by Jim Harrison
Joe took the shovel and we followed him up a hillock and down a long, steep embankment to a creek. While Joe dug in the bank with the shovel I walked down the bank fifty yards, stripped to my undershorts, and sat in a pool of cool, rushing water to rinse off my sticky body. Ann took a bath herself near where Joe was digging and, ever the voyeur, I regretted moving so far downstream. Joe shouted and held up an object I couldn’t determine from that distance. He shouted again more loudly and I hastily drew on my pants over my wet legs and underpants. I hopped barefoot upstream and Joe handed me what seemed to be an enormous bear skull, very dark colored as it seemed stained by oil or tar or creosote-like substance. I only recognized it immediately as a bear skull because there is one above the fireplace in the tavern, though not nearly as large as this one. When he handed it to me it was so heavy I nearly dropped it, as if the skull had become petrified by its long burial. I was so nonplussed that I barely gave the wet, nearly nude Ann a glance though I discovered later my brain and eyes in their role of apertures took an adequate number of photos.
“What in hell is this?” I yelled, quite dumbfounded.
“Bear,” Joe said. “Old bear.” He pursed his lips and raised a finger to signal a secret, then pointed upstream where the creek emerged from a vast and foreboding swamp.
I smelled the oily tang of the skull with a slight shudder. I’ve always had an aversion to bones but in these woods you rarely see bones or antlers because we have so many porcupines that feed upon them. I recalled Jack London’s phrase about always seeing “the skull beneath the skin” when he was drinking too much which was always. During summers as a boy up here I’d read and re-read Zane Grey and Jack London and felt quite manly with my hunting knife and single-shot .22 rifle, but even then I never went the extra mile into the woods but a mile less. A goofy friend back then, who became a renowned landscape painter, would always become lost and my parents drummed the terrors of the forest into my brain making me quite cowardly. When you paint the world with blame parents are the most convenient canvases. Of course later, in the fifties, I think, a little girl over near Brimley (east of here) was killed by a bear. Black bears have killed far more people than the fabled grizzly but then there are far more black bears. My mind whirred with irrelevancies because of the shock of the strange skull. Bones are certainly a lacuna in my education but I knew this skull couldn’t have come from a black bear, but must have been from a creature before the glacial ice age some thirteen thousand years ago.
Joe struggled for words then did a dancing pantomime in the creek, showing how he had found the skull in the creek muck with his feet. He took the bear skull back from me, then scrubbed off the tarry substance with sand and replaced it in the hole in the bank for safekeeping. My present was evidently going to remain under his control. He reached in his pocket and handed me a massive, stained incisor tooth for reassurance. I almost didn’t want the tooth but knew I had to be gracious.
Meanwhile, Ann stood there in wet undies with her brow furrowed, the human habit when the unknown is radically enlarged if only for a moment. Joe had obviously shown us something quite out of the ordinary but we were without the knowledge to perceive what it meant. Just moments after the skull was re-buried I was already questioning if it was as large as it seemed, and in my mind’s eye I wondered at the shovel shape between its forehead and nose. I had visited the Field Museum in Chicago dozens of times during my childhood and right up until my last trip last year, but the skeletons of mammals weren’t my favorites. I did realize that Joe’s bear skull probably wouldn’t fit comfortably in a bushel basket and I failed to remember anything that large at the museum. I mentioned to Ann that once on a trip to California my parents had taken me to the obligatory La Brea Tar Pits and it shared a similar odor to Joe’s bear skull.
Well, there you have it. I was slightly knocked off balance and I’ve never regained it. It wasn’t as if things went downhill after that day but they certainly took a different direction. On the way out of the woods toward my car I fell with a resounding thump on my ass, painfully bruising my tailbone. Joe carried me piggyback the last half mile which was, naturally, humiliating but then I didn’t quite care. When we got to my vehicle Joe became more spasmodic than usual and Ann blamed the extra exertion. She was particularly worried because he was already at the maximum dosage of the pill intended to relax his considerable musculature. She rejected anything to eat and I dropped them off at her car downhill from the cabin. She embraced me good-bye, warmly with her entire body for a change, which momentarily alleviated my tailbone pain.
I made myself an overlarge pan of corned-beef hash and studied the bear tooth which was longer than my forefinger while I ate, recalling how Marcia had given the skull a quick sniff, a brief lick, growled, and retreated, then stared off into the greenery in displacement. I took a nap then and had dreams with striking images of Ann’s body that unfortunately bled into a welter of botanical specimens of leaves that never existed so far as I knew. I awoke at twilight grinding my teeth and discovering I had broken a bicuspid. Oh fuck me, I thought, at least it doesn’t hurt because I’d already had a root canal in the tooth, and thus the nerve was dead.
Just before dark Dick Rathbone arrived with a very irritated game warden who was investigating a crime. Two telemetric collars, one off a black bear and the other off a timber wolf, had been traced to a trash can at a tourist stop near McMillan, east of Seney. For an unannounced reason the game warden thought Joe was involved, no matter that Joe has a specific aversion to firearms since his accident, finding the sharp, loud noises to be unbearable. According to the game warden two game biologists were seeing a great deal of research go down the drain because now the animals couldn’t be traced. Someone had obviously poached the animals and disposed of the collars. I asked the game warden, who was becoming a bit brash and cheeky for my taste, if he didn’t think it was a bit coincidental that two species fifteen miles apart (he had said this) lost their collars in the same period of time. He said, “Don’t tell me my business,” and I asked him to leave at once, first demanding his superior’s name who turned out to be the same nitwit that had had Joe’s shelter torn down. This was supposedly Joe’s apparent motive. I recalled in former times liking several old-time game wardens I had met but then the new breed were quite full of themselves as if they were the F.B.I. of the natural world.
My dream of Ann and all the flora she had become came back to me despite my irritable state. I “leafed” through a botanical text and decided that henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) most closely resembled what her dream genitalia had become. Maybe the witch’s herb was appropriate to this solitary girl who, no matter her avowed rationality, seemed to be disintegrating over her lover’s doomed condition. Melancholy as these thoughts were, these were far exceeded when my tongue tip hit my shattered tooth and I wondered what it meant mentally when you grind them so hard you break a tooth?
I had read somewhere that consciousness is predatory and when your consciousness becomes deeper and more complicated there are that many more layers you are obligated to process. This is definitely a discouraging notion. Since I was a young man I have frequently thought, and not all that unpleasantly, that I lived within a gray egg of my own making, an egg I had furnished carefully and selectively myself, and now it was beginning to crack. The fearful question, of course, is do all things that crack sink?
My ruminations were paltry compared to the yellow orb of the moon rising through the white pines and hemlock at the rear of my clearing in the forest. I sat on the picnic table, my butt still a little painful from its collision with earth, thinking idly that if Joe did have anything to do with the telemetric collars I doubted that he could have disposed of them some forty miles away, or would have had the sense to do so. But there was Ann who, if she had seen the telemetric collars aside from Joe’s own, would have known something was amiss and surely would have wiped off the fingerprints before driving off to get rid of them at a safe distance.
I have sma
ll tolerance for mysteries, crime, and magic, that sort of thing. They aren’t included within my gray egg but there was certainly the question of how anyone could get the collars off the animals without a tranquilizer gun or rifle. Since Joe had dug a grave for a baby bear only a mile down the river from my cabin he seemed a terribly unlikely candidate for killing a bear and a wolf.
The picnic table was too hard on my sore butt so I retrieved my sleeping bag and a large glass of very old Calvados I keep for special occasions. The Calvados had only been bottled a few years ago but it had been in a barrel since 1933, my birth year. I bought two bottles of it on Rue Madeleine in Paris for an inconceivable amount of money just after I retired. Now I held the glass up and looked at the moon through the amber liquid, dismissing the thought of what Joe and Ann might be doing at this hour. Sitting there on the folded sleeping bag, which was a fine cushion, I was stupidly amazed to realize how similar Ann’s body was to my ex-wife’s. The only way we had been truly compatible had been sexually and we had met several times in the year after our divorce for lovemaking. The divorce dug a three-year hole in my life but she had been much more resilient, re-marrying a prosperous man a few years younger than herself and, of all things, adopting two Oriental orphans from Laos. She had never acted very motherly around me but then I was scarcely a father type. My parents had been, in my view, cold, mean-minded Republicans so I thought of myself as a Democrat from an early age.
There was a whippoorwill calling from up the river, which seemed to make me drowsy. I stretched out the sleeping bag and lay back thinking how in Joe’s case fate had reduced itself to an injury, how driven by the often malevolent god of booze a moment’s carelessness had been a dramatic lesson against the concept of fairness, of course, but then history, if you’re truly human, must reduce itself to the individual case. I still remember way back when waiting at the Drake to meet someone for breakfast and reading The New York Times in which Mao had said that China felt secure because she could afford to lose a half billion people in a war and still survive as a country, a statement of incomprehensive evil. Oh fuck history. I heard an owl and several bats crossed the face of the moon. A slight breeze from the swamp to the west smelled agreeably pelvic and then I slept, quite unable to rise and go into the cabin. We’re not supposed to be trapped by our shelters but we are.
When I awoke at daylight it was raining softly but not enough to penetrate my sleeping bag. I traced a finger across my wet forehead and said, “This is me” as if to remind myself. The first sunlight was peeking through the trees in the same place that the moon had risen the evening before. The nature of the clearing around my cabin, which is normally brutally fixed in its sameness, looked peculiar. Through a hole formed by two adjoining branches of a birch tree I could see a raven in the sky but only for a moment. A chickadee, a somewhat pathetic little bird, stared at me from the handle of my barbecue grill not three feet away, but then maybe he thought I was a pathetic life-form. When it rained I had seen Joe looking upward as if trying to identify single drops. My skin tingled when I heard a noise and saw movement in the bushes just beyond the edge of my clearing. Several times this summer I’ve had a mother bear and two cubs visit my large plastic garbage can, usually just before dark or at dawn. When the garbage can is empty they swat it and bite holes in it. At that moment I didn’t want a visit so I sang out, “O solo mio” and was amused at my choice. There was a crashing in the brush that sounded like a solitary deer, which you can determine by the brief space between the sound of the landing and the leaping.
I felt mildly vertiginous getting out of the bag and off the picnic table. It was pleasurable in that it was a fresh sensation. The vertigo is that if I’m not going to continue doing what I’m already doing what am I going to do? There was the idea of setting fire to the cabin but then why should I blame it? There was also the idea of selling the approximately ten thousand volumes of my book collection in my Chicago condominium or running away which is childish because it presumes there is someone to look for you. I could fall in love like the great Picasso did over and over, buy a hundred Viagra pills, and blow out my heart making a sensual stew, which sounded like the best plan yet.
For the time being I fetched a bucket from the cabin and set off to pick blueberries to make pancakes for breakfast. There was a fine patch of the berries only several hundred yards from my cabin and my plan was to pick the berries, drink a cup of coffee while making the batter, and drink a large glass of good Sauternes with the pancakes, and then back to bed.
I had the bucket half full when Ann came thumping down my rumply two-track in her miserable subcompact. She said she was on her way home to East Lansing and simply wanted to say goodbye, which was a transparent fib. Her face was cold and her arms were crossed tightly on her chest, all in contrast to her white sleeveless blouse and short, blue-flowered summer skirt. The great Picasso would have leapt on her like a flying squirrel, or so I imagined. She was just standing there so to treat myself I knelt and picked a cluster of berries next to her left calf. Her knee was definitely a knee. Blue flowers on blue skirt, blue berries. I held out my palm and she ate some blueberries, then in a staccato rush poured forth her torments. She was trying to become pregnant by Joe! But then her mother was terribly religious and there was a burden in bearing an illegitimate child. Dick Rathbone was a mean bastard as Joe’s legal guardian and wouldn’t allow them to marry. Maybe I could marry her, with of course no legal obligations, assuming she was able to get pregnant. I tried to divert her by saying that marrying Joe would be an inter-species marriage. She yelled “Fuck you,” and jumped in her car, taking off so fast she spun some sand in my berry bucket. I meant to rinse them anyway.
According to Joe he first took note of the beast he had mentioned the month before while standing on various high hills either overlooking large expanses of woods or Lake Superior. It took a full afternoon for me to interpret what he was saying, aided to some degree by his notebook which was mostly gibberish. I have no doubt that he thinks he is writing something quite different from what he actually writes, just as when he is speaking he often is saying other than he intends. Anyway, this so-called “beast” reveals its location when your vantage point has altitude by a specific patch of stillness in the woods or on the water on very windy days. There are a number of other details I will add later on the nature and various shapes of this beast.
Well, Mister Coroner, don’t be ready to assume that I took Joe seriously on this matter, but then I’ve always found why a man believes something to be so more interesting than what he believes. This is not a fine point but something big as all outdoors. You have doubtless sawed a hole in Joe’s skull to determine the condition of its contents. At least I’m told this procedure is “de rigueur” in an autopsy, but surprise (!), what you discovered is what we’ve already known. What I am telling you is how that bruised gray matter drew him so far north on the watery night, very likely swimming after his beast, whether real or imagined. Of course, I asked Joe what the creature looked like and he bumbled out that it had three different appearances.
I can’t say that all this was pleasant to think about over my pancakes and Sauternes, a Château d’Yquem of a moderately good year. There was the question of why drink a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine for breakfast but why not? I was simply enough celebrating having slept outdoors for the first time in thirty years and I meant to do so again. And astoundingly enough, I didn’t go back to bed after breakfast. I assumed I had slept poorly outside but not so. Almost as a joke, but also to soften my forever-nagging sense of insecurity, I strapped on my pistol and set off for a hike.
I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when I was stopped by the thought I had read somewhere to the effect that our perceptions are our only internally generated map of the world. I wondered immediately about the map generated by the hawk that can read the classifieds at fifty feet, or the bear whose preposterous skull signaled that he or she had no natural enemies, or better yet the map generat
ed by Joe’s wounded brain and how different it might be from that of the rest of us. This made my tongue probe my broken tooth. In one of the books Roberto sent from Chicago it said that every single brain differs significantly from every other brain. In the simplest terms it takes a lot of training to make them behave the same. Some of Joe’s training was obviously destroyed by his injury never to be regained. What, if anything, took its place? Was there even a shred of the compensatory? It is obvious that he spends a great deal of time enjoying himself but that seems to be in areas in which he is least like us. He appears to have a freedom of a different sort that slips off the edges of the definition.
I looked around at my surroundings closely and determined I was on a horseshoe bend of the river in an area where the brook trout fishing used to be particularly good. I got on all fours and crept up to the mossy bank seeing several fish in the category we used to call “keepers.” These trout spent their entire lives underwater except for the briefest forays into the air for flies. I stared absurdly at the dozen or so species of trees in the vicinity. None were perfect or near-perfect specimens of their kind. I was aware from my botanical dabblings just how many tree diseases there were, literally hundreds. People generally only think of such matters before Christmas when they are quite bent on the “perfect” Christmas tree, but these species are scarcely wild, tended and trimmed as they are in vast plantations which are mostly biological deserts. There are no perfect trees any more than there are perfect human beings.
Upstream from where I knelt on the bank I knew there was a very large section of a white pine log that didn’t reach the mouth of the river during logging days. It is at least seven feet in diameter. When we were very young Dick Rathbone used to concoct ways that we might drag the log out and sell it for a large sum, though to whom was in question. Somewhat like Joe’s prehistoric bear the log was a relic of another time.
