The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  By nightfall, I was in my mother’s arms.

  Certainly the land impressed itself upon me, as I was carried and then walked across it, learning—imprinting—Prade Ranch’s various slants of light, the sound of Grandfather’s snores, the constant murmurs and splashings of the East Fork, and the birdsongs, the teeming bird cries that became, each spring, a symphony. All of these became my home, my rules and systems, the borders within which I lived, and to do harm to or take any one of them away would have fragmented part of my self. And it occurred to me by the time I was a teenager that I had become part of the land, every bit as much a part of it as sparrow eggs or thrasher nest, garter snake or oak tree, and that the rest of my life, or anyone’s life, would be a gradual learning process, a journey toward fitting into one’s home, for those of us lucky enough to still recognize what is home... that which we are a part of, rather than estranged from. And rather than using the word “lucky,” perhaps I should use the word grace.

  They were all four good teachers: Grandfather, Father, Mother, and Chubb. I suppose I take after Grandfather the most, with regard to being in the woods. One of my first memories is of when I was three or four years old, playing on the back porch in the twilight while the grown-ups finished supper. Chubb was eager to get back to his cabin before true dark, and was trying to say his good-nights. My mother and father were moving slower, however, sitting back in the darkness and watching the dusk come in, listening to the birds and sipping margaritas. They were both dressed in white that day, and back in the dimness then, and in the dimness of memory now, I could just see their shapes, not their faces. But I remember the moment.

  A nighthawk had flown into the yard and was leaping about in the grass, flushing and then chasing insects, not thirty feet away from us. In future years, while out walking in winter, Omar and I would sometimes find nighthawks huddled in a hole in the ground as cold as an ice cube, in a state not unlike hibernation, called torpor, where their body temperature lowers to whatever the surrounding temperature is. We’d carry them home (their huge dark luminous night-eyes wet and unblinking, believing, perhaps, that it was all only a dream). Again, amoral—but wild—Omar and I would warm the birds in the oven at 125 degrees, until they slowly came back to life. We’d watch them through the glass door of the oven, and when they began to stir, we’d open the oven door and let them fly out, circling the kitchen once or twice before heading out the open door and back into the cold, where they would promptly “hibernate” again, for there were no insects out in such weather, and it would have been a waste of their energy, and their life, to look for a thing that was not there...

  But this time that I am remembering—my first conscious memory—is from before the arrival of Omar. We were on the back porch watching this nighthawk chase moths, and Chubb was fidgeting, anxious to get back to his cabin before the light was gone.

  I don’t remember the words, but the import of what was happening was that Chubb believed that all nighthawks were “goatsuckers”—that they flitted low to the ground like that, right at dusk, trying to come up out of the grass and suck on the udders of all the animals in the woods—not just the goats, cows, and sheep on the surrounding ranches, but the deer in our woods. Grandfather said this was ridiculous, miffed that Chubb would believe such an old wives’ tale. Chubb said that he always saw the nighthawks hovering under the bellies of animals at dusk, that he had seen them suck, and that the next day the animal’s milk had been dry—sucked out.

  It was a big argument. Why the two men—the closest of friends—would argue so vehemently, I couldn’t understand, though I realize now that birds were their passion, and that when passion’s involved...

  I could hear the nighthawks soft tremulous whirring as it flounced through the tall grass. I tried to concentrate on that, rather than on the two men arguing. Mother and Father said nothing: staying back in the darkness, sipping those drinks. Fireflies.

  Grandfather was sputtering. He said that the nighthawks were chasing the bugs that swarmed the sweaty beasts, and that in the failing light that nighthawks like to hunt in, it just appeared that they were suckling the livestock. Grandfather said that what Chubb must have seen, and what all the “previous generations of blind, inattentive, head-bobbing myth-mongers,” before Chubb (I’m imagining this now, knowing Grandfather) must have seen was nighthawks pecking insects off of the animal’s hide, so that it would have looked like the nighthawks were nursing. And that if the udders did occasionally dry up the next day, it was from the fright of being swarmed by the nighthawks, or maybe even by being pecked by one.

  Chubb was insistent, however. Nothing less than his entire culture was at stake—goatsuckers is what they were called in Mexico, and in deep South Texas, and goatsuckers is what they were.

  And nothing less was at stake for Grandfather—his crusty belief in anarchy, his certainty that everyone was lazy, that no one thought things out for themselves anymore, that the world was going to hell in a hand basket, and it was because of a loss of attention to detail, a lapse in our glorious God-given ability to observe.

  I thought the two men were going to strike each other—each was so angry at, and disappointed with, the other—each shocked by and convinced of this stupendous flaw they’d discovered in each other simultaneously, and feeling tricked, feeling let down...

  Fireflies began to blink out in the yard as never before. A great horned owl began to boom down on the creek—by Chubb’s cabin—and more nighthawks, or goatsuckers, appeared in the yard, swarming among the hundreds, perhaps thousands of fireflies, like huge bats, while those nighthawks that were still hidden in the grass below continued to chirr their eerie, drifting, murmuring calls that were impossible to locate, calls which seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  “A hawk don’t drink milk,” Grandfather would have said, talking the way he did when he was angry. And then Chubb would have said, one more time, but less insistently—his culture, his identity!—“Goatsucker.”

  I remember thinking they were going to scuffle. And I remember feeling Chubb’s terror at being stranded there on the porch, at being surrounded by the dark, and robbed of his identity as well, as the truth of what Grandfather was saying—the possibility of it—began to sink in. I could feel Chubb, hot as an oven, standing next to me.

  It was a dark like 1 have never seen—full of the swirling green tracer-flights of fireflies, and echoing with the strange calls of the great horned owl and the everywhere wavering ghostly calls of the nighthawks. I remember that Grandfather did not strike Chubb, then, but did something far worse: he said, “Go on, then, run, you big ninny,” and there was nothing for Chubb to do but run, giving a short yelp as he jumped down off the porch and ran through the night, through the lightning bugs, running for the light of his cabin, but running toward the terrible sound of the great owl, which, for all he knew, was resting on the eave above his front door, waiting for him. Chubb yelped and cried out as he ran—surprising the nighthawks resting in the grass, which leapt up and brushed their feathers against him—and I heard Grandfather roar, “Go on, you lily, run, the goatsuckers are after you!” and then I heard the door to Chubb’s cabin slam, and there was nothing but the continued soft peents of nighthawks, sounding subdued now, and Grandfather’s heavy breathing, as if he’d been the one doing the running, and an odd, frightening silence there on the porch then, a kind of confusion, with no one saying anything, and everyone bothered by something, and I stood on the edge of consciousness, of complexity and paradox, and after a while the owl began to hoot again, and the summer katydids and tree frogs began to sing.

  It must have been tough for my Grandfather to have lived when he did, in between the wild and the tame—to have seen regularly wolves, lions, and bears in this country, and then to see nothing—to have so much taken away. I don’t hold him accountable for his moments of rough wildness or cruelty, which were rare and always far apart. In light of what the world had brought him, it seems that perhaps he could have used even more
rough wildness than that which was already in him. That even, rough as he was, he was still too tender. I hope my own core will, through time, become strengthened to be at least as durable as his.

  And if his roughness were a thing that needed forgiving—if there somehow were anyone in a moral position of being able to judge his roughness-in-the-world—I think they would have to remember and balance his tenderness, too.

  There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.

  In the morning Grandfather took me with him when he took coffee down to Chubb, and they sat on his porch and drank it and watched the red-winged blackbirds screech and whistle in the windblown cattails along the creek while I played in the dust. I don’t know what was said. I remember feeling like everything was all right again. I remember a breeze in the tops of the trees. And I have never heard anyone in our family mention, or even acknowledge, the presence of nighthawks ever since, save Omar and me. This was a forgotten memory, one which the land resummoned in me only recently, on a walk along Panther Creek, and I shudder now to think of the discomfort it must have caused Chubb, Grandfather, and my mother and father a few years later, to see Omar and me carrying those winter-chilled nighthawks in from out of the fields. Those innocent, trusting, sleeping nightbirds.

  Those goatsuckers.

  ***

  Before Mother returned to the earth, before we chiseled the limestone resting spot six feet deep beneath the big oak—before Grandfather lost his voice, and before I set about trying to show Omar where she could still be found, and teaching or showing him the history of her, which he had missed, by being too young—for Grandfather was mute for history, now, and Father was numbed to history, no longer able to bear its weight—even before all that, it was simple: I would go into the woods with Grandfather, and sometimes with both Grandfather and Chubb, and would study the birds.

  By the age of five I could distinguish a lone coal black zone-tailed hawk from the flock of vultures it drifted with. I did not understand evolution then, how it benefited the zone-tailed hawk to mimic the vultures, drifting with them, but different, on the high thermals above the river canyon. The only big difference was that the zone-tail had yellow legs, so that it could identify itself to both the vultures and to other zone-tails, for mating purposes: but to the wary rodents below, who were color-blind, when they looked up at the sky, at the shadows that had passed in front of the sun, all they saw was a flock of vultures circling overhead, looking for something dead, not living.

  The rabbit, or squirrel, would look away, relieved, believing that it was vultures, not hawks.

  And then the one zone-tail, this tremendous bird, would fold its wings and dive, would fall out of the vultures’ formation in a stoop like that of a peregrine, only so much larger and more terrible, screaming silently toward the earth, toward the small mammal below, like a chunk of black iron, the vulture that was not a vulture, while above, the vultures continued to circle, as if pretending that nothing had ever happened.

  Pulling up out of its stoop at the last second, and swinging those yellow legs, those curved talons (like a bear’s) out from underneath the feathered plummet: this locomotive falling from the sky, the talons striking hard across the animal’s back with a force that usually snapped the spine instantly, and knocked the animal head over heels across the dust, into a clump of trees. (If the zone-tail’s talons got locked into the animal’s body, the zone-tail would go rolling along with its intended as well, and was sometimes injured, even killed, in that manner.)

  We try and map the boundaries, and to string fence—we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life. We’re all interrelated: we’re all one organism—hawk and rabbit, daughter and mother. After the kill, the zone-tail would hop over to his betrothed (warm blood trickling from the rabbit’s nose) and begin tearing at the fur. Tufts of the fur would be carried away on the river breeze like cottonwood fluff in the fall. The hawk would then begin pulling the bright-colored entrails out: would seize them in its beak and begin hopping backward, as if unraveling its prey.

  All of this duly noted by the vultures above, who witnessed, and perhaps even gave counsel to the scene: descending, a day later, to eat that which the hawk had been unable to finish.

  The price of life; the price of inclusion in life! There are no boundaries. It is all wrapped up together, all hawk-and-boar tumble, and if God does not take us out by the hawk, we will be eaten by the vultures. Had my mother lived, I think I would have been cast in one direction. In her death, I have probably been cast in another, though who can say for sure? I know our bloodlines shape us at least as strongly as does the land itself, and it is of some comfort to me to realize that even in her absence she has helped direct and shape me, as if still living—though strangely, I suspect, in a direction somewhat different from the path I would have taken had she lived. We bend and flex, and are altered, or alter ourselves. A kind of motion accrues, like the movement of a snake across sand. We find that we are changing and gaining direction whether we plan that direction or not.

  Grandfather and Chubb and I would hide motionless in the brush and watch the vultures, would watch as a zone-tail drifted in to join them, and we could detect, from slight behavioral differences, a certain alienation between the zone-tail and the vultures; but they accommodated one another, acknowledged the sheer uncontrollability of borders, and used that freedom to the best of nature’s imagination.

  Nature’s imagination. While my classmates were lying in front of the television watching commercials, I was watching a zone-tail drop from the sky (those splendid yellow legs, the telltale giveaway, tucked, hidden within the recesses of shiny, vulture-like, greasy black feathers) to strike the lead turkey in a flock of young poults not twenty yards away from where we were hiding...

  An explosion of iridescent copper and green and bronze and blue feathers, turkey feathers, turkey down, floating all around us as if there’d been a pillow fight, turkey feathers floating downwind, following the river’s breezes to Uvalde, and like a thief, Old Chubb ran out and stripped a piece of breast meat from the dead turkey (the rest of the stunned flock pausing a good ten seconds before scattering). The zone-tail shrieked its anger at Old Chubb, but he got away, and like pirates, the three of us shared that breast meat for supper that night with Grandfather saying a prayer first, like an Indian, thanking the zone-tail for “the bounty that is this life...”

  ***

  So many of my childhood memories involve a force from the sky, the silent approach of beautiful strength, beautiful speed. There are two old pear trees in front of the house, trees that were root-planted by Mother’s grandfather in the fall of the first year of this century. For decades those two trees have been making sweet pears, and one day as Mother and I were watching a squirrel go from branch to branch gathering the pears (dropping them to the ground, and having to start all over), Mother said, “He’d better watch out in the broad daylight like this—a hawk is going to get him”—and I scanned the blue sky but saw nothing, but five seconds later a red-tailed hawk came sailing through the pear tree and grabbed the squirrel on the fly. Into our lives, and then out, with the squirrel hanging limply from his talons. Strong wingbeats. Those two pear trees were sixty years old then, and only now, as they approach one hundred, are they beginning to slow down in their sweet-blossomed, profligate ways. The bounty. The squirrel was gone, just like that: eating pears in one instant, being carried over the horizon in the next. “Speak of the devil,” my mother had said with satisfaction, for although she loved squirrels, she also loved pears and hawks, and above all, small miracles, small secrets.

  Yet another time, when I was seven or so—Omar was in the world, but not yet old enough to go out
into the woods—I was down along the river with Grandfather and Chubb. I had been reading bird books and had developed a crush that week on peregrine falcons, noting on the bird index’s map that once we had been right on the edge of their distribution, but that the poisoning programs for rodents and coyotes, and the insecticides sprayed on the land, had all but exterminated them from the area. But the book said they liked river cliffs, and we certainly had such cliffs.

  We were standing on the sandbar beneath the magic spot—the high chalky cliff where Mother would be buried in a year. We were watching swallows through the binoculars. It was one of the few mistakes I ever saw Grandfather make in science, and it was not really so much a mistake as it was bad timing.

  “Are there any peregrines left out here?” I asked the two men, and Grandfather, angry at the beautiful birds’ loss, I think, growled, “Hell, no, I’ve never seen one out here in all my days, and believe me, if one was here, I’d have seen it”—and not three seconds had passed when Chubb pointed to the flock of swallows just as a peregrine falcon ripped into them, vaporizing its beloved prey, its lone intended, into a powder of feathers. I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for Grandfather too—that it reminded him (to never forget again) that the heart of it all is mystery, and that science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery—a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man’s knowledge.

  The thing about nature is that each species does what it’s best at. That’s why it’s all so locked together. I’m certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony—the white light people speak of having seen when they come back from “the dead.” And what does our species do best? We construct artificial systems wherein we are mighty predators, or mighty thinkers, or sagacious, benevolent rulers of the universe—allies with God, even—but I have spent my life (as has my family before me) outside of those artificial systems. I have spent my life in the brush—and I have seen what it is we do best, and that is to love and honor one another: to love family, and to love friends, and to love the short days. We are only peripheral trappings ourselves, on the outside of the mystery. We are songbirds.