“You were making a short story long.”
“Yeah, Monty Moonbeam and the Giant Ox. You’ve never seen Kurlander and you never will, because the whole town burned down a long time ago in a forest fire. When the fire came into town, the people tried to save themselves by wading out into the river up to their necks, but the fire storm ate up all the oxygen in town and they suffocated anyway. For weeks afterward the river kept disgorging bug-eyed corpses with the hair and eyebrows singed off.
“It was the winter before the fire when Moonbeam and I drove up to Kurlander in his 1934 Ford sedan to hunt the giant aurochs. Six feet of snow on the ground—the woods looked like a bed of green crocuses poking up through the snow, and the muskegs that would suck you down in the summer like a trout might a mayfly were frozen stiff. Which was just fine for our purposes. You hunted these wild oxen on snowshoes, running on top of the stuff while the bulls with their sharp, narrow legs had to wallow through it by main force. It was easy enough to wear them down; then you shot the poor bastards through the spine so as not to mess up the trophy. The hard part was dressing them out in the snow; the blood froze on our mittens, and the heavier cuts of meat tended to melt out of sight. But the hardest part was dragging the meat and the trophy out of the woods on a toboggan—those horns were six feet from point to point, and one point or the other always snagged in the undergrowth and tipped the toboggan. But we took strength from the smell of blood.
“When we got into Kurlander, for what proved to be our last hunt, it was already dark. We stopped at the pool hall for a beer and a bratwurst. Most of the people in Kurlander were Finns— the sons and grandsons of the loggers who had cut down the old white pine forest fifty years earlier. Sallow, scrawny, surly, with those bulbous foreheads that make you think of poisonous mushrooms. I’ll tell you this, though: they handled their pool cues as neatly as their ancestors handled an ax or a peavey hook. There was an old man sitting in the corner with scabs for eyelids and snot caked on his whiskers—Blind Herman; he’d blown out his eyeballs with a blasting cap while dynamiting stumps years before. Moonbeam went over to talk to him. ‘Monty,’ the old man said, you’re growing taller than the trees!’ He was feeling his way up Moonbeam like you might if you had to turn on a floor lamp in the dark.
“Blind Herman told us that a real trophy bull had his harem yarded up in a tamarack swamp not far from Moonbeam’s cabin. The local boys hadn’t killed it yet because they were still getting over their Christmas hangovers. ‘Crazy Joe will show you the place,’ the old man said. ‘I’ll send him over to you in the morning, before first light.’ Crazy Joe was a younger man who took care of Blind Herman—a loony who had gotten that way when a bull tossed him and stomped on his head as he was crossing a pasture, coming home drunk one night from a dance. As a result, Crazy Joe was still drunk and always would be. That part of it was all right, as far as I was concerned, but every now and then he would launch into a polka—hard going to those who followed him on snowshoes.
“We had to leave the car on the highway and hike in to Moonbeam’s cabin—the tote road hadn’t been plowed—and the cabin was so cold that it took a cord of firewood, three blankets apiece, and a pint of gin to get to sleep. The last thing I saw as I dozed off was the stained-glass eye of a mounted aurochs winking at me in the firelight.
“Crazy Joe came mushing up out of the dark as we were frying ham for breakfast. He was short, swart, and jolly, bellowing the Beer Barrel Polka at the top of his lungs, belching and farting until the icicles cracked from his moustache. ‘Monty,’ he said, you growin taller dan da trees!’ I figured that that was what they said to you in the Kurlander country when they wanted you to feel good.
“While we were getting our guns and gear together, Crazy Joe staggered around the cabin, still in his snowshoes, hiccuping and singing in a slurred lush’s voice. Now he was singing ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home.’ Then he went on a crying jag: something about his poor old ma—that nobody ever understood her. I offered him a slug of gin, but he turned it away with a broad gesture of the hand, his lower lip extended in self-righteousness. ‘Never touch the stuff,’ he said. ‘Drunk enough without it, hic!’ Then he got his snowshoes stuck in the doorway. He acted drunk, but he sure didn’t smell it.
“It took us about an hour of heavy hiking to reach the swamp where the aurochs were yarded up: first over the lake, where the snow was compact and frozen like waves and squeaked under our snowshoes until I thought we would spook every living thing out of the country for miles around; and then into the tamaracks, where the snow was deep and quiet but the going was harder. It was getting on towards first light, and we saw sign in the snow where an owl had taken a grouse. There was a perfect imprint of the grouse’s body in the snow, wings and fan spread, and then overlaid on that the wide kind of fingertip prints where the owl’s wings had hit the snow. The owl must have knocked the grouse off the limb where it was roosting and then hooked it just as it hit the snow, and then flown off with it. Monty and I circled around the mark—it was too beautiful to wreck with our snowshoe prints—but Crazy Joe lost his balance in his drunken way and stepped on it. He sniveled a bit and kept saying, ‘Sorry, boys, sorry, boys/ until Monty told him to shut up, we didn’t want to spook the aurochs.
“We heard the aurochs before we saw them. It was that cowlike whuffling that you hear when you go into the barn at dawn to milk them, but it bore as much relation to the whuffling of domestic cattle as a lion’s purr does to a house cat’s. We could see steam rising in rings and wreaths from the herd, as if someone was holding a convention of extinct locomotives down there in the swamp. We could see the heads and horns of the bigger cattle, and the enormous head and horns of the bull weaving kind of slowly blue and boulderlike in the middle of the yard, and over it all this chuff-chuff-chuff sound, and the steam rising.
“The trick to hunting those bastards was to seal off the alleys that led out of the yard, and then to stampede them before they could see you. What we usually did was to locate the alleys and build fires in them—there were only two or three alleys at the most—and the smoke from the fires would panic the herd and send them stumbling into the deep snow, where you could run them down. That we did on this fine rosy morning, with the frost ticking in our nostrils and the pine smoke drifting down to mingle with the steam of the wild cattle. They went off through the tamaracks with us in pursuit, stumbling and cursing.
“Monty and I had rifles—my Model 94 Winchester and his .300 Savage—but Crazy Joe had only a lance, the traditional weapon of the country: a wide two-foot-long carbon-steel blade mounted on a peeled maple sapling. Monty and I each managed to put a round into the big bull’s hump as he went wallowing through the drifts with his head swinging from side to side, staring back at us with eyes like fog lamps, but then the bastard gave us the slip in the alders at the edge of the swamp. Joe stayed behind as we worked into the purple alder jungle. Unfortunately, they were the same color as the bull, so we had to take our time, he being still fresh and likely to be lying up in ambush anywhere in the thicket. Then we heard Joe yelling and the bull whuffling behind us—the bastard had circled, as they sometimes do—and went flip-flopping back out as fast as we could, the snowshoes inevitably getting stuck again and again in the thick alder stubs.
“By the time we got out, the bull had punched Joe down into the snow about six feet deep. All we could see was his snow-shoes, broken, with the webs all tangled, waving on either side of the bull’s muzzle. The bull looked up as we came out, and Monty put a hollow soft point right up his snot locker—a great splat of blood and mucus—and the bull reared back and died without a moan. Joe’s lance had bent against the bull’s shoulder blade: so much for primitive weapons.
“Fortunately, the man himself wasn’t bent near as badly. When we dug him out, we found he had only a couple of cracked ribs and a few hoofprints on his forehead where the bull had trampled him. The soft snow had saved his life. On a hard surface, the bull would have mashed Joe flat. We butcher
ed the bull out with the ax and meat saw we had brought along and then wrapped Joe in the hot, bloody hide and dragged the whole reeking lot back on the toboggan. Joe kept mumbling, ‘My God, he was taller dan da trees, taller dan da trees.’
The funny thing was, from that day on Joe wasn’t crazy drunk any more. The stomping he’d gotten from the aurochs had snapped him out of it. But as the winter wore along, he got surlier and surlier—even when he chug-a-lugged a bottle of Schnapps he couldn’t get drunk. The next summer he went off into the woods alone, out to the west of Kurlander. It was from that direction that the great forest fire came burning a few weeks later, the fire that wiped out the town. Monty often wondered if Joe hadn’t set it on purpose, out of resentment for anything that was taller than the trees.”
My son blinked at the end of the story, not having realized there could be any such connection. We ate the stew and read for a while in our sleeping bags, and then spun out into the deepest corners of sleep.
15
IN THE EVENINGS, I found myself thinking more and more about Ratanous. It seemed to me that I had read many books about him, years before. At the time, I didn’t take them seriously—they seemed like just so many pages of amusement. Now they were anything but amusing: the man might attack us at any moment. Or so it seemed in the dark, with the wind howling high in the trees beyond the campfire. I wrote down some of the titles of books I had read that might have been about Ratnose:
Ratnose the Relevant
Ratnose & The Pillars of Wisdom
The Beasts of Ratnose
Ratnose's Wanderings in Africa
Ratnose: Eye of the Woods
Ratnose & The River Demons
The Jungle Tales of Ratnose
Ratnose: The War Years (1914-1921)
Hilda, Daughter of Ratnose
The Guns of Ratnose
Ratnose’s Revenge
Ratnose Goes Beatnik
The Way of Ratnose
Run, Ratnose, Run!
Commodore Ratnose
Ratnose at the Circus
The “Other” Ratnose
Ratnose Meets the Press
The Complete Short Novels of Ratnose
Ratnose on Hunting 6- Fishing
That was as far as I got with the list. I think Myerson wrote most of them, fictionalizing from legends rampant on the Hassayampa in the late nineteenth century, and after his death the ongoing saga was picked up by his daughter, Leona Myerson Peterman. The books were immensely popular during the first half of this century, but fell out of favor with librarians after the war. My son, at least, could never find them in the children’s section of our local library. Though I don’t think he looked that hard.
16
I WOKE at first light thinking of my wife. Somehow, she and I were on the same clock. It happened over and over: when I came back from a trip she’d say, “I woke up at five-thirty Wednesday and couldn’t get back to sleep; I just tossed and turned.” As well she might, for at eleven-thirty the previous evening in Kirun or Helsinki I had turned down a whore’s proposition and retired righteously to think of hers. Now it was the butt end of night, the peepers creaking, and I had my wife’s titprints on my bowels, the invisible imperception of her warm curple fading from my hairy belly, when I heard the horse snort.
I shuddered out of the warm memory into cold fear: Ratnose!
Then the horse snorted again—a kind of gentle wheeze from the same direction. I lay back on the sleeping bag and waited. The fire was barely glowing under a blanket of ash. The light came very gradually, as it will at daybreak under normal skies, like water mixing slowly into an ink bottle. Green, then yellow, with the blackness not exactly fading but rather disasserting itself in the manner of a mother weaning an insistent child. Black and white together. The outlines of the hills back of the Hassayampa took shape. Movement on the ridge. A horselike figure, importunate, pawing and neighing. Pronged.
“There’s a unicorn up there on the ridge,” I told my son when he awoke. His eyes cleared of sleep; he reached for the Luger. I nodded approval, and he bellied his way into the bushes, shedding his sleeping bag like a cocoon. I listened for a while, watched longer, but heard nothing. Then I dozed off again. . . .
I awoke to the shot, two shots, and then stoked up the fire with a few pine stubs left over from the night before. The water was hissing when he returned, stumbling naked down the hill with the Luger spinning in easy gun-fighter loops and counter loops from his trigger finger. He flicked his long hair out of his eyes with the gunsight.
“Wasn’t worth the powder,” he said as he pulled on his pants. “They’re supposed to have gold horns and stay put only for virgins. I reckoned that I could score on the last account, but when I threw down on her, she only smiled. ‘I’m a tinhorn unicorn,’ she said. ‘Born during the Depression. My folks dint have no bread.’ She was nice-looking sure enough, and we had a nice talk, but she wasn’t worth the powder.”
“Then why did you shoot twice?” I asked him.
“Wolves,” he said. He put down the Luger on my sleeping bag. “Where’s the coffee?”
17
WE HAD RUN SHORT OF FOOD, and the land was spare of game. Even the Hassayampa had nothing easy to offer. My son turned over a downed tree and extracted three weak leafworms from the rancid soil—two of the worms broke in half as he tugged at them. The river here was strangely patterned: feeder streams came in at direct, ninety-degree angles to the main flow, which at this point was slow and stagnant. The water looked olive with algae, slippery. It smelled like those old cars you sometimes find away off in the woods, wondering how anyone ever had the nerve, much less the roads, to get them there; kind of a stale plastic scent—”fusty, peanut-smelling,” Sylvia Plath called it.
“Worms ought to get ’em if they’re here,” my son said with confidence. He slipped the longest of the worms onto a No. 10 hook and flipped it squirming into the current, or what little current we imagined. Nothing. He jigged the worm a bit and reeled in. Stop. Nothing.
The sky had been heavy with strange smells all day long. Now it smelled of hot dogs—perhaps our hungry imaginations? Old grease, the puke of a drunk.
“Where are we?” my son asked.
I thought about that for a minute, maybe more. I knew I’d never been on this stretch of the Hassayampa before, yet it seemed familiar. Then I remembered . . .
“Oh, yeah. Wait a sec.” I dug around, groggy, inside the big pack and came up with a tan plastic lure box. “Take that worm off of there and try one of these. They’re special for this part of the river.”
My son reeled in and looked at the worm. It was soggy, dead, unnipped, already rotten.
“Cut off the hook and tie a snap swivel on there,” I said. He did. Then I handed him the first lure: it was an electric-blue Camaro Z-28 with a gold racing stripe, B. F. Goodrich steel-belted street radials, an STP sticker on the right rear windshield, and a pimply blond teen-age driver in a T-shirt that read SHYTTE in Old English script, the whole lure measuring only two inches in length and weighing three quarters of an ounce, exclusive of the stainless-steel treble hooks that dangled fore and aft. The young fellow who was driving looked bored.
“Why the stainless on a freshwater lure?” my son asked.
“You’ll see when you try this water,” I said, “if you haven’t smelled it already. Now just flip it out there into the feeder stream and bring it in fast along the bank, with a lot of jigging motion. When you get to the corner here where the feeder hits the Hassayampa, snap it on around and reel in at top speed until the lure is about six feet away from the rod tip. Then let it sink.”
He flipped the lure up into the feeder stream. As he reeled in, twitching the rod tip as he retrieved, I could hear the faint squeal of tires underwater. Like hearing street rodders dragging on the state highway ten miles off in the fog before dawn; almost like foxes barking in the spring when you’re camped out away from the roads, but not that far away, and the chickens are still clucking o
ver the ridge, the screech owls hunting along the ravine, and you can’t tell in your slumber if it’s really foxes barking or just chickens or hunting owls or kids laying rubber over on the State.
The water was too opaque to see if he had a follow, but when the angle of the line said the lure was at the corner where the feeder hit the Hassayampa, my son snapped it around and cranked furiously; then he let the lure sink. Then—bang! A terrific hit. I could hear the clank of the metal, the explosions of tiny Police Specials, whines and sirens, a far cry of pain. My son struck, struck again, and the rod tip bent. Line screamed off the reel, stopped, screeched, stopped; then the line began moving in toward the bank. My son reeled in fast, keeping the pressure on, angling the rod from his wrist, and pretty soon there was a splashing in the dusk under the bank. I netted it.
A Plymouth Fury II squad car, fully four and a half pounds in weight and about nineteen inches long, maybe twenty. Hooked solidly in the right front tire. The green lettering, NYPD, was almost obscured by the algae that had grown scum-thick on the cream band of its background. The two cops had already split, but the pimply kid in the lure was slumped awkwardly out of the Camaro’s shattered window. The rear end of the Camaro was bent up so that the spoiler kissed the radio antenna, and the pimply kid’s teeny-tiny feet were bent against the fire wall. The engine in the Fury was still growling, so when I unhooked it, I slammed the car against a rock. The car shuddered and went quiet. A couple of shotguns fell out, each about as long as a toothpick.
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