The River Why

by David James Duncan

  The owl I’d heard came closer. It came closer and closer. Once I thought I saw it. It didn’t hoot or who. It had its own language—tree-consonants, wind-vowels. I didn’t understand, but I listened. Then it fluttered through the dome of red my fire made, landed on a dead limb close by. It was scruffy and gray and small. Its eyes were nothing but pupil: the entire eye could do nothing but see. And it was watching me. It spoke its wind-tree word and watched. It was scruffy and gray and small and alone. It lived here all the time. Way out here, all the time. Sometimes out here the sky turned gray and it rained for weeks on end: even then it lived here, that owl. We shared the fire dome. We watched each other. We kept each other company.

  I never heard the coyote again. I suppose it smelled me and ran. I suppose this was wise. I had no weapon; I wished it no harm; neither had I wished Alfred the Great harm. Neither had many people of my race wished trees or Indians harm. Coyotes, fish, trees, Indians—if anyone had the right to hate or fear, on sight, a man of my color, they did.

  In the blackness just beyond our dome, twigs cracked. Deer maybe. I thought of a Sasquatch, and felt foolish. I doubted the young Tillamook thought of a Sasquatch. Or if he did, I’ll bet he felt foolish. The twigs cracked again.… Whatever was cracking those twigs, it wasn’t a Sasquatch. Deer, maybe. Bear, maybe. No, not a bear. Not a cougar either. They’re too smart, bears and cougars. And too rare. Deer, maybe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a Sasquatch. To hell with Sasquatches. City-slicker yarn. Cootie of the mind. Cootie-stories. City folk in the wilds are full of ’em: I’d been with H2O on excursions where every night, as the campfire died, the women did nothing but gasp and squeal as the men did nothing but laugh and guzzle and tell about people (usually women, usually comely, sleeping women) who got mauled by bears, or screwed by cougars; or earwigs or centipedes crawled in their ears and ate into their brains; or leeches painlessly, silently sucked their blood away; or sleek rattlers glided onto their sleeker breasts and coiled, tongues flickering, hooded eyes gazing, hour after hour, till with the fading night and the fleeing snake fled their sanity, and at dawn friends found them, giggling and slobbering and chewing their lips forever; or spacemen came on kidnapping expeditions, or woods-zombies cruising for snacks of fresh flesh, or wildmen with horse-sized members, looking for mates—and always, in the end, the horrible sexy death, happily ever after. Cootie-deaths. Creepy crawly nasty deaths that waited in the wilds… that really did wait in the wilds: that waited in the wilds of a man’s mind.

  To hell with Sasquatches. To hell with cooties. The twigs kept cracking: to hell with them. They were just deer.… Maybe. The screech owl watched. It wasn’t scared. I turned to the fire and forgot the twigs. I lay down in the cedar boughs. I covered myself with branch and fern as best I could. I watched the coals till my eyes felt hot and the lids slid down to cool them. The cedar smelled good. I fell to sleep.…

  … and the dreams came so thick and fast the end of one was the middle of the next, and I tossed, squirmed, became a man on a dump—a huge dump, a small man, scruffy and small and alone. And the dump is alive! It’s moving! It heaves and writhes and it’s full of fragments of man and splinters of man and ghouls and cooties and cooties, and the small man lies on the dump, rides it like a cowpoke, stays in the saddle, rides and rides, and how can a cowpoke lie down and ride? because the saddle is on the ground, by the fire, by the coffee pot, by the lariat, the guitar, the boots, the hat, the chiggers, and it’s the man’s head and not the man’s butt that’s in the saddle, and the saddle is cinched to the dump, so he keeps on riding, rides and rides.…

  Brrr! Too cold… hard ground… fire’s down. build it back up. lie back down. fire flares up, eyes close, head sinks, twigs crack, don’t care, back in saddle, back on the dump, ride and ride; hard to stay on, impossible to fall off, keep on riding… brrr! fire’s down, ground’s hard; more wood, lie on other shoulder, flames and saddles, heave and writhe; cold and fire and can’t keep covered but wahoo! keep on! ride and ride…

  Gettin’ a little light, maybe. No. Too early to tell. More wood on fire. Brrr! Christ! Both shoulders ruined. Lie on back. At last, no dump: just hard, sound sleep.…

  It got light. The air was gray. The grass was white—frost. The fire was dead.

  I sat up, stiff, sore, smelling of cedar. My head had stopped fishing: no bites, no strikes, no glimpses, no Indian, no nothing. Just morning. A few clouds. And the owl—there in a vineleaf maple, stating its wind-tree word.

  I stood, groaning, my bones years closer to an arthritic old age than they’d been twelve hours before. Gathered more wood, made another fire, got warm. Walked back to the huckleberries, ate for a solid hour, got diarrhea. Different dump. What the hell was I doing here? Hooks, hands, and sources… got no coffee, no food, no car, forty miles on foot from home, and why? Buncha goddam malarkey, that’s why.

  I walked back and checked the fire. It was still smoldering, but safe. But I thought of Smokey the Bear and his broad-brimmed hat and shovel and belt-buckle and big brown eyes so I kicked dirt in the fire, stirred the fire, stomped the fire, spat in the fire, pissed on the fire—PHLECHHRBLRBLRBLT! What a stench!… damned Smokey! He’s practically a cootie!

  To escape the smell I walked. But I walked upstream. How come? Aw hell, I’d come this far. May as well see the rest. I’d at least know every inch of the Tamanawis. I stayed on the deer path and walked till walking warmed me. I drank water at a spring; ate a little sorrel; sucked some clover tips; smoked a pipe; felt better. I came to the marsh but skirted it, passing along a ridge, keeping my feet dry. I snuck up on the beaver ponds at the same time as the sunlight and saw five beaver on three different ponds. You don’t often see beaver; they haven’t forgotten the jokers who made them into hats. Ma says you’ve got to go a good piece and get there early to see a beaver.

  Saw some big cutthroaty swirls on a beaverless pond that made me wish for the first time for Rodney. Saw two deer—doe and fawn—and a seaward-coasting eagle who would glide in an hour to where I’d been a hard day-and-a-half’s walk ago. I saw seven ravens, flapping toward the sun singing Cro-awk, Cro-awk, trying to look portentous and mythical but coming off kind of scruffy-headed and up to no good. Still, except for the logging roads way up on the ridges, it could have been any century you’d care to name. Even the raven-worshipping Indians only came here ten thousand years ago: I saw any century, barring deluges and ice ages.

  Trotting away across a high slash-clearing, five elk, one a fine big bull. Watching them I nearly stepped on a grouse; it flew fifty yards up the trail and froze as I walked by. Could have kicked it in the head. Would have, too, if I’d something to cook it in. I’d seen Ma do it with sticks: she just clubbed ’em, plucked ’em, spitted and broiled ’em, ate ’em, laughing, right off the stick. Made H2O sick when she’d tell about it. I could have done the same. Should have. Would have… well… maybe I wouldn’t have. Damned thing. So dumb it was cute, squatting right under my boot, thinking it was invisible. Opposite of my yesterday’s Friend.

  Clouds were rolling in fast off the Pacific, but it looked like it might be a day before they meant business. Watching them, I spotted an osprey shopping the ponds for breakfast. And beside the ponds, a mink or muskrat—couldn’t tell which. They let me see them, these animals, way up near the source: empty-handed, I saw them. Not so easily would hunters see them; it’s not just the guns: it’s those red hats. Nature doesn’t take that color lightly. I envision a man up here hunting, sometime around the turn of the century. He wears a fluorescent red hat—the first red hat of them all. The deer and elk see him… and stagger away into the brush, cramped with laughter.

  But at this altitude I was running out of rust-colored subjects: the salmon didn’t climb this high (the river was just a screech-owl creek now), and the vineleafs and alders on the ridges were already naked, waiting for winter. An odd strategy, this stripping down for winter. And the trees looked as if they liked it no better than a human would, rattling and groping at the air; bony
fingers begging for sunlight; shirts in tatters, rotting at the wrists; wearing crows for jewelry.

  I kept on walking, watching for animals. Hunger pangs would come and go, but I’d come far enough that I was beginning not to care.

  The Tillamook, with his pine knot, went to no source. He had been told by his elders that the source was everywhere, so he made his encampment on the first waters he found once the knot burned dim. Then he waited, naked as a winter tree, to make his elders’ words come true.

  By night he kept his fire going. By day he rested in sunlight, rain, or shadow. Twice daily he would bathe in the icy water, scrubbing his flesh with evergreen boughs. The boughs hurt, he was weak, and the water was bitter cold. But hurt, weakness, and cold were none of them the one he waited for. He let them do their work. They left him in peace.

  The river twisted and shrank above the beaver ponds. It neared a mountain. It was small and quiet here, full of snake-bends, oxbows, and small cutthroat trout. It entered a grove of virgin Sitka spruce, and the hoof cut-trail entered in beside it.

  The grove was like a vast lodge, barked pillars rising to a high mosaic of green and black and sky. A watery light filtered down, as if through stained glass. In the center of the lodge was a hollow, bordered by sword ferns and fallen logs. In the bottom of the hollow was a broad, rocky bowl eerily paved with moss-haired, head-sized stones. Among the stones was a quiet spring. And from the spring brimmed the water, old and clean and untiring. I had reached the source of the Tamanawis.

  5

  The Raven and the

  The layman Ho asked Bashō, “If all things return to the One, to what does the One return?”

  Bashō said, “I will tell you, as soon as you have swallowed up all the waters of the West River in one gulp.”

  Ho said, “I already have swallowed up all the waters of the West River in one gulp!”

  Bashō replied, “Then I have already answered your question.”

  —a Zen legend

  A tin cup sat on one of the stones by the spring, half full of red rust and fir needles. So—I had predecessors here at the source. I wiped the cup clean, filled it, shut my eyes, and drank. Then I leaned back against a log, smoked a pipe, scratched my chin, wondered what to do next.

  I decided not to do anything. I just sat by the water and watched it brim.…

  For three, four, maybe five days the Tillamook waited. If the waiting grew very long, his people came to find him. All of them came, filling the woods with chatter. When he was found, they gathered a little distance downstream. Then they just stood there, peering, craning their necks, calling to him, laughing or crying—whichever might work best—begging him to come home…

  but he raved at them. He threw rocks at them, reviled them, drove them all away,

  just as they’d hoped he would. They knew that they were not the one he waited for. They knew that his long wait was the sign of a powerful spirit’s approach. They knew, when he hurled stones at them, that he had not grown sick or feebleminded. They left him in peace.

  He waited alone. Bones and stomach, hunger and cold, weakness, pain, and people, they all left him in peace. The young Tillamook grew still.

  Because he stayed still, the animals began to come. For days they had watched him. For days he had taken no notice. From the fasting and bathing his scent had grown faint, and from the long wait it had become familiar. At night they came close to his fire and watched. They sensed that nothing that stayed still for so long would harm them; nothing that sat so quietly could be a man. Maybe this was one of the strange shapes they sometimes found in abandoned villages—a discarded totem carving, a broken tool or weapon, a caved-in canoe. Maybe this Tillamook had become a kind of tree. Maybe he had become a spirit.

  The small animals came forward first—wren, chipmunk, mouse, jay; then raccoon came, and squirrel and raven; later deer came, and elk, and wise coyote; even old honeypaws, old black bear came. Some would circle his waiting-place, just watching. Others would pass through that place, pretending to ignore him, treating him like an old stump. Later, some flew just over his head, tousling his hair with the air of their wings, but still he did not move. Still later, some walked right up to him, touched his skin with paws or wet noses, sniffing, looking into his eyes. He smiled then, and spoke to them softly. He said, “Even you, my friends, even you are not the one I wait for.”

  But in the end, the one for whom he waited came. Crept up in silence, with all its power sheathed—yet the motionless boy knew, and his heart danced. His spirit-helper had come!

  The spirit made no sound, yet the boy could hear it—and its voice was kind, for he had waited well. It told the boy his man-name, and it told him his true name. It told him what his life’s work would be. And, whether boat-builder, wood-carver, hunter, shaman, fisherman, or chief, it promised him help, and told how that help could be summoned.

  The animals watched while, in silence, the boy sat with his spirit-helper. The animals did not see the two sitting as friends sit, nor as brothers sit, nor as fathers sit with sons. The animals saw one being sitting—not the spirit, not the boy. It was simply a man they saw sitting, then rising, then returning to his people to take up the tools of his vocation. Later that man would hunt them, to feed and clothe his people. And the animals could sense, in that hunter, the boy who had waited so long by the water: that hunter would sing them to him, would kill them quickly, and would speak softly to their spirits. And there would be no violence in their deaths.

  I stayed a long while at the wellspring, staring at the water. But, once I reckoned that there was nothing left for me there but the nitty-gritty waiting and cleansing and fasting, I began to realize I was two hundred years late and the wrong color. I had no elders—not really, not like the young Tillamook had them. I barely met Thomas Bigeater. Except for Nick, Titus, and Bill Bob my people knew next to nothing of sources and spirits. And just a day and a half of huckleberry-fasting left me weak and sick. I pulled off my boots and tried soaking my feet in the spring—just my feet—and in seconds they ached so bad I had to yank them out. Yep. Looked like “Gus” would have to be name enough and fly-tying and rod-building vocation enough for me.…

  But that was all right. It was good work, and the name would serve if people laid off the “Augustine.” I’d never quite figured what I was seeking at this source anyway. I wasn’t sure I’d know a spirit-helper if one bit me on the nose. If I was sure of anything at all, it was of what I’d find no matter how many layers of Gus-ness I scrubbed and fasted and sloughed off: more fisherman. I had hidden laminations and substrata and sinkholes of fisherman in me I hadn’t even begun to tap. God knows, I wanted to know my soul, I wanted to befriend Whoever it had been that walked with me on the road, yesterday dawn. But when I stuck my feet in the source-spring I could feel too well the limits of my own unguided yearnings: I would never make it. Not alone. I would never make it to the real source of things unless or until Ol’ Nameless chose to come and find me fishing.

  I stayed on at the spring for a time, not waiting and fasting now, but just resting and feeling hungry. There’s a difference between the two. I can’t explain that difference, but I know it’s there because as soon as I quit waiting and fasting I was filled with relief. It’s a damned tough business sitting around trying to force yourself to force God to forcefeed you a revelation or vision or spiritual assistant or something. But it’s A-OK to just sit around sitting around, especially in a spring-hearted moss-headed Sitka-roofed grove that looks like a place where any Irish grandma could win arguments about whether the Little People exist. And though my stomach was knotted with a hunger that wasn’t about to leave me in peace, the knots loosened some when I left off searching for spirits and made another meal of tobacco smoke and water. I found myself feeling the same loose, relieved way I’d felt the few times I’d been in churches and had snuck out the back into the open air. And no wonder: I’d been trying to make a church out of the source of the Tamanawis. Thank God I failed. It would
have been a hell of a note to have to hike fifty miles up into this place every time I wanted a word with my spirit!

  I remembered the Tillamook elders’ saying, the source is everywhere. And I began to appreciate their meaning, maybe not on any very profound level, but at least on some kind of meteorological and geographical level—which was profound enough for a hopeless case of a hungry fisherman sitting in the woods there smoking. What I realized was that a mecca isn’t worth much if it’s not a place inside you more than a place in the world; what I realized was that this mecca-spring here in the Sitka lodge was to the Tamanawis only what my birthplace was to me—a tangible starting point, but not an ultimate source; what I realized was that the real Tamanawis was the entire Tamanawis, and the source of that river was rain, groundwater, dew, snowmelt, fog, mist, animal piss, no-name trickles, podunk swamps, hidden springs, and the source of all these sources was the clouds, and the source of clouds was the sea, so the river running past my cabin literally did have its source “everywhere,” at least everywhere that water has ever visited—which includes all the Space and Time in the world.…

  Then I remembered a story—the best I’d ever heard concerning the source of rivers. The Indians told it—the India-Indians, that is. I don’t know if they’re related to the Northwest Indians, but I know it’s a story the Northwest tribes would have gone for, because there’s copulation in it. Northwest Indians have more stories about copulation than anybody I ever heard of. Anyhow it was an India-Indian story that came to me there in the Sitka grove, and the music from the spring brought the story to life, and the cool air made it dance. And even though to hear it in English without the water-and-air accompaniment is about like having Walter Cronkite read the lyrics to your favorite song, it meant too much to me to leave it out. It’s the story of the time that Sun’s light first touched Ocean. In English, it might go like this: