting home with deer antlers they’ve found before, carrying them only for the scent. It is my hope—and only a casual hope or dream, for I have all the time in the world, so much time before me—that my dogs will scent the antlers beneath the snow whenever we pass over one and that they will dig down and discover it with their good hot noses.
But this is unlikely.
We ski and we look, and we get through the short days, the dogs and I. Sometimes we cross the lion’s trail and follow it to the remains of a weeks-old deer carcass; the dogs dig furiously, and I hope at first they’ve found a dropped antler, but instead it turns out to be a whole deer, and usually it is a doe, no antlers, or a buck that has already dropped his antlers, and there is only a bald skull and hooves, hip bones, ribs, and vertebrae—no beautiful antlers, no prize in the woods . . .
Sometimes the dogs and I will cut new trails in the woods—the dogs floundering ahead of me, lunging like porpoises, half-swimming in the snow as they break new trail, with me following on the skis to help pack it down. We’ll spend several days taking the same route, until the deer find it and begin using it. It’s a pleasure to spend several days constructing, with only the strength in your legs, such a trail, and then ski it one day and find that the deer have discovered it, and to see all their fresh tracks on it where they have used it the night before.
I feel tender toward the deer in winter, and yet I do not grieve when I find where a predator has gotten one, or even when I find one that has starved, one that has used up its fat reserves in the deep snows and has been unable to find anything to eat. I’m sad and quiet, but I do not grieve.
Another quiet sight—but one that does not touch me all the way down, does not bring full grief—is to see the reckless dependence deer place, in a hard winter, on the random chance of a fallen tree. The black tree lichen, Bryoria—the old man’s beard—grows high on all the branches of the lodgepole pines, the Douglas firs, and the larches, especially in dark forests, which are usually dark because they’re overcrowded, and when the trees are overcrowded they’re more vulnerable to root-rot and pine beetles and other diseases and hence more likely to topple, to be blown over.
When they fall, they bring that previously unattainable Bryoria down to the ground. It is said that the deer start running toward the sound of a falling tree in winter the minute they hear it, though I have never seen this. I see such fallen trees alongside the road, however, and it’s true, there’ll be twenty or thirty deer standing around the fallen tree, chewing savagely at the Bryoria, a wispy lichen so thin and dry that a whole garbage bag full of it might weigh only a few pounds.
There is both a numbness and a desperation in the deer’s eyes, in the coldest of winters, and some of them do not make it, and what amazes me (and I think of this on nights when I am in bed under all the hides and blankets and the thermometer drops to forty below, and the stars crackle) is the fact that any of them make it. They have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and yet they go on because they have to go on.
There is a rock that we ski past, a cliff wall over the switchback of an old abandoned logging road that we like to ski, the dogs and I, when going up on the mountain. I call it “Panther Rock.” Sometimes when we pass beneath it (me skiing hard and fast down the steep hill and the dogs running hard, just in front of me), the dogs will suddenly come to a stop, whirl around, and turn their noses up toward the ledge above and growl and raise their hackles in a way that I have seen them do only for bears, but the bears are sleeping.
That’s one of the ways a mountain lion hunts—to perch hidden on a ledge, waiting for quarry to walk by below. I think about what a tempting target I would make on skis, how I would probably look to a hungry predator like just another deer floundering (my ski poles looking like third and fourth legs), and me running from something, and almost helpless, almost a victim.
I have not seen the lion on Panther Rock, but I know he’s up there. There are days when I believe that if I faltered, it would be within his capability to spring down and get me. Still, I ski past it, and sometimes right at dusk, because to shy away from it would be to also act like a victim, like prey, and I am confused in my sorrow, feeling some days angry and like a predator, but so many other days more like the deer, and I do not want to be a victim to my grief, and I respect the deer more and more.
Sometimes I sit alone in the woods, without the dogs, and I just think. I remember things: I turn the sterling memories of her over and over in my mind, polishing them like stones. I’ll think of just one day—sometimes a special day—a summer day. I’ll sit there just breathing slowly, breathing smoke clouds, remembering it.
Then I’ll get up and head on home, gliding silently through the woods, across deep new snow, breaking new trail, and I’ll wonder if this is how the deer feel, trudging through all the snow with their heads down.
I continue to look at all the other various tracks and realize that I am learning what so many others before me have learned: that there is no sense that can be made of it, and that it is more frigid and painful and hollow than you ever dreamed it could be, and that you want to lie down and quit but that because you are hers you do not, and you keep going. You keep going, but in so doing it does not mean that you are either understanding or accepting, only that you are still going, and that also by your still going on you know it does not mean that you are leaving the winter behind.
A TEXAS CHILDHOOD
It’s late January, and I’m sitting on the porch at the farm in South Texas again, watching Mary Katherine and Lowry, now nine and six, playing out in the middle of a pasture, surrounded by balmy breezes and birdsong—a week’s respite from the Montana winter. After long-winter’s accruing numbness, this premature burst of song and warmth rests upon all our skin exquisitely.
Watching the girls play, so far from the Montana wilderness, I find myself wondering, What, from childhood, informs us as adults? What images of nature—and what relationships—last? The physical memories of the world, surely, and yet also the fabric of stories. Both must make a child, and then an adult.
It seems a paradox to me that the more deeply physical senses are felt or otherwise engaged, the more deeply the mind can be stirred: as if these things, birdsong, breeze-stir, sunlight in winter, distant dog-bark, reminding me of my own childhood in Texas, are but story themselves. Occurring again and again in that manner, they are as strong, once the echo or memory of them exists in your mind, as they ever were to the original physical touch or sensation.
As a culture, we have been presented with the idea that a thing must be either-or. But isn’t it a valid possibility that deeply felt physical experiences can act not as a trade-off for the more interior world of emotion or story, but instead as a gate or path into a deeper interior world?
For a long time I thought the two were oppositional: the physical senses versus the life of the mind, as if the two were engaged eternally in some giant tag team pro-wrestling match of winner-take-all. Like so many others, I fell into the trap of thinking we were separate from nature—that we had not been birthed from the dust, and that because of the size and complexity of our brains, we w
ere the exception to any rule we desired to oppose or discard.
But these thumbs that we’re so proud of—the ones we are so sure have led to such rapid advancement as a species, allowing us to pick up and examine almost anything—have acted like a shortcut to the experience of millions of years, gotten otherwise by treading through time (moving across slickrock domes with padded feet, climbing trees with claws).
The shape of our calves are but direct reflections of the shape of the earth that we walk across; our arms, spreading from the warmth of our chests, are like nothing but the limbs spreading from the trunks of the deciduous trees that must have flourished in the land and the time that existed when we were being born. Our songs, our fluted musical instruments, so like those of the cries of migrating geese, or the howls of coyotes, which, heard from a distance of only a mile or so, are nearly indistinguishable. And what is a mile to natural history?
Our hair like the prairie grass, our skulls like river-polished boulders.
A thousand touches, and then ten thousand, and finally one day—the thumbs lifting and examining and holding and possessing, until we arrive, not like an afterthought nor any crowning glory, but instead only as if Yes, here is room for you, too, there is room at the inn . . .
Perhaps if we keep touching things, keep experiencing the world—perhaps we are only ten million-million more touches away—we will someday muddle through all the present clumsiness—this polar ice cap-melting, Ebola-contagion, nuclear-pissing-match foolishness—and will become even more graceful upon the earth, even more fitted to the shapes of our magnificent mountains, our arroyos, our sand dune beaches, grasslands, wild forests . . . . Perhaps . . .
I was talking about story, which I have come to think of as perhaps little more than the electrical charge that exists—like sparks across a synapse—between touch and the processing of information gathered from that touch, on its way into the catalogue of memory.
