The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  The river thaws first into ice floes that crash against each other, and then into fast blue water.

  Still he does not appear.

  She remembers how Trapper gathered her urine once a month to use it with his traps; she remembers how, that one time each month, the wolves would gather around their cabin and howl for a night or two, which excited Trapper terribly, made him pace the tiny cabin all night.

  He’d shout into the dark, and sometimes shoot his rifle: taking a bead on the great full grinning moon and then shouting, in the rifle’s echo-roar, when the moon did not fall, and when the wolves did not stop howling.

  Maybe her womb was barren, or maybe his seed was bad. Or maybe both. Or maybe it was like the wolf and the wolverine, who were not meant to mix; like the bear and the badger.

  She considers children. Remembers a man in Arizona whose son was killed by a bear, and who hunted that bear down, killed it, skinned it, and then slept on that hide every night for the rest of his life—another sixty-three years of falling asleep—or not—in the warmth of the killer’s thick fur.

  Thinking these things, Judith grows fond of her times with Trapper, and then one day, he appears. A white-haired crooked-standing figure on the far side of the river. It’s him, with about a thousand pelts on his sled.

  Judith turns and runs: into the woods, leaping logs like a deer. She doesn’t want to go back to the past, or back to the lovesick days in Arizona with roast suckling goat and chimichurri sauce for breakfast, margaritas, and those doves cooing while they went back to bed and made love: Harm, not Trapper, off in the desert.

  It feels wonderful to be running again.

  Trapper has been seeing the smoke from her fires for days now; it’s what turned him around. He’s been walking in circles, lost for the first time in his life, just a few miles from the river. He knows what is happening to him. He’s busted open the skulls of a million animals, gathering their brains to use for tanning their own hides, and he’s compared the highly ridged convolutions of a bear’s brains with the smoother, duller loops and folds of a marten, or the blankness of a boar-musky raging wolverine’s brain—and Trapper can feel a certain silliness, a kind of numbness, like a skullcap, settling over the top of his own mind.

  The loops of his brain-folds are losing their edges.

  Maybe it was the lion grease. Or loneliness.

  He’s been walking in circles, setting traps that don’t catch anything. Sometimes he steps in his own traps—by some miracle avoiding the forty-five-pound bear traps that would cut his legs off—but even when the traps clap shut on his ankle or his hand, he doesn’t really feel it.

  But the smoke: he still knew enough to go to the smoke. He still had the instinct, if not the knowledge, that somehow she could save him.

  He’d stake her out yet. His arms are wizened, slackmuscled, and he stares at them, then squints across the river. She’s probably stronger than he is now, he thinks. He’ll have to do it with cunning.

  He feels the loops unfolding. Thinks of how wolves pull the slick entrails out first and gulp them down, sometimes while the animal is still alive.

  Trapper doesn’t blink. He can’t feel anything. A million hardnesses are beginning to crash down upon him, and all he can think is, I want a million and one.

  4

  It was thought by the savages of the north, Trapper knows, that bears were half god and half human; that they were linked to the spirit world because they dig below the earth each autumn and come back out of the earth each spring. A bullshit stupid myth, Trapper thinks.

  Fact: a bear just rising from the so-called spirit world doesn’t have any gastric juices in his stomach yet. Trapper’s killed bears just coming out of hibernation and has opened their stomachs out of curiosity, and found live ants crawling around in the empty stomach, ants that the bear had licked up ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes before Trapper came sauntering through the woods.

  Trapper’s building a hide boat: tanning and stretching the wolf hides on the banks of the river and cutting green willow limbs. Maybe the boat will float and maybe it won’t. He wonders why the Indians didn’t think birds, like loons, belonged to the spirit world, diving under the water, and then flying into the air. Or maybe they did. Maybe the Indians thought everything belonged to the spirit world.

  When he finishes the hide boat, he looks at the huge stack of hides he is going to have to leave behind. He could try and cache them, he knows, but something—wolverine, or bear—would find them soon enough. A damn shame. He piles branches and grass around the stack of rich furs, and chips stones until a spark catches. Soon the hides are a billowing black crackling pyre, like a small volcano on the gravel riverbank.

  Trapper trembles but without feeling as he watches the black smoke, as he watches the ghosts of the animals return to the sky. There is no spirit world, he thinks. There is just her, whom he wants to capture, on the other side of the river. If he can capture her—that blur through the forest, that movement in the corner of his mind’s eye—all will be made new again.

  Spirit world, my butt, he thinks, turning to look at the river. He loads his traps into the round boat, readies the paddles he’s cut and carved, and pushes out into the rapids. The river is wild with the loud underwater clunks of rocks tumbling against one another. It’s so frigid that he won’t even live long enough to drown if the boat capsizes.

  He rows like crazy, his small violet eyes fixed firmly on the far shore. He feels the rocks clacking beneath him, the force of this one river on this one immense earth. Rapids drench him, slicking back his thin white hair. He watches the shore without blinking. Remembers, in a glimpse, Uncle Harm’s mangled face.

  Remembers a coyote he saw running off with one of his drags. The coyote was too smart to try and pull the drag, a grappling hook, through the brush, where it would get hung up. Instead, the coyote carried the drag-hook in his mouth, running along on three legs, that fourth foot flopping whenever the trap hit the ground, but running, and he escaped: looking back at Trapper with that one foot raised and the drag in his mouth.

  Pulling hard on the oars. The far shore closer now, close enough to see small blue flowers blooming on the bank. And the smell of the woods: her woods.

  5

  It’s spring, and bears are coming up out of the earth. For twelve days they have staggered through the woods like drunk sailors. They can’t quite wake up, and their eyesight—poor to begin with—is worse than ever. They walk into trees and fall over. The bears stretch and yawn, as if trying to wake up, and they’re exceedingly dangerous at this time. Trapper moves through the woods with caution, head down, looking for Judith’s curved tracks. He allows himself to think of her breasts, which remind him of apples.

  Bears are staggering through the woods and roll on their backs, trying to stand up straight, and Trapper says to one, “Brother, I know how you feel,” and passes right by it. Remembers that the Indians revered the grizzly so much that they wouldn’t even speak the bear’s name, whether out in the woods hunting it or back in camp talking about it.

  Instead, they would give the bear goofy names like “Grandfather,” “Good Father,” “Worthy Old Man,” “Illustrious One,” and even “The Master.”

  Master, my ass, Trapper thinks, stepping around another wobbly bear just up from the earth. The bear is spitting up a small pile of sticky wet green leaves, having eaten too much, too fast, in its lust for the new life.

  He knows he should kill them and skin them out, but the hide’s no good for trading in the spring.

  For a week he sees bears rolling drunk in the woods, as they try to get oriented.

  “You’re lucky, friend,” he says to another. “You’re going to get better.”

  Trapper’s still twitching. He has it firmly in his mind now that Judith can save him. That she will lay her hand on his forehead and the shakes will go away.

  In Arizona, after making love to her, Trapper would get a washcloth and dip it in a basin of cool water. Then he woul
d come over to the bedside and draw it slowly up the length of Judith’s panting body, starting at her summerdusty toes and drawing it slowly up her hot legs, over the mound of her sex, tickling, and like a sheet, across her concave belly, and like a wet curtain across her breasts.

  Up to her chin. Over her closed eyes.

  Patting her sweaty forehead with the wet washcloth.

  It was too long ago. He can never get back to that. But he’s got to chase it. That feeling of not being weak. Of being anything but weak.

  Even numbness is better than being weak.

  Trapper stops and rests often. He finds her tracks here and there: faint depressions in the moss. He suspects that she is staying within this one forest, that it has somehow become her new home (No! he thinks, dammit, I am her home!) and that she is reluctant to leave, to be driven off.

  He also thinks she wants to be trapped; if only so she can try to escape again.

  There’s a strange wormy feeling in his mind, and he can hear a buzzing, like night katydids. I love my prey, he thinks, forcing himself to his feet.

  Bear, lynx, and lobo all have a round, plump pad on each foot, but the older the animal, the flatter the pad wears until the ball is finally all gone and no pad at all is left—just a flat space.

  The female lynx has a shorter and smaller second toe on the hind foot than the male, and her front feet are a little rounder and neater than the male’s. The female lynx carries her young farther back in the body than any other wild animal. If she is heavy with kittens, the outside toe on both hind feet spreads out.

  Trapper studies the ground, and tries to catch Judith’s scent. At one spot, near a small hot spring where he feels certain she’s been bathing, he finds one of her club tracks in the moss and puts his nose in the depression and sniffs, closes his eyes and sniffs, but she’s clever... the sulfur odor of the spring confuses all scent, all instinct. Trapper has it in his mind that her beautiful shimmering yellow hair, which he so loved to brush, is a nest for static electricity, for glimmering ions leaving a magic, charged trail of cleanliness wherever she’s passed. If he concentrates hard enough on it, he thinks, he can follow this trail. And he’s tempted to track her that way—with passion, with desire, which he hasn’t felt in a long time.

  Trapper wants to lunge through the woods, hunting her hair-trail with this new, ten-years-gone passion; but remembers how Uncle Harm taught him to hunt, and how he has always hunted—giving himself over to the mindless, the barbaric, and shunning the mistakes of passion, regret, guilt.

  “A hunter slipping up on a moose,” Uncle Harm had preached, his face gouged and raked like the craters of the moon, but invisible in the darkness of the back porch—his white linen suit all they could see in his rocking chair, and his white Panama hat—“will make the animal uneasy by ‘concentrating’ his mind upon the animal.

  “Those who would catch a woodsman of the old school asleep do well to come carelessly,” Uncle Harm said. He’d been halfway like the Indians, in that respect, calling animals things like “woodsmen of the old school.” Trapper had heard him refer to one grizzly as “Golden Friend of Fen and Forest” and had had to ask him what the hell he was talking about.

  It was when Harm started getting really old, Trapper remembered, that he began to develop all the respect: all that Golden Friend shit. Trapper knew it for what it really was: fear. Coyote fear.

  Still, there had never been a better trapper than Judith’s Uncle Harm.

  “A stealthy approach,” Harm had preached, “seems to establish some telepathic communication with the subconscious mind of one who lives with nature. This faculty is borrowed from the animals, and is common among Indians.”

  Harm was a savage, Trapper thinks. He wore a fancy-ass suit in the evenings, but all he was was a savage. Wouldn’t fool with doctors. If he got a wound and it became infected, he would lie down in the shallows of the creek, would crawl out into the reeds and let the minnows come in and nibble away the afflicted flesh, and clean it that way.

  A savage, with a heart too hardened by killing, he thinks.

  Flowers. Women like flowers. This time I will keep fresh flowers on the table.

  From the ridge above, standing in a grove of budding-out birch trees, Judith watches as her young-old husband moves in a slow circle in the woods around the hot spring, carefully setting leg-hold traps just under the old rotting leaves. She watches him crouch and sniff at her newbathed tracks; watches his smashed hands touch the tracks, watches him lower his nose to the tracks once more and sniff.

  Despite herself, Judith lifts her hand to her hair, and touches it, strokes it once.

  At night, she hears him howling in her woods. Her woods! She feels the hairs on the back of her neck rising.

  ***

  He’s trembly, but he knows he could outrun her, if only he could catch sight of her. Her scent is everywhere. He’d chase her toward a ridge and catch her going up it; Trapper’s legs are thick, like a bear’s, so that he goes faster charging uphill than downhill.

  The Eskimos hunt birds with bolas, little balls of ivory or bone at the ends of strong sinew cords at least a yard long. The hunter whirls at least half a dozen over his head and hurls them among a flock of geese or ducks so that the balls will spread out in their flight. One of them is always sure to tangle itself around the wing or limb of a bird and send it crashing to the ground.

  Trapper fashions bolas in the afternoons, resting his tired legs, lying in wait by the hot spring.

  Judith watches from the ridge, furious. She slips down to the river and must wash her hair in the cold glacier-silt water. It’s not the same as her spring.

  Trapper can sense Judith’s anger, and knows he’s being watched. He smiles.

  Why won’t he leave me alone? Judith wonders. All I want is my life.

  God, that Uncle Harm was a numb bastard, Trapper thinks as he whittles on the bolas. He remembers a game he and Harm used to play—a game that Uncle Harm taught him—called sleep-a-night-and-die.

  They’d whittle long, slender, barbed shafts of bone and fit them into a socket at the end of juniper arrows. Then they’d sit on the porch and wait for some small animal to come out of the willows—a nose-wrinkling rabbit, a dusk-wary coyote, even a gentle doe.

  They’d fire their sleep-a-night-and-die arrows at their intended victim, proud to be killing not with the machinery of guns and traps, but just killing.

  Shot into a deer or rabbit or coyote, the barbed point would separate from the arrow socket, floating free in the flesh, and go searching for some vital part with each fleeing step of the creature; it would rankle and twist with each step, ever enlarging and irritating the wound, until the animal died.

  ***

  A myth of bears, Trapper thinks: they’ll bring others of their own kind, caught in a trap, food, to ease their hunger, to give comfort. Wolves, yes—he’d seen that often—but never bears.

  ***

  If she’s not coming to water at the hot springs, Trapper thinks one moonless night—his wormy mind barely moving in his sleep, like the slow coils of a snake on a cold day—then she must be going to the river.

  He rises in the night, crosses the ridge, and sets some new traps and snares. Builds a deadfall, too: not too big—he doesn’t want to kill her, he says to himself, confused—but big enough, by damn, to hold her.

  Then goes back to sleep: to dream of animals attacking him.

  ***

  Judith wakes on the riverbank, listening to the spring sounds of the geese heading back north—snow geese, Arctic geese. If Trapper approaches, she thinks, she’ll simply leap up and dive into the cold river and swim away. She’ll swim for a hundred years, if she has to. She’ll get away, or die trying. The water is so cold. She doesn’t think she could make it, but she’ll try, if she has to.

  At dawn she rises and looks at the river and considers building her own raft: leaving her woods. She listens to the river’s lovely roar, feels the great and terrible force, feels it in the
gravel at her feet. Leans her head into the river, dips her head under, and washes her hair: scrubs the ions away.

  All forests should have at least one man and one woman in them, Judith thinks, as she washes her hair. They are on the same side of the river now, but there is still that other river that separates them... and it is no good. We spend our silly lives crossing back and forth over that river, she thinks, rather than swimming in it, being carried downstream in whatever manner the drifts and great force will take us.

  All forests deserve one man and one woman, Judith thinks, but this man is crazy, has gone over to some other world, and this woman, she thinks—this woman, standing up and leaning her head back and squeezing the water out of her hair—is going back downstream. Maybe not all the way to Arizona, but somewhere. Someplace.

  The new birch leaves are rattling in the breeze. She will climb the ridge and look down on the poor sick shell of her husband, the past of him, one more time.

  How many others have fallen to Trapper in this manner, betrayed by curiosity, and a moment’s hesitation—a tempering of what was previously brute fear and headlong, terrified flight? He’s caught five hundred lynx by fastening a glittering strip of metal above the trap. And though it is not of his planning, it works this way for Judith; while watching Trapper—that one last look—she does not pay enough attention to herself or where she is going, and walks right beneath his deadfall: bumps the branch holding it above her.

  Despite herself, she cries out in pain at how it has crushed her; and he hears the thump of the log landing on her, and hears her cry—What was that? he wonders. Lion? Wolf? Lynx? Could it be her?—and he starts up the ridge toward the sound, eager-hearted, young again.

  And caught under the deadfall, with her shoulder broken, her leg in a leather snare, waiting for him to approach, unable to twist and look back at the river below her, but hearing it, hearing it, what Judith is thinking as she imagines his approach with the club, is this: I know he loves me.