by Rick Bass
We took the old parchment back into the dining room. Outside, the fireflies were just beginning to blink. It was lonely, without Omar in the house. We were down to just three of us.
The first letter was from a trip Homer Young had made a few counties to the west, looking for work as a school teacher. It was dated February 17, 1902.
Dear Chubb and Frank,
Landlord Holman, of the Monahan Hotel, who is an old-timer here, informs me that the List buffalo in this region was killed in the winter of 1885 by a professional hunter, George Fischer, who is credited with having killed more buffalo than any other man in Texas. People said they didn’t like this arid country and were not found hereabouts, but in the fall and summer of 1884, Fischer killed several over near the southeast corner of New Mexico, and finally, in January 1884, while riding to Midland, came up with the last two remaining animals, a cow and a calf, near a water hole. Fischer shot the cow and roped the calf, which he finally turned over to Mr. C. C. Winn, of Fort Worth, who eventually had it killed for a large barbecue. Said the meat was reported as “tasty.”
The twilight deepened. Grandfather stared at the old paper a long time. I was furious that mother wasn’t here to see it, to hear it: and strangely upset with Grandfather, too, that he’d forgotten to share it with her.
It still seemed as if she had just gone away for a little while. After all this time, it still seemed like she would be coming back, and that we could tell her about it then.
I saw that Grandfather was crying without sound: his eyes glistening, and his cheeks wet. A tear spackling the old paper.
He shuffled listlessly through the papers. Even Stan, who’d stepped in quietly, was paying attention.
“Here’s another one,” Grandfather sang. “From Fredericksburg Hotel, March 20, 1905.”
Yours of 15th in hand. In regard to the jaguar, we killed him Thursday night, September 3. Big moon. I will give you some of the particulars. Old Mr. Brooks came to go hunting with me that night. I had a boy staying with me by the name of John Dallas Thompson. We took supper at my home and then started for the mountains, three miles, and treed him in a small Spanish oak. Old Mr. Brooks shot him in the body with a Colt .45. He fell out of the tree and the hounds ran him about half a mile and bayed him. Old Mr. Brooks had lost his bullets in the chase so I stayed with him while Brooks and the boy, John Dallas, went back to Willow City after more guns and ammunition. I was sorry we had caught up with him and sorry we had shot at him and tried to make him leave the tree, but he wouldn’t.
In about an hour and a half Brooks and Thompson came back and brought several men with them, so then the fight commenced. We had to ride into the shinnery and drive him out, and we got him killed just at twelve o’clock that night. We commenced the fight with ten hounds, but when we got him killed there were three dogs with him, and one of them wounded. He killed one dog and very nearly killed several others, causing them to run home. He also got hold of Howard Burner’s horse and bit it so bad it died from the wounds.
The jaguar measured 7 ½, feet from tip to tip, 36 inches around chest, 26 inches around head, 21 inches around forearm, 9 ¼, inches across the bottom of the foot. Weight, 140 pounds.
In regard to how the jaguar came there, my idea is that it made its way up the San Saba River and across the Colorado and up toward Gillespie County. I took particular note of the country around Fredericksburg and in that part where the animal was killed it is rough with rocky ridges which they call “mountains,” running parallel with the creeks and rivers, with uneven valley lands between the streams and the mountains. There is no tall timber, but the entire country is covered with a thick brush, or chaparral, consisting chiefly of shin oak thickets known as the “shinnery”; also sumac thickets and Spanish oak clumps with live oaks along the creeks.
Grandfather closed his eyes when he had finished reading, and appeared to be asleep, but then he opened his eyes and looked straight at me with eyes so clear that I knew he was seeing everything: not just me, and not just my mother, thirty years ago, but into the future, too—into the very near future.
I took the dishes in, Stan and I cleaned them, and then we all went out onto the porch to pick up the baseball game. It was windy, and it was hard finding the signal: the voice sounded very small and far away, and kept drifting in and out, almost a whisper.
That night in bed with Stan I listened to the wind rock the tin roof of the house. He was warm, and I moved in closer against him, even as in my mind I moved farther away. So far away. All the way back to the northeast corner.
We were down to three of us, and then we would be down to two, and then to one. And then there would just be the land. This thought comforted me, and I fell asleep listening to the wind rock us to sleep.
***
Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I’d been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather’s hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight.
“Sycamores grow by running water,” he sang, “cotton-woods by still water,” and then he died, and I felt a century-slip away.
***
I live here on the Prade Ranch alone—already years beyond the age my mother was when she returned to the ranch—to the particular elements of the earth: soil, water, carbon, sky. You can rot or you can burn but either way, if you’re lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. You trade your life for the privilege of this experience—the joy of a place, the joy of blood family; the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing.
For most of us, we get stronger slowly, and then get weaker slowly, with our cycles sometimes in synchrony with the land’s health, though other times independent of its larger cycles. We watch and listen and notice as the land, the place—life—begins to summon its due from us. It’s so subtle... a trace of energy departing here, a trace of impulse missing there. You find yourself as you have always been, square in the middle of the metamorphosis, constantly living and dying: becoming weaker in your strength, finally. Perhaps you notice the soil, the rocks, or the river, taking back some of that which it has loaned to you; or perhaps you see the regeneration occurring in your daughter, if you have one, as she walks around, growing stronger. And you feel for the first time a sweet absence...
I remember a game Omar and I used to play, when we were small. Scorpions would glow in the dark, after we’d loaded them up with light by shining our flashlight on them. Not every scorpion would glow like this, but some would—about one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand. We’d lift up rocks, under the moonlight, and shine our lights on the scorpions’ backs, looking for such a specimen. And then when we’d find one, we’d fill him with the light from our flashlights, then shut the lights off and follow him, glowing in the dark, across the caliche streambeds, across the slick rock, and across the hills, following him until the glimmer faded, and there was only silence.
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About the Author
RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
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