by Rick Bass
As Trapper’s shakes set in, Judith grew that way: stronger than he was. He still had his strength, but when he was trembling, it was of little use; he’d drop things. He’d have to ask her for help. The glimmer of reasoning that this might have frightened her as badly as it frightened him glows in his mind, and then fades. He’s remembering this bear in the Gila.
You must tie a drag to the trap for them to run with, one which will only slow them down. If you tie the chain too tight, with no hope of escape, the bear or wolf will chew its damn leg off, to get away.
This Gila River grizzly holed up in a cave. It was a smart bastard. It ambushed Trapper, trap and chain and log and all. Wrapped Trapper up as best as it could. Biting at Trapper’s face and neck. The only thing that saved Trapper was the fact that the bear’s teeth had been broken by the huge steel trap: he’d tried to bite it off. Still, the bear raked Trapper’s back with his terrible claws. The first bear that ever got in close with Trapper; the first one he ever wrapped up with. Trapper was nineteen. Trapper grabbed the bear’s big tongue the way he’d been told and twisted like hell; the bear released his grip, and Trapper pulled his big knife free and stuck it up under the ribs, again and again, probing for the heart. Found it.
Bright red blood and froth and bits of tooth all over his face. He had to sleep on his stomach for three months. He remembers how Judith would lick the wounds; and then, when they healed, how she would lick the scars. They were living on her Uncle Harm’s ranch, in an adobe by the Salt River. White-winged doves cooing all the time. The mornings were cool; everything seemed new.
Nineteen!
He didn’t know if his seed was bad or if she was barren. Nothing ever happened, and he’s not sure, as he trembles now, ancient at thirty-five, that that was a bad thing.
Candlelight washes across his crooked face. He can’t believe he’s alone.
***
In February it warmed to fifteen below. It had been so cold that Judith’s head hurt: she grew a little crazy, afraid to sleep for fear that her head would split the way the dry fir trees had been every January night. She couldn’t move around, couldn’t walk through the woods with her ugly feet unless it was snowing hard; she couldn’t risk leaving tracks.
Judith figured she was about twenty-five miles north of him. She could sense by the stillness in the woods—the utter emptiness and newness and peace—that he had no idea where she was hiding.
But he would find out. He would sense that peace—he would feel her feeling it—and he would be drawn toward it. She would have to be ready to move again, and quickly.
She wanted to get away, but not too far away.
There were nights when she felt he was still tied to her: she knew he was out tracking her. Strangely, she felt loved.
But it felt fine to be alone, and to be free of his air. It wasn’t bad air that he breathed in and out; it was just his.
When it began to snow, she would rise and go for walks in the woods, walking through the heaviest snowstorms. She’d found a winter-killed moose and made a robe of that, to add to her other coats. She wore all of them when she walked, and when she got lost and could not find her way back to her snow cave, as frequently happened, she’d build a new one. She was following a ridge above a river bottom over into the next valley. It was a country Trapper had never worked before, and sometimes Judith would catch herself with the ludicrous thought that she would have to tell him about it when she got back.
Remember, Judith told herself, he is gone.
She was pretty sure he was gone.
Her hair was wild and dirty, turning darker, from yellow blond to dirty blond, which troubled her. But it wasn’t enough to turn back for: the simple touch of his busted-up hands, brushing and washing her hair, and a warm fire.
A wolverine confronted her one day, ran scampering around her snow cave, raising his hind leg and pissing all around it, a vile scent that reminded her of maggots. He stuck his snarling face into her cave and Judith screamed and jabbed her knife at him, cutting his nose, and the wolverine ran away, lunging across the snow like a man with a broken back, squalling and leaving a trail of blood but looking over his shoulder at her as if to say, “I’ll be back.”
Judith cut a heavy walking stick and lashed the sharpest deer antlers she could find to the end of it. She never went anywhere without it, and had nightmares about the wolverine until she found him dead in March, where wolves had killed him.
The meat of the wolverine had been too mean and vile for the wolves to eat; they’d eaten only his entrails. Ravens led her to his carcass. It pleased Judith to think of the wolves eating his guts. But she moved on, because he’d marked her cave as his territory, and the woods were spoiled.
She kept moving north whenever it snowed, moving from one pocket of stillness and peace to the next. It was exactly as if she had an injury, and had to let the muscle and bone knit and regather strength. It took time.
In February, Trapper had abandoned his cabin and gone south looking for her. By the first week he knew she could be dead and under five or six feet of snow—he might not find her skeleton for ten or twenty years, or ever—but he pushed on, casting for scent. He knew she would cross at least one divide, and possibly two. The way she had hit that window, he knew she was terrified of something.
It was the first time in eighteen years that he hadn’t spent a winter trapping; it felt good. He stood by his fire each night, the trembling having spread from his hands to his shoulders and legs. He was alone, and he acknowledged this—there was something wrong with him, something which time would not fix—but he felt good.
He’d piss on his campfire each night to let the wolves know he was in the woods. He heard their howls, the whole of the woods echoing with their sound. Trapper knew that in winter they were all only two days away from starving.
He worked a hundred miles south in a week, and then fifty miles east of that line, coming back across it, and fifty miles west.
“Sombofambitch,” he said in March, when he finally felt the peace, and could acknowledge its presence. He was having trouble with his speech. “She has gonb Norf... Norf... Norf.” His heart was fluttering, and his legs, when they trembled, felt like a colt’s.
He was back at his cabin padding traps with hides, as he didn’t want her to have an ankle broken. He would set them in the spring.
The scent, or feel, of her peace reminded him of the northern lights. No one else he knew ever claimed they could hear them, but he could: the sound was faint to be sure, but clearly there, and it was like strips of thin metal delicately chiming. Trapper believed in angels and a God, though he had never seen either, and believed without doubt that the red and green of the northern lights showed where angels had been: just a day’s passage ahead of him, or two at most.
Trapper started north with a hundred pounds of traps slung over his shoulder. He hadn’t used sled dogs in five years, because the wolves always killed them, and he was tired of the heartache of losing them.
Aiming north and west, he figured she’d head for the ocean—women love oceans, he thought, and men love forests.
He came near her on that trip, missing her by less than a mile. Judith was sitting on the bluff looking out over the western river bottom when she felt his presence in the woods and then, an hour later, saw him go walking below her, all those heavy chains thrown across his shoulder: his steps with the snowshoes looking big and sloppy.
She watched him cross the frozen river with his traps. She couldn’t see his face or even his beard, and certainly not his strange blue eyes, which turned almost violet in late winter, as if in anticipation, perhaps, of spring.
She could make out his wide back, the heavy robes he was wearing, and his clumsy steps. She watched as if it were her wedding day; she felt that much love for him, and that much relief that he was missing her. He stopped often to look at tracks in the river bottom, but they were not her tracks.
In Arizona, Trapper had fried everything in lion grease. Pan
cakes, sausage, elk steaks, or fish—it all sizzled in the sweet fat of the mountain lions he killed. Old folks said that it would go to his brain and give him the trembles later in life, and maybe it did, but watching him move across the river bottom—trembling, though still somehow in possession of his strength—Judith doesn’t think that’s what did it.
She thinks it is the force of God blowing through the trees that makes him shake. He has chased things so hard and for so long that he has gotten cut off. He’s gotten lost, or dead-ended, or trapped. Or something.
Anyway, he didn’t look ready to die. He looked like he was holding steady.
Judith watched Trapper cross the river: heading all the way to the coast, she suspected—salmon, boats, fishing villages—just to look for her.
It made her feel good in a way she hadn’t felt in a long while.
Trapper moved slowly. Judith stayed behind a tree. He was hundreds of feet below her, and half a mile off. Once he turned and looked back up the bluff, right at her. Tears began to roll down Judith’s cheeks, freezing before they fell, as she felt all of her precious space shattering in his gaze, his discovery, but he was looking right through her. Trapper turned away again.
Immediate relief became joy, but then Judith felt an echo of sadness, like a stone dropped, clacking to the bottom of a nearly dry well on a hot day.
Trapper made his way across the mile-wide river. He didn’t have long to get to the coast and back before the breakup of the ice left him stranded—the river would surge in a month or six weeks with jagged icebergs, cracking and booming, frothing with dead moose and bear bobbing in its torrent, young foolish animals who’d tried to cross it... It occurred to Judith that maybe Trapper wasn’t coming back.
He still had not come straight north. She believed that when he did not find her on the coast, he would come back and try the forest—the last place he would have suspected her to be. It was a miracle that he had not seen her when he’d looked back up the bluff in her direction. Judith had held her breath to keep from breathing out smoke-vapor, and hadn’t blinked—just those round, crystal, frozen tears leaking from her. Judith had seen Trapper spot live animals hidden in the forest at distances greater than half a mile. Despite the beauty of his violet eyes, he was color-blind; he saw a monochromatic version of the world, grainy blacks and whites of tone. Winter didn’t bother him, because it was how he always saw the world—and animals that relied on the tones of camouflage were helpless, revealed bluntly, nakedly, before his gaze.
After Trapper was gone, Judith felt sorrow and fear, but then the fear left and joy returned. She wished him well on his journey and worried for him, but reasoned that any time spent trembling in the woods was infinitely preferable to time spent trembling on a bed in a cabin or—worse—in a town.
Judith imagined that the space to the north of her, all the way to the North Pole, was hers—her own space.
She could not wait for spring, when color would fill that space, and her world would burst with life.
***
They had left Arizona when the first silver and copper mines were going in and cattle were sweeping across the desert and fouling the brief rivers. There had been trout a foot and a half long in the Santa Cruz River, and steamships had cruised up and down it—but five years after the cattle showed up, the rivers had turned to silt plains, and there weren’t enough wolves to turn the cattle back. Trapper regretted that he had helped see to that.
He had never poisoned wolves the way the ranchers did. He trapped them instead, and then hit them in the head with a club to keep from ruining the pelt.
Judith’s Uncle Harm was the one who had taught him how to trap. Judith has tried to imagine Trapper being anything else in life—a miner, or a schoolteacher—but can’t see it. She takes this to mean that if he had not met up with Uncle Harm and herself, Trapper would be dead. Invisible.
She takes this to mean, indirectly, that she saved his life. If he had not fallen in hot love with her, he would never have learned to trap.
Uncle Harm was seventy-seven and failing when Trapper showed up. He still hunted and trapped, but Uncle Harm was hunting with dogs mostly by that time, and no longer tried to get physically involved with his prey.
When he’d been younger, Trapper’s age, Uncle Harm had hunted the way Trapper did—on foot, stalking and laying traps, shooting from ambush, and taking on the animals in his traps with only a knife or a club. Uncle Harm was the first white man to perfect the old Yaqui trick of hunting down and engaging a grizzly—getting it to charge—and then swatting its wrists with an iron bar, breaking them, thereby evening the odds considerably; dodging the crippled bear’s jaws and killing it with a knife or lance after that.
The worst Uncle Harm ever got it was from a Mexican grizzly down in Chihuahua. The grizzly was so big that it simply pulled free of the giant trap, leaving behind part of its foot and two huge claws.
Whenever Uncle Harm spoke of this he always took care to mention how the flesh-end nerves of the freshly pulled claws were still red with life, glowing in the trap.
The tracks of the escaped bear were plain, and Uncle Harm, a young man of thirty-three at the time, followed them easily and quickly. At a sharp bend of the trail he found what he wanted. The hurt grizzly had backtracked to the bend to wait.
There was no time to lift his club or his knife. The bear knocked Uncle Harm down with one swat, breaking his collarbone, and then bit him on the skull—Judith had heard Uncle Harm preach that the human skull is irresistible to grizzlies, that they like to puncture it like a ringtailed cat popping eggs—and then when the bear heard Uncle Harm’s skull pop he moved his attentions to Uncle Harm’s shoulders and began ripping them and chewing.
Uncle Harm was dying fast, and he knew his only chance was to play dead, which he was having no trouble doing. He shut his eyes while the grizzly picked him up and dragged him back and forth across the manzanita, smearing the brush with his blood. Still Uncle Harm played dead, trying to outlast the grizzly’s rage.
The grizzly finally dropped him and ran off, only to return to shake him again so hard that it almost broke Uncle Harm’s neck. The grizzly bit him in the face, then stood over Uncle Harm before nosing him, as if trying to bring his victim back to life so he could kill him again. The bear leaned down and snorted in Uncle Harm’s ear, trying to make him jump, but Uncle Harm remained dead.
Uncle Harm heard the bear limp off after that, and consciousness left him.
When he awoke it was night. He crawled back down the creek to a small spring. Another wolf hunter found him the next day. They sewed him up with veterinary supplies, “but my looks,” Uncle Harm would always say, motioning to his terrible, grinning face, “were never thereafter complimentary.”
Trapper loved the old man: loved him deeply. Sometimes Judith thinks Trapper should have married Uncle Harm instead of her. He loved to be with the old man. Uncle Harm fried all his food in lion grease too, though he never got the shakes. When Harm got really old and had to resort to chasing animals with dogs rather than on foot, he would circle around the desert on his mule with a gramophone lifted to his old near-deaf ears, trying to pick up the sound and direction of his dogs’ squalls as they battled a bear or a lion. He insisted on going out on his own—wouldn’t share his territory, the Galliero Mountains, with anyone, not even Trapper—and when he got older still, there were days when Trapper and Judith didn’t know if he’d make it back. At such times, they would go out looking for him.
Sometimes they would find him unscathed—he’d have gotten tired and stopped to camp by a creek on his way in, with a grizzly hide and the quartered carcass packed across his mule, his dogs panting in the shade, all scratched and cut up from the fight—Uncle Harm looking five or ten years younger every time he killed something. But there were other times, sad times, when they’d go out and find Uncle Harm, made loopy from dehydration, spinning in circles on his back on the desert floor, staring crazily up at the great white autumn clouds while h
is dogs stood around him in a confused circle, wanting to step in and lick him but unable to move in among his spinning arms and legs; the saddled mule would be off in the shade chewing saltbush, unconcerned, with no grizzly or lion pelt across its saddle. Uncle Harm looked a hundred years old on such days, and wild-eyed, too, and with his canteen stone-empty...
Judith and Trapper would gather him up, lift him onto his fool mule, give him water, and put his hat back on him to shield him from the sun. They would walk back home: a whole day’s hunting ruined for Trapper, but he didn’t care. Back then Trapper could take it or leave it. Uncle Harm’s facial scars glowed pale blue whenever he had a heat stroke. There was a muddy creek behind their adobe house, and they’d float him in that until he returned to himself.
By nightfall, when the coyotes were singing, Harm would be better; he’d have crawled out from the creek and gone to his little house (Trapper and Judith lived in the big house) and there he would change into his white linen evening suit. He’d fix a cup of pinon tea and go sit on his porch and listen to the night. He’d tell Trapper and Judith trapping stories, and secrets, and in the morning, though there would be new scars and stretchmarks upon his heart, he would be ready to go out and kill again.
He kept going. Judith thought it was half-monstrous and half-heroic—it was just the kind of thing a man would like and admire—the way Uncle Harm ruined himself. He kept driving, mindless, pursuing. It makes her sad to realize that the times she loved Trapper most were when he was hunting the least. It makes her feel guilty, too, because when Trapper was not hunting he was paying attention to her, and loving her. Does this mean she can’t love Trapper for what he is, but rather, only for what he can give her?
Nobody could be that selfish, she thinks. It’s simply a matter of where he puts his heart. It’s very simple, Judith thinks. He puts his heart in the woods, or he puts it in the palm of her hand. His heart clenches hers as though they are two elk with their noble antlers linked, if only by accident, in combat.
