In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  In midafternoon I’d come home—it would be hot then, in the summer. The fields and meadows in front of the ranch smelled of wild strawberries, and I’d stop and pick some. By that time of day it would be too hot to do anything but take a nap, so that’s what I’d do, upstairs on the big bed with all the windows open, with a fly buzzing faintly in one of the other rooms, one of the many empty rooms.

  When it cooled down enough, around seven or eight in the evening, I’d wake up and take my fly rod over to the other side of the meadow. A spring creek wandered along the edge of it, and I’d catch a brook trout for supper. I’d keep just one. There were too many fish in the little creek and they were too easy to catch, so after an hour or two I’d get tired of catching them. I’d take the one fish back to the cabin and fry him for supper.

  Then I’d have to decide whether to read some more or go for another walk or just sit on the porch with a drink in hand. Usually I chose that last option, and sometimes while I was out on the porch, a great gray owl came flying in from the woods. It was always a thrill to see it—that huge, wild, silent creature soaring over my front yard.

  The great gray owl’s a strange creature. It’s immense, and so shy that it lives only in the oldest of the old-growth forests, among giant trees, as if to match its own great size against diem. The owl sits very still for long stretches of time, watching for prey, until—so say the ornithologists—it believes it is invisible. A person or a deer can walk right up to it, and so secure is the bird in its invisibility that it will not move. Even if you’re looking straight at it, it’s convinced you can’t see it.

  My job, my only job, was to live in the mansion and keep intruders out. There had been a For Sale sign out front, but I took it down and hid it in the garage the first day.

  After a couple of years, Beauregard, the real killer, did sell the property, and was out of the picture. Pointy-toed Zim got his 10 percent, I suppose—10 percent of $350,000; a third of a million for a place with no electricity!—but Quentin, the stock analyst, didn’t buy it right away. He said he was going to buy it, within the first five minutes of seeing it. At that time, he took me aside and asked if I could stay on, and like a true predator I said, Hell yes. I didn’t care who owned it as long as I got to stay there, as long as the owner lived far away and wasn’t someone who would keep mucking up my life with a lot of visits.

  Quentin didn’t want to live here, or even visit; he just wanted to own it. He wanted to buy the place, but first he wanted to toy with Beauregard for a while, to try and drive the price down. He wanted to flirt with, him, I think.

  Myself, I would’ve been terrified to jack with Beauregard. The man had bullet holes in his arms and legs, and scars from various knife fights; he’d been in foreign prisons and had killed people. A bear had bitten him in the face, on one of his hunts, a bear he’d thought was dead.

  Quentin and his consultant to the West, Zim, occasionally came out on “scouting trips” during the summer and fall they were buying the place. They’d show up unannounced with bags of groceries—Cheerios, Pop Tarts, hot dogs, cartons of Marlboros—and want to stay for the weekend, to “get a better feel for the place.” I’d have to move my stuff—sleeping bag, frying pan, fishing rod—over to the guest house, which was spacious enough. I didn’t mind that; I just didn’t like the idea of having them around.

  Once, while Quentin and Zim were walking in the woods, I looked inside one of their dumb sacks of groceries to see what they’d brought this time and a magazine fell out, a magazine with a picture of naked men on the cover. I mean, drooping penises and all, and the inside of the magazine was worse, with naked little boys and naked men on motorcycles.

  None of the men or boys in the pictures were ever doing anything, they were never touching each other, but still the whole magazine—the part of it I looked at, anyway—was nothing but heinies and penises.

  In my woods!

  I’d see the two old boys sitting on the front porch, the lodge ablaze with light—those sapsuckers running my generator, my propane, far into the night, playing my Jimmy Buffett records, singing at the top of their lungs. Then finally they’d turn the lights off, shut the generator down, and go to bed.

  Except Quentin would stay up a little longer. From the porch of the guest house at the other end of the meadow (my pups asleep at my feet), I could see Quentin moving through the lodge, lighting the gas lanterns, walking like a ghost. Then the sonofabitch would start having one of his fits.

  He’d break things—plates, saucers, lanterns, windows, my things and Beauregard’s things—though I suppose they were now his things, since the deal was in the works. I’d listen to the crashing of glass and watch Quentin’s big, whirling polar-bear shape passing from room to room. Sometimes he had a pistol in his hand (they both carried nine-millimeter Blackhawks on their hips, like little cowboys), and he’d shoot holes in the ceiling and the walls.

  I’d get tense there in the dark. This wasn’t good for my peace of mind. My days of heaven—I’d gotten used to them, and I wanted to defend them and protect them, even if they weren’t mine in the first place, even if I’d never owned them.

  Then, in that low lamplight, I’d see Zim enter the room. Like an old queen, he’d put his arm around Quentin’s big shoulders and lead him away to bed.

  After one of their scouting trips the house stank of cigarettes, and I wouldn’t sleep in the bed for weeks, for fear of germs; I’d sleep in one of the many guest rooms. Once I found some mouthwash spray under the bed and pictured the two of them lying there, spraying it into each others mouths in the morning, before kissing...

  I’m talking like a homophobe here. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it was just that realtor. He was just turning a trick, was all.

  I felt sorry for Quentin. It was strange how shy he was, how he always tried to cover up his destruction, smearing wood putty into the bullet holes and mopping the food off the ceiling—this fractured stock analyst doing domestic work. He offered me lame excuses the next day about the broken glass—“I was shooting at a bat,” he’d say, “a bat came in the window”—and all the while Zim would be sitting on my porch, looking out at my valley with his boots propped up on the railing and smoking the cigarettes that would not kill him quick enough.

  Once, in the middle of the day, as the three of us sat on the porch—Quentin asking me some questions about the valley, about how cold it got in the winter—we saw a coyote and her three pups go trotting across the meadow. Zim jumped up, seized a stick of firewood {my firewood!), and ran, in his dirty-diaper waddle, out into the field after them, waving the club like a madman. The mother coyote got two of the pups by the scruff and ran with them into the trees, but Zim got the third one, and stood over it, pounding, in the hot midday sun.

  It’s an old story, but it was a new one for me—how narrow the boundary is between invisibility and collusion. If you don’t stop something yourself, if you don’t single-handedly step up and change things, then aren’t you just as guilty?

  I didn’t say anything, not even when Zim came huffing back up to the porch, walking like a man who had just gone out to get the morning paper. There was blood speckled around the cuffs of his pants, and even then I said nothing. I did not want to lose my job. My love for this valley had me trapped.

  We all three sat there like everything was the same—Zim breathing a bit more heavily, was all—and I thought I would be able to keep my allegiances secret, through my silence. But they knew whose side I was on. It had been revealed to them. It was as if they had infrared vision, as if they could see everywhere, and everything.

  “Coyotes eat baby deer and livestock,” said the raisin-eyed sonofabitch. “Remember,” he said, addressing my silence, “it’s not your ranch anymore. All you do is live here and keep the pipes from freezing.” Zim glanced over at his soul mate. I thought how when Quentin had another crackup and lost this place, Zim would get the 10 percent again, and again and again each time.

  Quentin’s f
ace was hard to read; I couldn’t tell if he was angry with Zim or not. Everything about Quentin seemed hidden at that moment. How did they do it? How could the bastards be so good at camouflaging themselves when they had to?

  I wanted to trick them. I wanted to hide and see them reveal their hearts. I wanted to watch them when they did not know I was watching, and see how they really were—beyond the fear and anger. I wanted to see what was at the bottom of their black fucking hearts.

  Now Quentin blinked and turned calmly, still revealing no emotion, and gave his pronouncement. “If the coyotes eat the little deers, they should go,” he said. “Hunters should be the only thing out here getting the little deers.”

  The woods felt the same when I went for my walks each time the two old boys departed. Yellow tanagers still flitted through the trees, flashing blazes of gold. Ravens quorked as they passed through the dark woods, as if to reassure me that they were still on my side, that I was still with nature, rather than without.

  I slept late. I read. I hiked, I fished in the evenings. I saw the most spectacular sights. Northern lights kept me up until four in the morning some nights, coiling in red and green spirals across the sky, exploding in iridescent furls and banners. The northern lights never displayed themselves while the killers were there, and for that I was glad.

  In the late mornings and early afternoons, I’d sit by the waterfall and eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’d see the same magic sights: bull moose, their shovel antlers in velvet, stepping over fallen, rotting logs; calypso orchids sprouting along the trail, glistening and nodding. But it felt, too, as if the woods were a vessel, filling up with some substance of which the woods could hold only so much, and when the forest had absorbed all it could, when no more could be held, things would change.

  Zim and Quentin came out only two or three times a year, for two or three days at a time. The rest of the time, heaven was mine, all those days of heaven. You wouldn’t think they could hurt anything, visiting so infrequently. How little does it take to change—spoil—another thing? I’ll tell you what I think: the cleaner and emptier a place is, the less it can take. It’s like some crazy kind of paradox.

  After a while, Zim came up with the idea of bulldozing the meadow across the way and building a lake, with sailboats and docks. He hooked Quentin into a deal with a log-house manufacturer in the southern part of the state who was going to put shiny new “El Supremo” homes around the lake. Zim was going to build a small hydro dam on the creek and bring electricity into the valley, which would automatically double real estate values, he said. He was going to run cattle in the woods, lots of cattle, and set up a little gold mining operation over on the north face of Mount Henry. The two boys had folders and folders of ideas. They just needed a little investment capital, they said.

  It seemed there was nothing I could do. Anything short of killing Zim and Quentin would be a token act, a mere symbol. Before I figured that out, I sacrificed a tree, chopped down a big, wind-leaning larch so that it fell on top of the lodge, doing great damage while Zim and Quentin were upstairs. I wanted to show them what a money sink the ranch was and how dangerous it could be. I told them how beavers, forest beavers, had chewed down the tree, which had missed landing in their bedroom by only a few feet.

  I know now that those razor-bastards knew everything. They could sense that I’d cut that tree, but for some reason they pretended to go along with my story. Quentin had me spend two days sawing the tree for firewood. “You’re a good woodcutter,” he said when I had the tree all sawed up and stacked. “I’ll bet that’s the thing you do best.”

  Before he could get the carpenters out to repair the damage to the lodge, a hard rain blew in and soaked some of my books. I figured there was nothing I could do. Anything I did to harm the land or their property would harm me.

  Meanwhile the valley flowered. Summer stretched and yawned, and then it was gone. Quentin brought his children out early the second fall. Zim didn’t make the trip, nor did I spy any of the skin magazines. The kids, two girls and a boy who was a younger version of Quentin, were okay for a day or two (the girls ran the generator and watched movies on the VCR the whole day long), but little Quentin was going to be trouble, I could tell. The first words out of his mouth when he arrived were “Can you shoot anything right now? Rabbits? Marmots?”

  And sure enough, before two days went by he discovered that there were fish—delicate brook trout with polka-dotted, flashy, colorful sides and intelligent-looking gold-rimmed eyes—spawning on gravel beds in the shallow creek that ran through the meadow. What Quentin’s son did after discovering the fish was to borrow his dad’s shotgun and begin shooting them.

  Little Quentin loaded, blasted away, reloaded. It was a pump-action twelve-gauge, like the ones used in big-city detective movies, and the motion was like masturbating—jack-jack boom, jack-jack boom. Little Quentin’s sisters came running out, rolled up their pant legs, and waded into the stream.

  Quentin sat on the porch with drink in hand and watched, smiling.

  During the first week of November, while out walking—the skies frosty, flirting with snow—I heard ravens, and then noticed the smell of a new kill, and moved over in that direction.

  The ravens took flight into the trees as I approached. Soon I saw the huge shape of what they’d been feasting on: a carcass of such immensity that I paused, frightened, even though it was obviously dead.

  Actually it was two carcasses, bull moose, their antlers locked together from rut-combat. The rut had been over for a month, I knew, and I guessed they’d been attached like that for at least that long. One moose was long dead—two weeks?—but the other moose, though also dead, still had all his hide on him and wasn’t even stiff. The ravens and coyotes had already done a pretty good job on the first moose, stripping what they could from him. His partner, his enemy, had thrashed and flailed about, I could tell—small trees and brush were leveled all around them—and I could see the swath, the direction from which they had come, floundering, fighting, to this final resting spot.

  I went and borrowed a neighbor’s draft horse. The moose that had just died wasn’t so heavy—he’d lost a lot of weight during the month he’d been tied up with the other moose—and the other one was a ship of bones, mostly air.

  Their antlers seemed to be welded together. I tied a rope around the newly dead moose’s hind legs and got the horse to drag the cargo down through the forest and out into the front yard. I walked next to the horse, soothing him as he pulled his strange load. Ravens flew behind us, cawing at this theft. Some of them filtered down from the trees and landed on top of the newly dead moose’s humped back and rode along, pecking at the hide, trying to find an opening. But the hide was too thick—they’d have to wait for the coyotes to open it—so they rode with me, like gypsies: I, the draft horse, the ravens, and the two dead moose moved like a giant serpent, snaking our way through the trees.

  I hid the carcasses at the edge of the woods and then, on the other side of a small clearing, built a blind of branches and leaves where I could hide and watch over them.

  I painted my face camouflage green and brown, settled into my blind, and waited.

  The next day, like buffalo wolves from out of the mist, Quentin and Zim reappeared. I’d hidden my truck a couple of miles away and locked up the guest house so they’d think I was gone. I wanted to watch without being seen. I wanted to see them in the wild.

  “What the shit!” Zim cried as he got out of his mongo-tire jeep, the one with the electric winch, electric windows, electric sunroof, and electric cattle prod. Ravens were swarming my trap, gorging, and coyotes darted in and out, tearing at that one moose’s hide, trying to peel it back and reveal new flesh.

  “Shitfire!” Zim cried, trotting across the yard. He hopped the buck-and-rail fence, his flabby ass caught momentarily astraddle the high bar. He ran into the woods, shooing away the ravens and coyotes. The ravens screamed and rose into the sky as if caught in a huge tornado, as i
f summoned. Some of the bolder ones descended and made passes at Zim’s head, but he waved them away and shouted “Shitfire!” again. He approached, examined the newly dead moose, and said, “This meat’s still good!”

  That night Zim and Quentin worked by lantern, busy with butchering and skinning knives, hacking at the flesh with hatchets. I stayed in the bushes and watched. The hatchets made whacks when they hit flesh, and cracking sounds when they hit bone. I could hear the two men laughing. Zim reached over and smeared blood delicately on Quentin’s cheeks, applying it like makeup, or medicine of some sort, and they paused, catching their breath from their mad chopping before going back to work. They ripped and sawed slabs of meat from the carcass and hooted, cheering each time they pulled off a leg.

  They dragged the meat over the autumn-dead grass to the smokehouse, and cut off the head and antlers last, right before daylight.

  I hiked out and got my truck, washed my face in a stream, and drove home.

  They waved when they saw me come driving in. They were out on the porch having breakfast, all clean and freshly scrubbed. As I approached, I heard them talking as they always did, as normal as pie.

  Zim was lecturing to Quentin, waving his arm at the meadow and preaching the catechism of development. “You could have a nice hunting lodge, send ‘em all out into the woods on horses, with a yellow slicker and a gun. Boom! They’re living the western experience. Then in the winter you could run just a regular guest lodge, like on Newhart. Make ‘em pay for everything. They want to go cross-country skiing? Rent ‘em. They want to race snowmobiles? Rent ‘em. Charge ‘em for taking a piss. Rich people don’t mind.”