The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  ***

  In the early sixties, I went to school with a girl whose father was president of a ranchers’ social organization known as the Predator Club. Their headquarters was out west, on the county line, in a leaning shack with dusty windows and one bare light bulb overhead. It was next to the bar (the Starlight), and as county agent, Father would sometimes stop by the Predator Club’s meetings, mostly to just let them know he was alive and in the world. They didn’t like him and he didn’t like them. Complicating Father’s duties and life was the fact that in theory part of his job description was to act as a liaison for those ranchers seeking governmental assistance (poison, aerial machine gunning, and so on) in eradicating predators (foxes, coyotes, bobcats, crows, owls, raccoons, jackrabbits, mountain lions—the whole food chain) from their ranch lands. Father always refused to help them, though, saying it was against his religious beliefs.

  These men saw Prade Ranch as a breeding ground for the wild beasts who would then come in the night and make raids on their brain-dead cattle herds and their rangemaggot stinking sprawls of sheep.

  The ranchers received free poison, and received bounties for the predators they killed. It was all a huge game, like chopping firewood for the winter: seeing who could gather the biggest stack of dead wild animals to take in for bounties. At the Predator Club meetings, the men would drink, shoot pool, play cards, tell stories, and strengthen their social bonds, while out on the prairie, to the north and east, the full moon rose, the wild creatures came carefully out of their burrows, stirred in their nests: fed their young, and listened to the far-off sound of a truck out on a country road, or the sound of some ranch dog barking... They waited for the sounds of man to cease, around two or three in the morning, so that they could then come out and have three or four hours before daylight, when the world that was once theirs would be returned to them, late in this century of loss, and of fear...

  Although federal law prohibited the killing of endangered species such as golden and bald eagles, state law did not, and the feds were a long way away. There wasn’t anything Father could do to get the Predator Club to stop killing coyotes and crows, but he let them know if he caught them killing eagles, he would do his best to send them to jail.

  I know that they would have killed him, to keep from going to jail.

  During that time of the Predator Club—those monthly meetings—happiness left our home, and we’d be tense, even irritable. Sometimes (unknown to my father), Chubb and Grandfather would ride out with guns and park in the dark and keep hidden watch on the Predator Club meetings that my father attended.

  We all knew they shot at eagles, chased them in helicopters. They didn’t dare fly over Prade Ranch—several years earlier, Grandfather had fired his rifle at the helicopter and put a hole in the rear fuselage. He could very easily have hit the gas tank (“I was aiming for the gas tank,” he told us, but in court he had to say that he was just firing a warning shot, and that he hadn’t meant to hit them...).

  But still, especially in the spring, we’d hear the helicopters, hear the gunfire. The eagles congregated in larger and larger numbers above our canyon, drifting on the thermals. I believe without a moment’s hesitation they gave us a blessing, that the accumulated weight of their bronze-gold wingbeats made it a holy spot, both for them and for us.

  I heard Mother and Father whispering about it some nights; I heard Grandfather and Father talking about it, always growing quiet whenever I came in the room—they who had never been quiet around me, so that I knew it was a dangerous thing.

  The girl I went to school with—the daughter of a sheep rancher, the Predator Club’s president—there was something wrong with her—something missing—some ability to take joy from life, some mercy. The rest of us shied away from her because of this strange sickness that emanated from her. It wasn’t her fault, but still, like healthy animals shunning a sick one, we avoided her, even all the ranchers’ sons and daughters whose fathers were in the Predator Club with her—Alicia’s—father.

  She just wasn’t right.

  Being cast out, of course, aggravated her condition—her otherness—and because in many respects I had my own otherness, my own certain distance from the herd, Alicia turned her resentment on me. She watched me. Even in her eyes, she was not right. Sometimes I’d feel that there was so much sickness in her that it was spilling out of her, and that wherever she looked, that sickness would spread.

  I am trying to remember all the pleasant things about the country—all the good things—but there was this, too, and like the good things, it also was, I suppose, part of the gradual strengthening, part of the process whereby one becomes wedded to the land, becomes laid down into it, heart and memory and soul, like a formation of rock: a family. A generation, or two or three.

  What I mean to say is that I have two things, two secrets, that I am not proud of, growing up. These things are part of the land, too, now, and part of me.

  The first thing was the golden eagle I found along the river one September. At first I thought it was a man wearing feathers, it was so large. The day was extraordinarily still—everything seemed frozen, with only the river moving past—and I thought that the eagle, or man, was only sleeping, and so I approached carefully, tiptoeing over the white-bleached rocky shoals: certain that my approach would cause the man, or the eagle, to wake up and fly away.

  The closer I got, the more luminous the body seemed to get, the bronze feathers becoming even more bronze in that late September sunlight, and I could see that there were injuries—broken feet, a fractured wing, and several bullet holes across the wide, feathered back—but still I believed that the man, or eagle, was only resting, and that it would get up and fly away.

  Even when I sat down next to it and touched it, I believed that it was only resting.

  I sat next to the bloody rocks (in my tears it seemed that the white caliche, the soil itself, was bleeding—that the blood had not come from the eagle, but up from the ground itself) and I rested my hand on the eagle’s back, whose feathers were warm in the sun, and whose eyes were closed (beautiful blue eyelids, like a man’s). But when the sun went down behind the ridge the body began to grow cool, then cold, and I lay down and covered as much of it as I could with my body, to keep it warm.

  Later, long after nightfall, I woke up and heard the bell ringing, and left my shin over the eagle’s back and hurried home.

  I did not tell my father, or anyone, about the eagle. I didn’t want our lives to change. I didn’t want to bear testimony.

  The next morning when I went back out at dawn—running, to rejoin the eagle—I stopped when I saw that my shin was off the eagle, and I thought that the eagle had gotten up and moved around in the night, trying to heal itself. But when I got to the eagle I saw that it was deader than the day before, and that the wind must have just blown the shin off.

  I spent that day and the next (a Sunday) carrying the eagle across the river and up to the cliffs. It was much taller than I was, and heavier. I kept falling and cutting myself. I’d stop and rest and feel how the talons were like swords. I’d open one of the eagle’s eyes and stare into it. I’d stroke the great curved beak.

  By Saturday night when Mother rang the bell for me to come in, I had the eagle almost to the top of the mountain—I shed my clothes at the river and bathed before dressing again and hurrying home—and then on Sunday, I got the eagle to the top of the mountain.

  I carried it to the deepest, thickest woods I knew of, up above the cliffs—the river so far below it was like only a thread—and I climbed up in a big dead oak that hung out over the canyon and placed the eagle’s body in a fork of the dead oak. The oak was dry and hollow-rotty, and pieces of it cracked and crumbled and spilled over the edge of the cliff, vaporized into dust-nothings as they fell to the river so far below that they would never reach it—and with leather strips I lashed the eagle high in the tree, in this place where the river could be seen below but where the eagle could not be seen (backdrop of tall ce
dar obscuring the skyline: the eagle hiding), and I bound the eagle’s wings so that they were outspread, seven feet wide, uplifted as if on a crucifix, and I tied his head upright so that he could see all below, and all beyond, and lashed his feet to the branch, curled those steel talons into and around the wood so they would never let go. The wind was always blowing up on the ridgeline, and it blew and ruffled his feathers, and when I left, he was still sitting like that, head up and wings outstretched, ready at any moment, in any life, to take flight: poised at the edge, ready.

  That night I dreamed of the oak tree flying; that the eagle had taken flight and carried the great tree away with him, the tree bound to his ankles. It was a windy night, gusting and straining against our tin roof, and I got up and went outside to look at the moon and to watch the sky, to see if I would see the great bird carrying the giant tree away, but I saw nothing, only clouds and moon, yet there was a kind of an echo, as if I had just missed it: as if, had I come out on the porch a second earlier, I would have seen it.

  I was sick for a week after that, in bed with a high fever, and when I next went back to check on the eagle, the feathers were beginning to come off. I took one off and carried it home to keep in my cedar chest, where it still rests—but the eagle’s grip on that branch remained as firm as ever, until by the time I went away to college there was only the skeleton of the eagle, wind whistling through the bones, through the eye sockets, making a whistling sound perhaps not unlike the sound eagles make to themselves as they fly two miles above the earth—this eagle skeleton holding up the tree’s skeleton—and then one year when I came home from college, the tree and the eagle were gone. I crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked down, but saw nothing.

  ***

  The second thing I am not proud of is also a sin of omission. The girl I went to school with, the one whose scent was different—the one no one liked, without knowing why—the girl whose father was president of the Predator Club—told us what her father did with lambs.

  She was bragging, trying for friends, or even for a touch, a whisper of intimacy. The Predator Club kept a running list in the newspaper of the number of livestock suspected of having been killed by predators. (If a lamb disappeared, or was found dead—even if uneaten, or unscavenged—it was also counted as killed-by-predators.) One of the duties of the members of the Predator Club involved a conscious effort to keep predators under sustained negative light. The members wrote regular letters-to-the-editor detailing the stock they’d lost, and to which predator, and in which grisly manner. (I was reminded of the game that Omar and I played as children: seizing a turkey drumstick and shaking it back and forth, pretending that it was a human arm or leg.)

  Each issue of the weekly paper had at least one letter that detailed graphically the wild savagery seething out in the brush, just out of sight—the evil that pulsed beneath the fur of the wild things. A visitor to Real County would think the human race was under attack.

  It is spring again and I have lost another babe lamb to the wolf of the sky, the feathered Adolf Hitler—the gold eagle come out of the sun and struck lamb and ewe and pulled there [sic] entrils out and flew away with entrils hanging like a joke, smiling...

  and

  I have seen mother coyotes teach their young how to torment, tossing mice in the air repeatedly, torturing them. These kinds of coyotes are a danger to humans and also have lots of diseases. They chase pregnant mama cows on moonlit nights until the fetus is aborted and then do a victory dance around the stillborn calf, yaping [sic] and dancing but never touching the carcass...

  and often, a variation (or sometimes direct reprint) of this one:

  My grandfather came here in ought-eight and fought hard to get rid of all the varmints. That poison the land with their evil. I don’t know why his work should go for not. He made sure the Indians didn’t come back too so it is safe for God-fearing hard-working white people! People are more important than skunks, and so all skunks and other predators should be killed. Skunks eat turkey eggs! Did you know that?

  In the spring when I was fourteen—imagining, through myself, what she had been like when she was fourteen—there was a rash of eagle predation on the great herds of sheep that scoured the hillsides of Real County. The state officials (who were owned by the agriculture industry) condoned the eagle killings that followed; the feds did not, and they sent some of their men in to break it up. One of those federal men was shot and wounded. There were rumors that my father was not a county employee, but a fed also: an informer. The only thing that saved him perhaps was his outspokenness against eagle-killing; if he’d been an informer, he would’ve been quiet and secretive, like a fox.

  He was like a crow or an owl, however: scolding, calling out. Every spring we’d see between ten and twenty golden eagles, including some nesting pairs. (They mate for life.) That year—the year that Mother’s life in the rocks was in its second year—that year, we saw only one golden eagle. We didn’t find any poisoned animals on Prade Ranch, but Father said he was finding them on the roadsides, in his travels: 1080, he suspected.

  He said that neighbors were acting differently, whenever he stopped in.

  Father picked up some of the robins and rabbits and raccoons and dogs and cats and foxes and squirrels he found on the roadside and sent them all to Austin to be tested.

  1080 and massive doses of strychnine.

  The land was aching with poison. For the first time, we were afraid to drink the water straight from the river, as we’d done all our lives.

  Outside of our ranch, the world seemed to consist of nothing but sheep, cows, and goats. Sheep, cows, goats. The mohair market was up that year, and goats especially flooded the hills. Whenever I got off of Prade Ranch it was like a foreign country.

  The girl at school who bragged, Alicia, told us things about her father. About the eagle claws he kept: about the necklace he’d made her of their beaks and talons, and how she kept it buried in a cedar box, in a secret place.

  No one believed her. But as eagle killings continued to be in the news, she kept insisting that her father had killed hundreds, and that she had all their talons, that they were strung on leather, made into bracelets and necklaces, and that they kept them hidden “because of the g.d. feds.”

  All right, so where are they hidden? we wanted to know. Prove it. But Alicia only shook her head, said that she couldn’t. She said her father had said the whole family would go to jail forever if the g.d. feds found out.

  Bull, we said. Liar. And turned away, annoyed that we’d paused to listen to the clatter of her tinny words but delighted by the delicious taste of blood, delighted by the anguish we could feel descending upon her as we drifted away. It was like—we knew this in our minds, could taste it—like pulling a sheet back and walking away with it, leaving her bare body exposed, a quivering body that’s been burned badly and needs that sheet’s cool light touch to give the body a moment’s peace, even a moment’s ecstasy...

  Bull, we said, pulling that sheet back as we walked away. The other girls would wander off to play and I would wander off to stand under a tree and read...

  She was quiet about it then for a long time. My guess is that someone at school mentioned it to his or her father, who was in the club, who then mentioned it to Alicia’s father, who doubtless roared at Alicia.

  But in May, too lonely to stand it, she began mentioning it again. Bull, everyone said, but this time I saw it was for real. This time I could feel what I had missed before. And she must have seen the way I looked at her and believed, then—the way I did not say bull when all the other boys and girls did.

  I turned away and went over to my tree to read. But this time it did not feel like we were pulling the blanket away because this time someone—me—had left her with hope.

  Three days later she came over to my tree at recess and pulled one of the eagle-bracelets out of a brown paper bag, and just held it there, until I reached out and touched it, pressed my fingers against the points of the talons, t
o see that it was real.

  I looked at her and saw her for the first time.

  She was so blind in her fear—like a girl put in a closet and shouted at, and kept in that closet, not let out until after dark—that she couldn’t even think, or consider, who my father was. She was so desperate that it didn’t matter; there was only the moment. I touched the razor talons, almost pierced the tip of my finger against them, and I believed: I believed then and still do that that moment may have saved her, may have pulled her out of the ocean in which she was drowning, sinking like an anvil...

  We never became friends. We never even talked again. But I’d look at her in class sometimes, and she’d see me, and she’d know then that she existed—that even if she wasn’t loved, or popular, neither was she invisible—that had ended the moment I’d touched the eagle’s talons—and I marveled at how much power and magic animals have, and what the eagle had, even after death.

  We have traded away our mysticism for a few ears of corn, for a crop of maize, or chickens, or cows, or trinkets.