by Barry Lopez
I took him all the way up north, to my place. He had some antelope meat with him and we ate good. That was the best meat I ever had. We talked. He wanted to know what I was doing for work. I was cutting wood. He was going to go up to British Columbia, Nanaimo, in there, in spring to look for work. That night when we were going to bed I saw his back in the kerosene light. The muscles looked like water coming over his shoulders and going into the bed of his spine. I went over and hugged him.
I woke up the next morning when it was just getting light. I could not hear the sound of the river and the silence frightened me until I remembered. I heard chopping on the ice. I got dressed and went down. The earth was like rock that winter.
He had cut a hole a few feet across, black water boiling up, flowing out on the ice, freezing. He was standing in the hole naked with his head bowed and his arms straight up over his head with his hands open. He had cut his arms with a knife and the red blood was running down them, down his ribs, slowing in the cold, to the black water. I could see his body shaking, the muscles starting to go blue-gray over his bones, the color of the ice. He called out in a voice so strong I sat down as though his voice had hit me. I had never heard a cry like that, his arms down and his fists squeezed tight, his mouth, those large white teeth, his forehead knotted. The cry was like a bear, not a man sound, like something he was tearing away from inside himself.
The cry went up like a roar and fell away into a trickle, like creek water over rocks at the end of summer. He was bent over with his lips near the water. His fist opened. He put water to his lips four times, and washed the blood off. He leaped out of that hole like a salmon and ran off west, around the bend, gone into the trees, very high steps.
I went down to look at the blood on the gray-white ice.
He cut wood with me that winter. He worked hard. When the trillium bloomed and the varied thrushes came he went north. I did not see him again for ten years. I was in North Dakota harvesting wheat, sleeping in the back of my truck (parked under cottonwoods for the cool air that ran down their trunks at night like water). One night I heard my name. He was by the tailgate.
“You got a good spot,” he said. “Yeah. That you?”
“Sure.”
“How you doing?”
“Good. Talk in the morning.”
He sounded tired, like he’d been riding all day.
Next morning someone left, too much drinking, and he got that job, and so we worked three weeks together, clear up into Saskatchewan, before we turned around and drove home. When we came through Stanley Basin in Idaho we crossed over a little bridge where the Salmon River was only a foot deep, ten feet across. It came across a big meadow, out of some quaking aspen. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “I bet that’s good water.” We did. We camped up in those aspen and that was good water. It was sweet like a woman’s lips when you are in love and holding back.
We came home and he stayed with me that winter, too. I was getting old then and it was good he was around. In the spring he left. He told me a lot that winter, but I can’t say these things. When he spoke about them it was like the breeze when you are asleep in the woods: you listen hard, but it is not easy. It is not your language. He lived in the desert near antelope one year, by a lake where geese came in the spring. The geese did not teach him anything, he said, but it was good to be around them. The water in the lake was so clear when the geese floated they seemed to be suspended, twenty or twenty-five feet off the ground.
The morning he left he took a knife and carefully scraped his whole body. He put some of these small pieces of skin in the water and scattered the rest over the sagebrush.
He went to work then in another town in Nevada somewhere, I forget, in a lumberyard and he was there for a long time, five or six years. He took time off a lot, went into the mountains for a few weeks, a place where he could see the sun come up and go down. Clean out everything bad that had built up.
When he left that place he went to Alaska, around Anchorage somewhere, but couldn’t find any work and ended up at Sitka fishing and then went to Matanuska Valley, working on a farm there. All that time he was alone. Once he came down to see me but I was gone. I knew it when I got home. I went down to the river and saw the place where he went into the water. The ground was soft around the rocks. I knew his feet. I am not a man of great power, but I took what I had and gave it to him that time, everything I had. “You keep going,” I said. I raised my hands over my head and stepped into the water and shouted it again. “You keep going!” My heart was pounding like a waterfall.
That time after he left he was gone almost ten years again. I had a dream he was living up on those salmon rivers in the north. I don’t know. Maybe it was a no-account dream. I knew he never went south.
Last time I saw him he came to my house in the fall. He came in quiet as air sitting in a canyon. We made dinner early and at dusk he went out and I followed him because I knew he wanted me to. He cut twigs from the ash and cottonwood and alder and I got undressed. He brushed my body with these bank-growing trees and said I had always been a good friend. He said this was his last time. We went swimming a little. There is a good current at that place. It is hard to swim.
Later we went up to the house and ate. He told me a story about an old woman who tried to keep two husbands and stories about a man who couldn’t sing but went around making people pay to hear him sing anyway. I laughed until I was tired out and went to bed. I woke up suddenly, at the end of a dream. It was the same dream I had once before. About him climbing up a waterfall out of the sky. I went to look in his bed. He was gone. I got dressed and drove my truck to the falls below the willow flats where I killed my first deer many years ago. 1 ran into the trees, fighting the vine maple and deadfalls, running now as hard as I could for the river. The thunder of that falls was all around me and the ground shaking. I came out on the river, slipping on the black rocks glistening in the moonlight. I saw him all at once standing at the lip of the falls. I began to shiver in the damp cold, the mist stinging my face, moonlight on the water when I heard that bear-sounding cry and he was shaking up there at the top of the falls, silver like a salmon shaking, and that cry louder than the falls for a moment, and then swallowed and he was in the air, turning over and over, moonlight finding the silver-white of his sides and dark green back before he cut into the water, the sound lost in the roar.
I did not want to leave. Sunrise. I went up onto the willow flats where I could see the sky. I felt the sunlight going deep into my hair. Good fall day. Good day to go look for chinquapin nuts, but I sat down and fell asleep.
When I awoke it was late. I went back to my truck and drove home. On the way I was wondering if I felt strong enough to eat salmon.
WITHIN BIRDS’ HEARING
WITHIN BIRDS’ HEARING
I AM ENFEEBLED BY this torrent of light. Each afternoon seems the last for me. Hammered by the sun, mapless in country but vaguely known, I am like a desiccated pit lying in a sand wash. Hope has become a bird’s feather, glissading from the evening sky.
The journey started well enough. I left my home in the eastern Mojave twelve or fifteen days ago, making a path for the ocean. Like a sleek cougar I crossed the Lloma Hills, then the Little Sangre de Cristo Range. I climbed up out of the southernmost extension of White Shell Canyon without incident. Early on, the searing heat made me wary, brought me to consider traveling only at night. But, the night skies cast with haze and so near a new moon, it was impossible to find my way.
Today I thought it might rain. But it does not seem likely now. It’s been more difficult to locate water than I’ve known in the past, and that lack in this light and heat has added to my anxiety. Also, my grasp of how far I still have to travel is imperfect. This most of all fills me with dread.
In the distance, the stony, cactus-strewn land falls down into the drainage of the Curandera. I will turn north here this morning and hope to be in the wet canyon of the Oso by nightfall and down off this high blistered plain. Fro
m there, however far it may be, I know the river will flow to the ocean. It’s comforting, each evening, to construe the ocean as my real destiny—the smooth beach underfoot, round and hard like an athlete’s thigh, the ocean crashing, shaking off the wind, surging up the beach slope, all of it like wild horses. But, walking the Oso, I could come upon some sign that might direct me elsewhere, perhaps north into the Rose Peaks, into country I do not know at all.
Part of the difficulty of this journey has been having to feel my way like this. I departed—my body deft, taut—with a clear image of where I should go: the route, the dangers, the distances by day. But then the landscape became vast. Thinking too much on the end, I sometimes kept a pace poorly matched to the country. By evening I was winded, irritated, dry hearted. I would scrape out a place on the ground and fall asleep, too exhausted to eat. My clothing, thin and worn, began to disintegrate. I would awaken dreamless, my tongue swollen from thirst, and look about delirious for any companion—a dog, a horse, another human being just waking up. But there was no one with whom to speak, no one even to offer water to. I spat my frustration out. I pushed on, resolute as Jupiter’s moons, breaking down only once, weeping and licking the earth.
I did not anticipate the ways in which I would wear out.
My one salvation, a gift I can’t reason through, has been the unceasing kindness of animals. Once, when I was truly lost, when the Gray Spider Hills and the Black Sparrow Hills were entirely confused in a labyrinth of memory, I saw a small coyote sitting between two creosote bushes just a few yards away. She was eyeing me quizzically, whistling me up with that look. I followed behind her without question, into country that eventually made sense to me, or which I eventually remembered.
Another time, the eighth day out, I fainted, collapsing from heat and thirst onto the cobble plain through the blood shimmer of air. I was as overwhelmed by my own foolishness, as struck down by the arrogance in my determination as I was overcome by thirst. Falling, I knew the depth of my stupidity, but not as any humiliation. I felt unshackled. Released. I came back to the surface aware of drops of water trickling into my throat. I tried to raise an arm to the harrowing sun but couldn’t lift the weight. I inhaled the texture of warm silk and heard a scraping like stiffened fans. When I squinted through quivering lashes I saw I was beneath birds.
Mourning doves were perched on my chest, my head, all down my legs. Their wings flared above me like parasols. They held my lips apart with slender toes. One by one, doves settled on my cheeks. They craned their necks at angles to drip water, then flew off. Their gleaming eyes were an infant’s lucid pools. Backed into this rock shelter, out of the sun’s first, slanting rays, I am trying to manufacture now a desire to go on, to step once again into a light I must stroke through. The light wears like acid and the heat to come will terrorize even lizards. It is not the desert of my childhood.
I concentrate on an image of transparent water and cool air flowing through the Oso River Canyon, beyond the horizon. I will lie down naked in its current. Cool watercress will stick like rose petals to my skin. I will anoint my eyes, my fevered ears. I will lap water like a trembling dog. The fired plain before me, the wicked piercing of thorns, my knotted intestines, the lost path I will endure for that. Drawing the two together in my mind—the eviscerating heat, the forgiving water—I see the horizons of my life. My desire to arrive, to cover this distance, is so acute I whimper like a colt when I breathe.
Two days past, in Agredecido Canyon, I came upon a gallery of wild figures painted on a sheer rock escarpment a thousand years ago. I was walking on the far side of the wash and nearly missed them, concealed behind a row of tall cottonwoods. So many days in a landscape without people had made me anxious and I went quickly across, as though they were alive and could speak.
Someone’s ancestors had drawn thirty-four figures on the sienna rock, many familiar and comforting—mountain sheep running, human figures traveling, and other animals free of gravity, as if they were plummeting toward the sky. Huge kachinalike demi-gods were dancing, A square-shouldered human form stood with its back turned, holding a snake. Two perplexing images attracted me. One was a series of pictographs, lined out along a cleft in the rock. The initial drawing, the one farthest to the left as I read them, was of a single bush, like sagebrush. Then came a clump of thin, thready lines, lightly incised. Then a rope coil with tattered ends and then a second rope, unwound and undulating. Lastly, a cast of double curves, like a child’s seagulls flying away.
The second image was simpler, a bear tumbling on the spout of a shooting geyser. I thought it a water geyser, but the bear’s large eyes and the round shape of its mouth revealed such fear that finally I believed it a geyser of blood. As with so much of what people leave behind, it’s difficult to say what was meant. We can only surmise that they loved, that they were afraid.
I rise and press off. From beneath a paloverde I take a bearing on the high white disk of the sun. Looking toward the indistinct middle distance, the outwash plain of distorted mountains, I believe I am looking at the shoulder of the place where the waters of the Oso will rise.
I stride along this route just north of west, listening to the seething cut of the sickle light, feeling the black heat rise around me like water, watchful where I step. My eye is out sharply for any track, for the camouflage in which poisonous snakes hide. I find a good pace and work to hold it, adjusting breath and stride as I cross arroyos with their evidence of flash floods and climb and descend shallow hills. I do not think of the Oso at all but only of what is around me—the powdery orange of globe mallow blossoms, lac glistening on wands of creosote bushes, bumblebees whining. The afternoon, the prostrate sky, sweep on. My feet crumble the rain pan and wind pack of dust. Breezes whisk scorched seeds toward me. The seeds, bits of brittle leaf and stem, corral my feet and lie still.
At one point I see antelope—so far south for these animals, twenty or more of them ranging to the southeast, an elongation of life under the heaved sky.
At last light, when the sun has set beneath the mountains, I am without a trace of the Oso. I sit down on a granite boulder, a slow collapse onto the bone of my haunches. The country has clearly proved more than I can imagine. I consider that I began this morning confidently, rightly seasoned I believed, and then, with every conscious fiber, I feel I will not despair. My body comes back erect with determination. I have made so many miles today. But I know—I have no good day past this one. Desperation, the heavy night tide, surges. I cannot stand again. My feet throb from stone bruises and thorn punctures. My flesh spills the shrieking heat. My tongue wads my mouth. I bow my head, my sticking eyelids, to my knees. Into this agony, as if from an unsuspected room, comes a bare cascade of sound. My wounds become silent. The long phrase descends again, a liquid tremolo. The skin over my cheekbones chills, as when sweat suddenly dries. Again the falling tiyew, tiyew, tiyew, tiyew, and, a turn at the end, tew.
I stand up to rivet the dimness. The burbling call breaks the dark once more. This time I hear each note, a canyon wren, surely, but something else. I strain my ears at the night, listening for that other sound. When it comes I realize it has been there each time, each call, an ornament hardly separated from the bird’s first note. I recall vividly the last canyon wrens I heard, ones around my home where they are never far from the waters of the Colorado, their voices another purling in the dry air.
The song again, pure, sharp, now without the grace note. I fix its place and move into the night, my face averted, feeling through the darkness with my hands, sliding my feet ahead, down a scrabble slope. Long minutes pass between bursts of wren song and then there is only silence. I am standing in water for some moments before I am aware of its caress, before I can separate the pain in my feet from its soothing. A little farther on I hear the gurgle of springs. More water, running from beneath the Sierra de San Martín. I squat down to feel the expanse of the shallow flow. Headwaters of the Oso.
I walk a little ways, down the gathering waters.
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I drink. I bathe. I rinse out my clothes.
The ocean is far away, but I feel its breath booming against the edge of the continent. Wind evaporating water tightens my bare flesh. I feel the running tide of my own salted blood. In the full round air from below I can detect, though barely, a perfume of pear blossoms and wetted fields. I can distinguish in it the last halt cries of birds, becalmed in the marshes.
EMPIRA’S TAPESTRY
EMPIRA’S TAPESTRY
THE FALL EMPIRA LARSON came to Idora we remember not solely for her arrival but for the height of the drought. Winter rains the year before never filled the creeks. The following summer the woods were parched and brittle and we worried terribly about fire, though none came. It wasn’t until Christmas that the creeks came up and the river filled.
Empira came to teach fourth grade. She boarded with me her first six months, then moved to a small house that needed repairs and was always damp, but which gave her a depth of privacy people like her seem to crave. It was my own feeling that she had arrived on the heels of some difficulty with a man—not necessarily something he had caused, either; but I didn’t inquire and wouldn’t have. She showed a sharp tongue if provoked but otherwise had a fine bearing and was gracious with the children. She seemed to live the life before her, not one left behind.
To be truthful, I wasn’t much drawn to her at first nor did I welcome her friendship. After my husband died I felt an odd antagonism toward younger women, especially women like Empira who had made independent lives for themselves, who moved about the country freely and might have had many lovers. Empira’s presence made me look poorly on my own life. In conversations with her, meal after meal, I came to know an anger that had not touched me before.
