In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  Before planting the seedlings, the Forest Service burned the slopes they had cut the previous summer and fall. In the afternoons there would be a sweet-smelling haze that started about halfway up the valley walls, then rose into the mountains and spilled over them, moving north into Canada, riding on the south winds. The fires’ haze never settled in our valley, but would hang just above us, turning the sunlight a smoky blue and making things, when seen across the valley—a barn in another pasture or a fence line—seem much farther away than they really were. It made things seem softer, too.

  Glenda had a long scar on the inside of her leg that ran from the ankle all the way up to mid-thigh. She had injured her knee when she was seventeen. This was before arthroscopic surgery, and she’d had to have the knee rebuilt the old-fashioned way, with blades and scissors, but the scar only seemed to make her legs, both of them, look even more beautiful. The scar had a graceful curve to it as it ran the distance up her leg.

  Glenda wore green nylon shorts and a small white T-shirt when she ran, and a headband. Her running shoes were dirty white, the color of the road dust during the dry season.

  “I’m thirty-two and have six or seven more good years of running,” she said whenever anyone asked her what her plans were, why she ran so much, and why she had come to our valley to train. Mostly it was the men who asked, the ones who sat with us in front of the saloon watching the river, watching the spring winds move across the water. We were all glad that winter was over. Except for Nancy, I do not think the women liked Glenda very much.

  It was not well known in the valley what a great runner Glenda was. And I think it gave Glenda pleasure that it wasn’t.

  “I’d like you to follow Glenda on a bicycle,” Tom said the first time I met her. He’d invited me over for dinner a short time after she’d arrived. “There’s money available from her sponsor to pay you for it,” he said, handing me some money, or trying to, finally putting it in my shirt pocket. He had been drinking, and seemed as happy as I had seen him in a long time. After stuffing the bills into my pocket, he put one arm around Nancy, who looked embarrassed for me, and the other arm around Glenda, who did not, and so I had to keep the money, which was not that much anyway.

  “You just ride along behind her with a pistol.” Tom had a pistol holstered on his belt, a big one, and he took it off and handed it to me. “And you make sure nothing happens to her, the way it did to that Ocherson woman.”

  The woman named Ocherson had been walking home along the river road after visiting friends when a bear evidently charged out of the willows and dragged her across the river. She had disappeared the previous spring, and at first everyone thought she had run away. Her husband had gone around all summer making a fool of himself, bad-mouthing her. Then hunters found her body in the fall, right before the first snow. Every valley had its bear stories, but we thought our story was the worst, because the victim had been a woman.

  “It’ll be good exercise for me,” I said to Tom, and then I said to Glenda, “Do you run fast?”

  It wasn’t a bad job. I was able to keep up with her most of the time. Some days Glenda ran only a few miles, very fast, and on other days it seemed that she ran forever. There was hardly ever any traffic—not a single car or truck—and I daydreamed as I rode along behind her.

  Early in the morning we’d leave the meadow in front of Tom’s place and head up the mountain on the South Fork road, above the river and into the woods, going past my cabin. Near the summit, the sun would be up and burning through the haze of the planting fires. Everything would look foggy and old, as if we had gone back in time and not everything had been decided yet.

  By the time we reached the summit, Glenda’s shirt and shorts were drenched, her hair damp and sticking to the sides of her face; her socks and even her running shoes were wet. But she always said that the people she would be racing against would be training even harder than she was.

  There were lakes around the summit, and the air was cooler. On the north slope the lakes still had a thin crust of ice over them, a crust that thawed each afternoon but froze again at night. What Glenda liked to do after she’d reached the summit—her face flushed and her wrists limp and loose, so great was the heat and her exhaustion—was to leave the road and run down the game trail, tripping, stumbling, running downhill again. I would have to throw the bike down and hurry after her. She’d pull her shirt off and run into the shallows of the first lake she saw, her feet breaking through the thin ice. Then she’d sit down in the cold water like an animal chased there by hounds.

  “This feels good!” she said the first time she did that. She leaned her head back on the shelf of ice behind her and spread her arms as if she were resting on a cross. She looked up through the haze at the empty sky above the tree line.

  “Come over here,” she said. “Come feel this.”

  I waded out, following her trail through the ice, and sat down next to her.

  She took my hand and put it on her chest.

  What I felt was like nothing I had ever imagined. It was like lifting up the hood of a car with the engine on and seeing all the cables and belts and fan blades still running. Right away, I wanted to get her to a doctor. I wondered, if she were going to die, whether I would be held responsible. I wanted to pull my hand away, but she made me keep it there, and gradually the drumming slowed, became steadier, and still she made me keep my hand there, until we could both feel the waters coldness. Then we got out. I had to help her up because her injured knee was stiff. We spread out our clothes and lay down on flat rocks to dry in the wind and the sun. She’d said that she had come to the mountains to run because it would strengthen her knee. But there was something that made me believe that that was not the truth, though I cannot tell you what other reason there might have been.

  On every hot day we went into the lake after her run. It felt wonderful, and lying in the sun afterward was wonderful too. Once we were dry, our hair smelled like the smoke from the planting fires. There were times when I thought that Glenda might be dying, and had come here to live out her last days, to run in a country of great beauty.

  By the time we started our journey home, there’d be a slow wind coming off the river. The wind cleared a path through the haze, moving it to either side, and beneath it, in that space between, we could see the valley, green and soft. Midway up the north slope, the ragged fires would still be burning. Wavering smoke rose from behind the trees.

  The temptation to get on the bike and coast all the way down was always strong, but I knew what my job was, we both did. It was the time when bears came out of hibernation, and the safety of winter was not to be confused with the seriousness of summer, with the way things were changing.

  Walking back, we would come upon ruffed grouse, the males courting and fanning in the middle of the road, spinning in a dance, their throat sacs inflated and pulsing bright red. The grouse did not want to let us go past: they stamped their feet and blocked our way, trying to protect some small certain area they had staked out for themselves. Glenda stiffened whenever she saw the fanning males, and shrieked when they rushed in and tried to peck at her ankles.

  We’d stop at my cabin for lunch, and I’d open all the windows. By then the sun would have heated the log walls, and inside was a rich dry smell, as there is when you have been away from your house for a long time. We would sit at the breakfast room table and look out the window at the weedy chicken house I’d never used and at the woods going up the mountain behind the chicken house. We drank coffee and ate whitefish, which I had caught and smoked the previous winter.

  I had planted a few young apple trees in the back yard that spring, and the nursery that had sold them to me said that these trees could withstand even the coldest winters, though I wasn’t sure I believed it. They were small trees and would not bear fruit for four years, and that had sounded to me like such a long time that I really had to think about it before buying them. But I bought them anyway, without really knowing why. I also didn’t k
now what would make a person run as much as Glenda did. I liked riding with her, though, and having coffee with her after the runs, and I knew I would be sad to see her leave the valley. I think that was what kept up the distance between us, a nice distance—the fact that both of us knew that she would stay only a short time, until the end of August. Knowing this seemed to take away any danger, any wildness. It was a certainty; there was a wonderful sense of control.

  I had a couple of dogs in the back yard, Texas hounds that I’d brought up north with me a few years before. I kept them penned up in the winter so they wouldn’t chase deer, but in the spring and summer I let them lie around in the grass, dozing. There was one thing they would chase, though, in the summer. It lived under the chicken house, and I don’t know what it was; it ran too fast for me to ever get a good look at it. It was small and dark with fur, but it wasn’t a bear cub. Perhaps it was some rare animal, something from Canada—maybe something no one had ever seen before. Whatever it was, it never grew from year to year, yet it seemed young somehow, as if it might someday grow. It would rip out of the woods, a fleet blur headed for its burrow, and as soon as the dogs saw it, they would be up and baying, right on its tail, but the thing always reached its burrow under the chicken house just ahead of them.

  Glenda and I would sit at the window and watch for it every day. But it kept no timetable, and there was no telling when it would come, or even if it would. We called it a hedgehog, because that was the closest thing it might have resembled.

  Some nights Glenda would call me on the shortwave radio. She would key the mike a few times to make it crackle and wake me up, and then I would hear a mysterious voice floating in static through my cabin. “Have you seen the hedgehog?” she would ask sleepily, but it was never her real voice there in the dark with me. “Did you see the hedgehog?” she’d want to know, and I’d wish she were with me at that moment. But it would be no good; Glenda was leaving in August, or September at the latest.

  “No,” I’d say in the dark. “No hedgehog today. Maybe it’s gone away.” Though I had thought that many times, I would always see it again, just when I thought I never would.

  “How are the dogs?” she’d ask.

  “They’re asleep.”

  “Good night,” she’d say.

  “Good night.”

  One Thursday night I had Tom and Nancy and Glenda over for dinner. Friday was Glenda’s day off from running, so she allowed herself to drink and stay up late on Thursdays. Before dinner, we started out drinking at the saloon. Around dusk we went down to my cabin, and Glenda and I fixed dinner while Tom and Nancy sat on the front porch, watching the elk appear in the meadow across the road as the light faded.

  “Where’s this famous hedgehog?” Tom bellowed, puffing a cigar, blowing smoke rings into the night, big perfect O’s. The elk lifted their heads, chewing the summer grass like cattle, the bulls’ antlers glowing with velvet.

  “In the back yard,” Glenda said as she washed the salad greens. “But you can only see him in the daytime.”

  “Aww, bullshit!” Tom roared, standing up with his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He took off down the steps, stumbling, and the three of us put down what we were doing to get flashlights and run after him to make sure he was all right. Tom was a trapper, and it riled him to think there was an animal he did not know, could not trap, could not even see. Out by the chicken house, he got down on his hands and knees, breathing hard, and we crowded around him to shine the flashlights into the deep, dusty hole. He made grunting noises that were designed, I suppose, to make the animal want to come out, but we never saw anything. It was cold under the stars. Far off, the planting fires burned, but they were held in check, controlled by back-fires.

  I had a propane fish fryer, and we put it on the front porch and cut the trout into cubes, rolled them around in flour, then dropped them in hot, spattering grease. We fixed about a hundred trout cubes, and when we finished eating there were none left. Glenda had a tremendous appetite, and ate almost as many as Tom. She licked her fingers afterward, and asked if there were any more.

  After dinner we took our drinks and sat on the steep roof of my cabin, above the second-floor dormer. Tom sat out on the end of the dormer as if it were a saddle, and Glenda sat next to me for warmth, and we watched the fires spread across the mountainside, raging but contained. Below us, in the back yard, those few rabbits that still had not turned completely brown began coming out of the woods. Dozens of them approached the greenhouse, then stopped and lined up around it, wanting to get into the tender young carrots and the Simpson lettuce. I had put sheets down on the ground to trick them, and we laughed as the rabbits shifted nervously from sheet to sheet, several of them huddling together on one sheet at a time, imagining they were protected.

  “Turn back, you bastards!” Tom shouted happily. That woke the ducks on the pond nearby, and they began clucking among themselves. It was a reassuring sound. Nancy made Tom tie a rope around his waist and tie the other end around the chimney, in case he fell. But Tom said he wasn’t afraid of anything, and was going to live forever.

  Glenda weighed herself before and after each run. I had to remind myself not to get too close to her; I only wanted to be her friend. We ran and rode in silence. We never saw any bears. But she was frightened of them, even as the summer went on without us seeing any, and so I always carried the pistol. We had gotten tanned from lying out by the lake up at the summit. Glenda took long naps at my cabin after her runs; we both did, Glenda sleeping on my couch. I’d cover her with a blanket and lie down on the floor next to her. The sun would pour in through the window. There was no longer any other world beyond our valley—only here, only now. But still, I could feel my heart pounding.

  It turned drier than ever in August, and the loggers began cutting again. The days were windy, and the fields and meadows turned to crisp hay. Everyone was terrified of sparks, especially the old people, because they’d seen big fires rush through the valley, moving through like an army: the big fire in 1901, and then the monstrous one in 1921 that burned up every tree except for the luckiest ones, so that for years afterward the entire valley was barren and scorched.

  One afternoon in early August Glenda and I went to the saloon. She lay down on top of a picnic table and looked up at the clouds. She would be going back to Washington in three weeks, she said, and then down to California. Almost all of the men would be off logging in the woods by then, and we would have the whole valley to ourselves. Tom and Nancy had been calling us “the lovebirds” since July, hoping for something to happen—something other than what was, or wasn’t, happening—but they’d stopped in August. Glenda was running harder than ever, really improving, so that I was having trouble keeping up with her.

  There was no ice left anywhere, no snow, not even in the darkest, coolest parts of the forest, but the lakes and rivers were still ice cold when we waded into them. Glenda continued to press my hand to her breast until I could feel her heart calming, and then almost stopping, as the waters worked on her.

  “Don’t you ever leave this place,” she said as she watched the clouds. “You’ve got it really good here.”

  I stroked her knee with my fingers, running them along the inside scar. The wind tossed her hair around. She closed her eyes, and though it was hot, there were goose bumps on her tanned legs and arms.

  “No, I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  I thought about her heart, hammering in her chest after those long runs. At the top of the summit, I’d wonder how anything could ever be so alive.

  The afternoon she set fire to the field across the road from my cabin was a still day, windless, and I suppose that Glenda thought it would do no harm—and she was right, though I did not know it then. I was at my window when I saw her out in the field lighting matches, bending down and cupping her hands until a small blaze appeared at her feet. Then she came running across the field.

  At first I could hardly believe my eyes. The smoke in front of the fire made it look
as if I were seeing something from memory, or something that had happened in another time. The fire seemed to be secondary, even inconsequential. What mattered was that she was running, coming across the field toward my cabin.

  I loved to watch her run. I did not know why she had set the fire, and I was very afraid that it might cross the road and burn up my hay barn, even my cabin. But I was not as frightened as I might have been. It was the day before Glenda was going to leave, and mostly I was delighted to see her.

  She ran up the steps, pounded on my door, and came inside, breathless, having run a dead sprint all the way. The fire was spreading fast, even without a wind, because the grass was so dry, and red-winged blackbirds were flying out of the grass ahead of it. I could see marsh rabbits and mice scurrying across the road, heading for my yard. It was late in the afternoon, not quite dusk. An elk bounded across the meadow. There was a lot of smoke. Glenda pulled me by the hand, taking me back outside and down the steps, back out toward the fire, toward the pond on the far side of the field. It was a large pond, large enough to protect us, I hoped. We ran hard across the field, and a new wind suddenly picked up, a wind created by the flames. We got to the pond and kicked our shoes off, pulled off our shirts and jeans, and splashed into the water. We waited for the flames to reach us, and then work their way around us.

  It was just a grass fire. But the heat was intense as it rushed toward us, blasting our faces with hot wind.

  It was terrifying.

  We ducked our heads under the water to cool our drying faces and threw water on each others shoulders. Birds flew past us, and grasshoppers dived into the pond with us, where hungry trout rose and snapped at them, swallowing them like corn. It was growing dark and there were flames all around us. We could only wait and see whether the grass was going to burn itself up as it swept past.