by Rick Bass
“Please, love,” Glenda was saying, and I did not understand at first that she was speaking to me. “Please.”
We had moved out into the deepest part of the pond, chest deep, and kept having to duck beneath the surface because of the heat. Our lips and faces felt scorched. Pieces of ash were floating down to the water like snow. It was not until nightfall that the flames died, leaving just a few orange ones flickering here and there. But the rest of the small field was black and smoldering.
It turned suddenly cold, and we held on to each other tightly, because we were shivering. I thought about luck and about chance. I thought about fears, all the different ones, and the things that could make a person run.
She left at daylight. She would not let me drive her home—she said she wanted to run instead, and she did. Her feet raised puffs of dust in the road.
The Valley
ONE DAY I left the South, fled my job, and ran to the heart of snow, the far Northwest. I live in a cabin with no electricity, and I’m never leaving.
There aren’t many people in this valley—twenty-six registered voters—and rather than disliking almost everyone, as I found it so easy to do in the city, I can now take time to love practically everyone.
I have to start small. I have to get it right.
Jody Michaels is sixty years old and lives up in the woods. She takes in stray dogs that come her way. There are more than you’d think: they jump out of the backs of trucks, or run away from home. They strike out for the North.
Jody’s is the last cabin they come to before going over into Canada. She keeps a large team of sled dogs—huskies and malamutes, blue-eyed creatures that have so much wolf in them that they don’t know how to bark, and can only howl.
When the moon comes up over the mountains that ring our small bowl of a valley like a high fence, all of Jody’s dogs begin to howl, a sound that echoes around the valley. Perhaps the wild, strong sled dogs attract the strays. Often we’ll see a stray loping down the road, dragging a broken leash, a broken chain—usually a big dog—and it’ll be heading north, for Jody’s.
She keeps them in a holding pen for one week, puts a note on the blackboard in front of the Mercantile, and calls the vet in Libby, which is due southwest, sixty miles across the snowdrift-covered pass. If no one claims the dog after that week, she does a very odd thing: she hikes to the top of Hensley Mountain with the dog and sits down with it.
You can see the whole valley from the top of Hensley. It’s above the tree line, just barely, and the wind whips and gusts, blows your hair into your eyes. Jody must feel a little like God when she’s there surveying things.
And she watches that dog too, watches the way it pants, and the way it looks out at the valley and off toward Canada. Jody knows dogs so well that she can tell, up in that blowing wind, if the dog can survive on its own or not. If it can, she’ll unclip the dog’s leash, take the collar off, and let it go down the mountain into the deep woods that cross over into Canada—she’ll let the dog have its wish. But if Jody doesn’t find what she’s looking for, she’ll lead it back to her cabin. Later in the day she’ll drive it to the pound, where, almost always, it will be the end of the line for that runaway dog. There is a man in the valley, never mind his name, who for a dollar will take unwanted dogs up the road a ways and gas them or shoot them. Needless to say, Jody does not employ his services.
I am like those stray dogs, and I think Jody is too. Those dogs have run a long way to get here.
No one has money in the valley. No one has money even in the little town of Libby. Some of the people who have sled teams rely on road kills to feed their dogs—such large, hungry dogs—and for a fact, you never see a road-killed deer or elk up here. Whenever one of us does strike a deer, instead of leaving it, we load it into the truck (if the truck is still drivable), and head for the Dirty Shame Saloon.
The Dirty Shame sits at the base of Hensley Mountain, which, back in the forties, got a radar dish put on top of it, one of a whole chain of dishes the Air Force had set up along the Northwest’s peaks to detect bombers flying over from Russia, the theory being that as we weren’t far away—the Russian planes would only have to zip across Alaska, the Yukon, and British Columbia—it would be an easy matter to dive-bomb the valley, riddle the Dirty Shame (which has been here forever) with bullets, and strafe the Mercantile. The radar dish is still there, abandoned, and the lonely dirt road to the top, which seems to lead into the clouds, has long been grown over, crisscrossed with windfall timber and young aspen trees.
One thing from those days did not fall into disrepair, however: the warning siren that was supposed to sound whenever a Russian plane was detected. Handy with tools and electronics, Joe, the owner of the Dirty Shame, decided to hike up there one day and disassemble the siren. He brought it down to the saloon and mounted it on the front porch. Now, every time someone hits a deer and brings it in for barbecuing, Joe shorts the siren’s wires with the blade of his pocketknife. Wolves, coyotes, and dogs go crazy when he does that. The siren is so loud that some people in Idaho and Washington can hear it, but because the roads into the valley are in such bad shape, outsiders have no hope of getting here in time for the evening barbecue. Everyone who hears the siren knows what it means.
If its summertime when the wail goes up, we gather at the saloon around six or six-thirty. Jody comes in her little wagon, pulled by huskies and malamutes. There are nearly as many children as there are registered voters, and after the barbecue the whole group of us will dance until the sunlight leaves, which isn’t until around midnight. We bring lettuce from our gardens for the barbecue, and fresh-baked bread. Doug, who is not a veterinarian but is good with animals—he sews them up, and people too, after they’ve been hurt—brings jars of honey from his beehives. Dave brings his banjo, and Janie her fiddle. Young Terjaney has an enormous electric accordion with row upon row of colored flashing lights which once belonged to his father. Old Mr. Terjaney had brought the accordion all the way from Hungary. He kept it strapped to his chest when he played. The sound was magnificent.
Old Mr. Terjaney drank a lot. Along with everything else, we bring homemade beer to the barbecue, made in our cellars during the slow winters, beer that we keep chilled in the river during summer. Old Mr. Terjaney would open one jar after another of the deep amber-colored brew. He’d get out in the road and dance as he played his big one-footed polkas and waltzes. He kept a jar of beer perched on top of the accordion.
One night, near midnight, he spilled his beer. He’d been dancing and playing a polka with his jar wobbling on top of his accordion. The instrument was hot from the good use he’d made of it, and it exploded like fireworks, electrocuting Old Mr. Terjaney right there in the road. We thought he’d done it on purpose—perhaps this was a special function of the instrument when he pressed a certain button. There were so many buttons. We even cheered at first. It’s amazing that Joe was able to repair it.
If it is snowing when you go out to get wood for your fireplace, tie one end of a rope around your waist and tie the other end to the cabin door. The snow can start coming down so fast and hard that in the short time it takes you to get to the woodshed, you can get lost in a whiteout on your way back. It doesn’t sound like it’s possible, but it happened to me once. A light snow turned heavy in just seconds, and then became a blizzard. I ended up staying in the woodshed all night waiting for daylight. I felt ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as I would have felt dying within a mile of my cabin, when all I had wanted to do was get a few sticks of wood.
There is some compass in all of us that does not want us to walk a straight line. I respect this, and do not try to challenge it in blizzards.
Sometimes people run out of gas (visitors, not locals) up on the pass, where during the winter traffic can go by only every second or third day, and some of them freeze to death in their cars—traveling without heavy clothes, without sleeping bags in the back—and others freeze in the woods when they get out of their cars and try to w
alk for help. Everyone up here has CB and shortwave radios in their trucks. You can live in a dangerous place quite easily, but to visit it is another thing.
We’ve got a nice cemetery. There are two cemeteries, actually: one that no one seems to know about, up in the hills above the river, that this kid just found while out walking one day. But the other cemetery, which originally catered mostly to loggers—since they were the ones who used it the most, what with trees falling on them and saws back-bucking and trucks and skidders rolling off cliffs and the like—is now used by everybody, and is majestic.
It’s up on Boyd Hill, and you can see the river from it, even through the larch trees, which are centuries old. Two hundred feet tall, they tower like redwoods and have withstood even the biggest fires. They’re so huge that eight or ten people holding hands can’t encircle them. The larches line all sides of the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence, and the air beneath the canopy of trees so high above is a different kind of air, motionless, even when the rest of the woods is windy. Different, too, is the thin light that’s able to filter through. Moss grows on the headstones. The shade is cool and smells good. There’s a spring nearby, up higher on the mountain.
The timber companies would love to cut the trees around the cemetery—each tree is worth several thousand dollars by itself—but no one starts a chain saw within a mile of the place; it’s an unwritten rule.
“Give them a rest for once,” says Mack, the little man who takes care of the cemetery, emptying out old flowers, bringing in new ones. It’s not the trees he’s talking about.
The names of some of the people in the cemetery, if you can believe the headstones, are Piss-Fir Jim, Windy Joe Griff, and Solo Dog Thompson. There was a hermit buried here in the sixties, an old man who even by valley standards was an outsider. He lived as high up in the mountains as you could get, higher than any deer or elk lived, so hunters rarely saw him. Because no one knew his name, he was called The Hermit on his gravestone.
He used to come down twice a year with his mules to buy groceries—flour and beans, mostly. One spring he didn’t show up, so Joe, Young Terjaney, and A. C. Rightman went to check on him, and sure enough he’d died during the winter.
It was windy up there, windier than you could imagine, Rightman says. They found the hermit about a mile down the trail leading away from his cabin. The body was frozen in a crouch, as if he’d known he was sick and had been trying to crawl into town for help—though crawling would have taken weeks, and we couldn’t imagine what ailment he might have had that would have prevented him from walking but would still let him crawl.
“Probably a bellyache,” Rightman will say, stroking his chin, if you ask him. The mules were gone (“Grizzly,” Rightman says), but inside the cabin they found the old man’s cats, living on mice and melting snow that had dripped in through cracks in the roof during warm May afternoons. All the cats ran out the cabin door except for a large, placid orange one, which Rightman took home to his wife, Marva. Cats can live to a ripe old age in the valley, and dogs can reach the age of twenty or twenty-five; it’s not uncommon. Rightman and Marva never gave the cat a proper name. “Hey, hermit’s cat,” he’ll say, “get down off that table.” They had the cat for a long time.
For a headstone the hermit has a rough piece of granite pulled off a talus slope, just like the others. John Skabel-lund, the blacksmith, chiseled the old man’s name on it—The Hermit—but he’s buried off in a corner of the cemetery, as far away as possible from everyone else. It was a joke at first, but I can tell now that a few people feel bad about it.
“You can bury us next to him,” Janie says, speaking for her whole family.
The other cemetery is way over on Yellow Creek, up in the mountains. No roads lead to it. Deep woods, grizzlies, and elk surround it, and nothing else. Only women are buried there. The place is a mystery to everyone.
Not many people know how to find it. Rightman says its run by outsiders, and he must be right. He took me up there on skis one winter. Somehow it feels safer in winter.
The women’s pictures—taken when they were young, and framed in glass—are inset in the marble headstones. We ask, how do you carry such heavy stones into the deep woods? The headstones are inscribed with the women’s names, their dates of birth and death, and that’s all. None of them smiled for their pictures.
Some of the pictures are fading—there are headstones from the 1910s and 1920s. But there are new ones too: the newest is marked just two years ago.
“It’s weird,” Rightman says. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, finishing it, and flicks it toward the nearest white stone. “It’s got to be easterners of some kind.” He’s probably right. They all look fashionable, like women from New York or Philadelphia. None of them are from out here, we can tell.
Whenever a car drives into the valley—almost always lost—and stops at the Mercantile for gas and directions, those of us who are around will pretend to be interested in helping. But if that car’s got eastern license plates, what we’re really checking for is where they’ve got the body hidden.
“Packhorses,” Rightman says. “If they die in the winter, they freeze ‘em, then bring ‘em out here in the spring, at night, and take ‘em up there on packhorses.”
But it’s muddy in the spring, and we never see hoofprints.
Rightman shrugs, draws on his cigarette. He knows he’s right. “Got to be packhorses,” he says. “That’s all there is to it.”
My theory is that the women were taken there during a thunderstorm, so the rain would wash away the tracks of those who buried them. I’d like to hide in a cool bower, to see them do it. I want to watch them digging in the rain, the rain beating on their backs.
The other night I saw a cougar run across the road in front of me, flashing across the sweep of my headlights, chasing something.
This is a beautiful valley. I wake up smiling sometimes because I have all my days left to live in this place. I hike up into the hills, to a rock back in the trees, and sit there and just look. On the road far below, a friend drives past in his truck, moving so slowly it seems that a man on foot could walk alongside and still keep up. I watch until the truck disappears around the bend. When dusk comes, purple light slides in from all directions.
The lights in my friends’ cabins begin to come on then, glowing patches in the dark.
Antlers
HALLOWEEN brings us closer. The Halloween party at the saloon is when we—all three dozen or so of us—recollect again why we live in this cold, blue valley. Sometimes tourists come when the summer grass is high, and the valley opens up a little. People slip in and out of it; in summer it’s almost a regular place. But in October the less hardy of heart leave as the snow begins to fall. It becomes our valley again, and there’s a feeling like a sigh, a sigh after the great full meal of summer.
We don’t bother with masks at the party because we know one another so well, if not through direct contact, then through word of mouth—what Dick said Becky said about Don, and so on. Instead, we strap horns on our heads, moose antlers, deer antlers, or even the high throwback of elk antlers. We have a big potluck supper and get drunk as hell, even those of us who do not generally drink. We put the tables and chairs outside in the gust-driven snow and put nickels in the juke box and dance until early morning to Elvis, The Doors, or Marty Robbins. Mock battles occur when the men and women bang their antlers against each other. We clomp and sway in the barn.
Around two or three in the morning we drive or ski or snowshoe home, or we ride back on horses—however we got to the party is how we’ll return. It usually snows big on Halloween—a foot, a foot and a half. Whoever drove down to the saloon will give the skiers a lift by fastening a long rope to the rear bumper of his truck, and the skiers hold on to that rope, still wearing antlers, too drunk or tired to take them off. Pulled up the hill, gliding silently on the road’s hard ice, we keep our heads tucked against the wind and snow. Like children dropped off at a bus stop, we let go of the
rope when the truck reaches our dark cabin. It would be nice to be greeted by a glowing lantern in the window, but you don’t ever go to sleep or leave with a lantern burning like that—it can burn your cabin down in the night. We return to dark houses, all of us.
The antlers feel natural after having them lashed to our heads for so long. Sometimes we bump them against the door frame going in, and knock them off.
There is a woman up here, Suzie, who has moved through the valley with a rhythm that is all her own. Over the years Suzie has been with all the able-bodied men of the valley. All, that is, except for Randy. He still wishes for his chance, but because he is a bowhunter—he uses a strong compound bow and wicked, heart-gleaming aluminum arrows with a whole spindle of razor blades at one end—she will have nothing to do with him.
At times I wanted to defend him, even though I strongly objected to bowhunting. Bowhunting, it seemed to me, was brutal. But Randy was just Randy, no better or worse than any of the rest of us who had dated Suzie. Wolves eviscerate their prey; its a hard life. Deads dead, right? And isn’t pain the same everywhere?
Suzie has sandy red hair, high cold cheeks, and fury-blue eyes. She is short, no taller than even a short man’s shoulders. Suzie’s boyfriends have lasted, on average, for three months. No man has ever left her—even the sworn bachelors among us have enjoyed her company. It is always Suzie who goes away from the men first.
