The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  And we start anew.

  ***

  The thing that gets the deer in these woods most of the time is the wolves. There’s usually just one pack at a time in this little valley. They keep the deer pruned back real nice, real healthy. None of our deer has ticks or other parasites. Nature’s still working the way it’s supposed to up here.

  There are a lot of coyotes, too, but if the wolves find the coyotes in their territory they kill them as well, viewing the coyotes as competitors. We’ve seen a group of four wolves chase a pack of a dozen coyotes across a meadow, routing them.

  Coyotes hunt the same prey as wolves but use a different style. The coyotes aren’t as efficient as the wolves—a lot of times they’ll only try to injure a deer, then stay near it for days, waiting for it to succumb—whereas the wolves just pretty much go after what they want and either get it or don’t. And if they get it, they get almost all of it. They’ll eat nearly everything—85 percent, 90 percent, sometimes 100 percent of the kill—bones, hooves, hide, everything. As if the thing never was.

  ***

  Summer, and our slow days around the cabin: cutting some firewood to sell, or building rock walls for the neighbors; in the late summer, both of us canning fruit and making jam. The heat almost unbearable, boiling water on the wood stove, with which to sterilize the fruit jars. Huckleberries from the woods, and strawberries from the garden. Sweat pouring down us. Adding half a bag of sugar to the whole vat. Pouring it steaming into the jars, and sealing them, and then waiting for the lids to pop!, indicating they’ve swelled to a perfect tight seal. The sweat veeing down our chests and backs; the crackle of the fire in the wood stove, and the baby asleep in the bedroom. Martha and I slipping down to the pond, undressing, and going for a swim to clean off. Making love in the pond—too hot out in the sun—and then climbing up onto the bank to dry in the faintest of breezes—late August, September—and no sound in the world, other than the silence of the baby sleeping and the faintest leaf clatter of the aspens—the sound of a cloud—and the irregular, soothing pop of each fruit jar.

  Winter at full arm’s length: coming, but still a full arm’s length away. Dry brown grasses drying in the sun; our lazy arms around each other, our milky skin. A ninety-day growing season.

  ***

  The deer that I hit with the truck, and carried home—the one that I hung out in the barn: on the fifth day of aging it, I went out to butcher her. I’d been walking past to check her every day—to make sure the coyotes hadn’t gotten her. And every day when I’d gone by, the deer had been untouched. The doe had been hanging there the same as I’d left her, with her back to me, neck outstretched by the rope, hanging from the rafters with all four legs drooping at her sides, drawn by gravity.

  I’d assumed she was still all there, and I’d begun to look forward to the meat. I was going down to the desert to camp and was looking forward to baking the two big glistening red loins in the coals of a campfire, and I was going to marinate great long red strips of the backstrap.

  I went into the barn with the butcher knife, but when I swung the doe around to begin skinning the hide, the carcass felt as light as a coat on a coat hanger, and as I spun her to face me I saw that there was only a skeleton beneath the hide, that a coyote had gotten into the barn and had eaten the meat off of her hindquarters, had eaten out all of the butt steaks, had eaten up into the carcass as far as it could reach—standing on its hind legs to do so—eating all the way up to the bottom half of the backstrap, so that only the shoulders and neck were left untouched. I was stunned, and ashamed. I thought I knew better. You can’t keep a coyote away from meat. It’ll get it—whatever it takes, it’ll get it, just as the wolves do.

  ***

  Martha studied whitetails in college, got her doctorate in ungulate nutrition, specialized in winter range requirements. We used to talk about deer all the time—about almost nothing but deer. The bucks we’d seen. When we thought the fawns would drop. When the rut would start: that one week of the year when the bucks run wild, dashing through the forest day and night looking for does to breed, intent on only one thing. Totally unaware of their mortality. Road-hunters cruising the snowy lanes in big trucks, knocking down the bucks as the bucks run right past them, ignoring the trucks, ignoring everything but the sweet scent of deer vulva and buck jism, which has always reminded me of the holidays.

  Roadside gut piles and gleaming red carcasses left behind then, and coyotes slipping out of the woods to join in the feast, and ravens cawing all over the valley in what can only be called pagan glee, swooping in and out of the trees with gobbets of red flesh dangling from their beaks, and the snow coming down, sealing off the old world and making the new one, the clean white beautiful one...

  Martha and I met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?

  Martha was eighteen, too. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road-building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things—the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.

  She told me that we had too many roads already, that the mountains and all wildness was disappearing beneath concrete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.

  It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries-old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.

  But it’s not as if I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminism curricula. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January) I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life while she lived one.

  This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were, as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences—the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in—these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.

  ***

  What I did with that first deer—the one that fell through the ice in January—was run back to my cabin and dig my canoe out from under the snowdrifts.

  Drenching wet, but with my clothes starting to freeze in that clanking wind, I dragged the canoe down to the lake and slid it onto the ice. I sledded it out to where the ice began to crack and splinter, and then I got in the canoe, and began to smash the ice with my paddle.

  The deer’s eyes rolled wild as I broke that ice, and I sledged my canoe, a foot at a time, closer.

  Finally, I had the canoe off of the ice and out into the open water, the cold black water. I canoed right up to the swimming deer—the deer so cold, and tired—and slipped the noose over its head. I hauled it up out of the water and managed to haul it into the canoe with me. It scrambled, trying to leap free, but I gripped the rope tight and held on.

  With my free arm I paddled us back in the ice-breaking lane I’d plowed on my way out—a lane just wide enough to slip a canoe through.

  Once on shore, I pulled the deer out of the canoe and put it over my shoulders. I carried it up the mountain and then turned it loose deep in the woods, in a cedar jungle where I knew there were neither wolves nor coyotes—too thick and tangley for them. I watched the deer run off. The ice had frozen into a glass coat around the deer, and as the deer ran, the ice shattered and tinkled. It was like a kind of miracle.

  ***

  I remember us driving through town one day, the whole family—Martha and me and the baby—on a shopping trip and to see a movie. It was in the winter, and too far to drive all the way back that n
ight; we’d gotten a hotel room in town and would head back the next day, up over the snowy pass.

  It was right around Christmas. The lights were twinkling, and streamers and banners were draped across Main Street. There were snow-flecked wreaths on the doors of all the businesses. We were coming back from the movie theater when we saw a hunter driving home with a deer strapped to the hood of his car. He was doing it mostly to show off: just cruising the main drag. The clank of tire chains on the snowy road. Smoke rising from everyone’s chimney.

  There was no need to be parading that thing around. The guy was just being an asshole.

  Still, it was a big deer. It’s possible it was some kind of record deer—some kind of trophy.

  The guy pulled over in front of the Chevrolet dealership and got out and stretched: an excuse for people to stop and ask him about that big deer, to comment on his prowess, etc.

  We walked over to look. Snow was falling. Everything was real nice and quiet. There was that nice hush, the sense of community, of seasons and change and closure, that always comes near the end of deer season, in the West, in the mountains: the way autumn gives itself up to winter.

  But this deer wasn’t ready for any of that. No spirit mumbo-jumbo, no ghostly wraith-of-the-forest relinquishing itself back to the spirit of the wild; nor was there to be any edification of the sense of the rural community and its place in the hunting-and-gathering cycle of things on the account of this deer, this snowy night, because this deer wasn’t dead. It was just knocked out.

  The hunter had knocked him down, aiming for a heart-and-lung shot to keep from spoiling the trophy head, but out in the woods (he was telling us all this) the deer had jumped up again and charged him. The hunter had fired a second shot from the hip, striking the deer in the skull, dropping it instantly. Miraculously, the second shot didn’t even break the skull or shatter the antlers.

  That had been at dusk. The hunter had started to clean the deer, but it had gotten dark, and the hunter had decided to do that in town. Wanted to get his picture taken with a whole deer, not some diminished bloodstained gutted thing.

  The cold ride off the mountain had revived the deer, however. The concussion wore off as we were all standing around admiring it. The great buck lifted his head like some European stag, and started kicking and thrashing. It slipped out of the ropes that had it fastened to the hood. It slid off the hood and bounded down the street. It ran down the sidewalk and past the bank. The electronic sign on the bank building said 7:03, and eight degrees.

  The hunter looked as if he’d just had his own guts pulled out. I thought he was going to howl. The baby started laughing and pointing in the direction the deer had gone.

  The tracks were easy to follow in the new snow. The hunter grabbed his rifle and started after the deer. The hole in the deer’s side had opened again and was leaving glittering drops of crystalline blood, crimson as berries, which were already starting to freeze. It was just a little blood that the deer was leaking, but the wound would open up and bleed more as he kept running.

  I knew this. The hunter knew this. We all knew it. Sometimes we know the language of deer perhaps as well as we know each other.

  We all followed the hunter at a trot—the crowd of us, like a posse: men, women, and children.

  It was as if the deer belonged to the whole community. It was a sense of loss for all of us when that deer leapt up and ran away. Only the baby was laughing. Her cheeks were rosy-red from the cold. She was clapping her mittens as we trotted along behind the hunter.

  “How old is she?” one woman asked Martha as she ran alongside us.

  The deer ran as if it knew where it was going; as if it had been in town before. It ran in a straight line, north, as if heading for the train station. Close to the mill, and close to the river.

  The deer was starting to bleed more. We tracked the deer down to the end of Main Street and past the train station, across the railroad tracks and into the brush. It was headed for water, as any wounded animal will do.

  Someone had a flashlight and turned it on as we hurried through the brush. Cold alder branches popped us. A few in the posse turned back, then: they had supper to cook, or bowling practice. Only about half a dozen of us kept on, having a strong interest in the way things would turn out.

  The deer was losing more blood. How much blood did it have?

  We found where the deer had slipped and had tried to rest for a moment, but it must have gotten back up when it heard us coming. If it had been my deer I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, would have let it go off and lie down to rest and die in peace, and then I would have tracked it, but it wasn’t my deer.

  He was going to push it all the way to the river.

  There was no way the deer would be able to swim the river. The current was too fast, and the water too deep.

  The tracks went straight out across the gravel bar, disappearing then into the dark river.

  “He’s in heaven now,” a woman said. We were all breathing jets of silver puff-clouds. The mill’s whistle moaned for the day shift to get off.

  “He was real” the hunter said, near tears. He turned to us. The black river behind him seemed to stretch forever, laughing, now that that warm deer was in its cold belly.

  “Did you all see it?” the hunter asked. He lifted his rifle, brandished it. “I want you all to know I shot that deer,” he cried. “I did it, I was the one. For a while, I had it lashed to the hood of my car,” he said. “Me.”

  Most of us looked away, disgusted. Maybe he had wounded that big old deer, and he’d probably even killed it—and maybe it was a record of some kind—but he’d lost it, too, and it’s a sin to waste meat.

  “Shit,” said the woman who’d told us the deer was in heaven, “that doesn’t count for fuck. I used to be in love with my husband, too—my ex—but used to doesn’t count for shit.”

  A hunter in Idaho, seventy miles downstream, saw the icy corpse go floating by and retrieved it—lassoed it and dragged it in. He built a fire and thawed it out, took the carcass in to be measured, and it was true, it was the third largest whitetail ever shot, but he wouldn’t give the deer back, so nobody got the record. We saw the picture of it in the paper.

  There were some among us who believed the deer had not drowned when it hit the water, but had somehow swum that whole seventy miles, and then had drowned. In the long run it doesn’t really matter, the deer’s dead, but I’m one of the ones who believes he almost made it: that he swam that frigid river with his head, and that huge rack, out of the water, plumes of ice-rime ghosting from his nose, swimming through the lonely cold night; swimming for his life, his head held high: and he almost made it; almost.

  ***

  We live in one of those places I did not build a road into. A place of wildness and mystery. Our little girl looks out the window on a winter morning and watches a family of otters playing on the river ice. There are elk outside, looking in the kitchen window, like missionaries who’ve come to visit. In my dreams, I think of our bodies as being the color of flames, because for half the year, it’s so cold that the only place we can make love is in front of the fire, so that our writhing bodies take on the color of the fire itself. The skin at the ends of our fingers splits and cracks from the dryness of the cold. Our eyelashes sheet with frost when we go outside to ski or snowshoe. Ravens float above us when we ski, as if lonely for company in the huge silences.

  We’re shifting. I tend to be the effusive one now, prone to gushes of euphoria followed by torrents of despair, while Martha seems to have reversed and become the sane one, the steady one, the wise one.

  The country behind us, through which we have traveled, and through which I don’t guess we’ll be traveling again: I can see it now, lying slightly below us.

  Like so many of us, Martha loves the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears, and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we ca
ll intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with—the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase, and all of the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself?” And then she’ll think I’m making fun of her.

  Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science and more tolerant of mystery.

  She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.

  And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science, a little precision. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end?

  What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.

  ***

  So many things can end a deer’s existence. Not just predation, but also starvation, malnutrition, liver flukes, worms. Smaller things, a series of events that lead to a gradual deterioration in the deer’s well-being—a series of mistakes, or harshnesses of nature, are generally what leads to the end of the line. But it’s all part of a flow. I see that, living up here in the mountains. I see it in the ways of deer, and in the ways of the seasons, and I see it in us, too. It’s neither good nor bad: it just is.

  ***

  Martha’s doctorate work included studies about the nutrition a deer needs when the going gets really rough. She would measure cell wall content of forbs as a percentage of dry matter; would measure lignocellulose content, and the nitrogen in dead vegetation in winter, and she would formulate digestibility factors for the deer. The rains of fall and snows of winter degrade the cell walls and leach nitrogen from the plant tissues. I like to think of it as the land taking back those elements that it had loaned to the deer for the summer, for the joy of that quick life. Martha’s old technical papers tend to express it a bit more dryly: