The Beast God Forgot to Invent

by Jim Harrison

  Since our collective mood (except for Marcia’s) was a bit shabby I began to sense the beginning of the end, at the same time chiding myself for this questionable sense of pre-recognition. I swerved to avoid a ground squirrel or chipmunk and failed, hearing the almost imperceptible thunk of its demise. This further distracted me and Dick asked me to stop so he could take over the wheel. I got in the backseat with Ann, and Marcia gladly got in the front seat with Dick. She somehow prefers this illusion of keeping a watch out for us. I avoided looking at Ann who still seemed to be smarting from Dick’s whiskey comment. And then without warning I fell asleep as a child might, waking only when Ann pushed away my head which was half on her lap though I hadn’t been sufficiently conscious to enjoy the position.

  Dick had parked my four-wheel drive on the two-track with the closest access to Joe’s cave and was stuffing the food and water in his daypack. I drowsily watched Marcia scoot into the brush on the track of Joe while Dick and Ann laughed about something out of my earshot so Ann must be over her snit. They both looked at me as if questioning whether I was going along and I scrambled out of the backseat with all of the energy of a half-drowned worm.

  I had been smart enough to use a walking stick to poke ahead of me after my former pratfalls and was able to keep up with them without too much trouble, concentrating on Ann’s butt a few feet ahead of me. How could such a functional thing be a source of so much anguish, I asked myself, mulling over the usual biological answers. I was amused to remember that Edelman had quoted Darwin saying, “But then arises the doubt: can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?” There was an image of randy Shakespeare lapping at a low chambermaid like a street cur right after creating his greatest sonnet. And libidinous Einstein, he of the enlarged hippocampus, retreating from cosmic considerations to the pleasures of a dampish adulterous bed. We won’t include our beleaguered president who seems to make the most otiose pundit and graft-sodden congressman feel superior.

  Off course I ran into Ann in my reverie when she stopped to tie her boot. I picked her up as she hissed, “You asshole,” then congratulated me on picking her up so easily. I’m reasonably strong from the aimless calisthenics that start my day, the only self-improvement scheme I haven’t abandoned. I want to continue being able to open wine bottles, jars, climbing stairs to my bed.

  When we reached Joe’s cave Marcia was waiting for us, then scooted off into the brush which Dick took as a sure indication that she knew Joe’s location. I was a bit miffed thinking I’d take a rest on one of the deerskins I intended to pull from Joe’s cave. Ann handed me one of those trifling squirt bottles of water used by hikers, joggers, and bicyclists and the stream of water sent me choking. Ann dashed off after Dick and Marcia and I labored to follow, refusing the heavy heart of the kid who couldn’t keep up. My heart actually seemed to flutter and chatter and I was windless but I kept up, almost anyway, at least to the point I could hear them thrashing through the brush ahead of me.

  When I emerged along the high bank above the creek where Joe had found the huge bear skull I could hear Marcia barking. Well down the bank Dick and Ann were looking straight up into two very tall white pines and Marcia barked with her forepaws against one of the trees. I could see nothing from my vantage point and rushed to join them. Ann turned, hearing me, and pointed straight up. At first I could see nothing but then within the bows of the two tops of the trees that were nearly intertwined there was a hammock. It was at least fifty feet up and obviously contained Joe though he wasn’t moving. It is indeed a euphemism to say we were nonplussed. “He’s arboreal,” I said, rather stupidly. We sat down to wordlessly think it over. After a bleak few minutes Ann took some pills from the bottle in Dick’s daypack and stuffed her small squirt bottle in a side pocket of her hiking trousers. “Don’t fall,” Dick said lamely, which she didn’t respond to before she started up the tree.

  It was easy climbing, not that I’d do it myself. White pines have nicely spaced branches but when Ann reached the hammock we could clearly hear the kind of keening wail you used to hear at old-time Irish funerals in Chicago, or in the tapes ethnologists make of Native American ceremonies. The sound made my very innards blush and I began to grind my teeth and hit the ground with the palm of my hand. Marcia forced herself onto Dick’s lap and closed her eyes. Dick stared down at the meandering creek for the smallest comfort. There was no point in trying to imagine Joe’s poor bruised brain gone quite amok until its vocals became so berserk that the forest herself refused to absorb it. I frankly began to weep which I hadn’t done since my father disappeared from earth and even then I waited until the next morning when I saw his briefcase on his desk in the den which held his large rock collection. Then I wept. And now I did.

  When the keening finally stopped, Dick tipped himself backward until he was supine and Marci stood beside me wagging her tail. Ann came down the tree, gathered some food, and went back up without saying a word. I shared a pot roast sandwich with Dick, laden with Edna’s homemade horseradish so hot it cleared the sinuses. Dick took out the bottle of whiskey and we stared at it a moment as if finally figuring out what whiskey was truly for, then each had a swallow.

  It was early evening before Ann came down again. She looked absolutely haggard, fairly hissing “thank god for drug companies.” It seemed to me also that certain romantic illusions had fled her, at least for the time being. Dick made her a cup of instant coffee into which she poured a goodly bit of whiskey. She exuded a sense of powerlessness that we all shared.

  The smoke from our campfire drifted straight up in the windless air, a burnt offering that lightly enshrouded Joe’s hammock in a silken mist. Our sole comfort was our rationed sips of whiskey though you had to count the rather tender burble of the creek. My mind drifted back to our collective ineffectuality though if all those genius authors of my stack of brain books, or at least say Edelman, Damasio, Slobodkin, Calvin, et al., had been here they couldn’t have done much except greatly deepen the level of conversation. It was akin to an oncologist possessing vast knowledge about melanoma except how to cure it. Dig it out with your miniature shovel, the scalpel. The man in the tree above us was as far out of reach as the moon that gave the illusion that it was nestled in the treetops beside him, but the moon had been one of his greatest comforts according to the frequency in which it appeared in his journals, which were somehow his brain’s effort to re-map itself after the losses incurred in the injury. You had to think of his neural correlates of perception, the struggle of those infinitesimally thin sheets of brain tissue to map the woods and water, the birds and mammals he felt drawn to, his utter and direct intimacy with his senses unmitigated by our usual concerns. And what “self” he had left would largely be considered nominal to many of us, possibly not worth living for but then there was my perhaps goofy suspicion that he had crossed over a line into an otherness of perception that was unavailable to the rest of us.

  Just before dark Dick went up the tree with an additional bedtime pill, perhaps a slight overdose but also a chemical insurance policy against Joe having a major seizure in the night. It was impossible not to wish to avoid that wailing which would be explosively disturbing in the dark, even worse than in the afternoon when the sound left the mind scorched of anything else.

  The speed at which Dick climbed the tree belied his age which was practically my own. I recalled a dreary meeting with my accountant last spring when he happily reminded me that my life expectancy was now eighty-three. The blessings of wealthy desuetude, I thought at the time, nearly walking into a speeding Rush Street taxi. I impulsively went over to Gibson’s and had a porterhouse with a full bottle of Pomerol, thinking that I may as well knock a month off the end. Poor Dick and Edna only bought cheap lean cuts. Years ago I had sent them twenty shares of Ford Motor for Christmas and it arrived back with a thank-you note to the effect that it was “too late in life” to
own stock because he didn’t want to have to think about it. This year I intended to have a Newberry dealer deliver a new yellow pick-up and doubted he’d have the craw to return it because he greatly valued pick-up trucks. Dick never had the least interest in money beyond what he and Edna needed to get along. Once he used a whole week’s salary to buy me a fly rod but mostly because he loathed the old “whippy” rod I was using.

  Her back was turned and I listened to Ann eat an apple as Dick climbed back down the tree. A crisp crunch and apple-wet glistening lips in the firelight which grew in the darkness. Dick laid out a survival item he called a “space blanket,” which protected a body from ground moisture, for Ann to rest on. He had earlier tried to talk me into leaving the woods and picking them up in the morning. I doubted my ability to navigate the hour’s walk back to the car but also at heart I didn’t want to leave. Instead, I made myself useful gathering a large pile of firewood, proud that I was doing so while Dick snoozed.

  I had envisioned a long evening talking by the fire but we each had only a single nightcap before we began to snooze sitting up. Ann patted the narrow room on the space blanket on each side of her and suggested we “cuddle,” adding that we “geezers” should keep our hands to ourselves. Dick joked that “that shouldn’t be difficult” as Ann was a bit “thin in the withers” for his taste. She faked irritation and cupped herself against me as if I were a superior choice, then promptly went to sleep.

  I stared up at the moon which was sliding slowly away from Joe’s treetop perch. I wondered if he might be looking down on us as a raven might, that is with curiosity but ultimately impassive because it wasn’t one of us.

  Dawn was an abrupt and unpleasant surprise. The eastern sky was a furious red and the wind had arisen precipitously from the northwest, chill and brisk. It wasn’t all that far before dawn when Dick had heard the wind and fed the fire. We could also look up and see Joe’s empty hammock flapping in the wind. Ann predictably burst into tears, and then we noted that Marcia was also gone. Dick immediately trotted off in the direction of Joe’s cave telling me to put out the fire. Ann shrugged off my consoling hug and followed Dick. I looked at the blazing fire with its flames fed by the wind and quickly boiled water for coffee. I felt awful indeed with aching bones, a tight chest, and sore throat. I got close enough to the fire to stop my shivering. I poured some medicinal whiskey in my coffee and noted that at some point during the night Marcia had finished off the food.

  The idyll was clearly over, brief as it was. It is often difficult to start a fire and even more difficult to put it out. I had no container for water except a tiny camp coffeepot but there was a great deal of sand just below the lip of the creek bank. I scooped away painfully breaking a fingernail on a tree root. For some reason I diverted myself with thoughts of claws versus fingers. At one point I had the unnerving sense that I was being watched from the dense greenery across the creek. I had seen a large sturgeon once in my life and then there was the seemingly outsized raven yesterday morning with Ann in the loft. Now all I needed in my cold, clammy mood was to have the third and most preposterous beast to slouch out of the tag alder across the creek. I studied the greenery with shortened breath before I came to my senses or, more accurately, dismissed my dubious senses in favor of putting out the fire.

  I became reasonably ill for a week and, more importantly, so did Joe. I had a violent chest cold but Joe’s medication had become less effective than it had been during the summer. When I reached the others at Joe’s cave that morning, after trying arduously to put out the fire during which time I didn’t give a flat fuck if the whole world burned, Joe looked gaunt, miserable, groggy, remote, and a little disoriented. He was cooking some rather large trout on a flat board near a large bed of coals which meant he had descended from the tree in the night. Dick was quite curious about the trout which we ate with extreme pleasure with salt. I was feeding Marcia some fish skin when she looked off toward our night campsite and growled. Joe made some peculiar animal sounds I hadn’t heard before and Marcia romped and scooted in a circle then dove into the cave for shelter. Ann spoke sharply to Joe asking him not to repeat the sounds and Joe turned pale and shaky as if on the verge of fainting. His eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled back until we saw total white. Ann embraced him and broke down at which I fled toward the car, stumbling along in the most complete, sick exhaustion of my life. Curiously, I had no trouble navigating on the hour’s walk and it occurred to me that to the degree I had given up on my interior quarreling after the anxiety attack I had begun to notice better the “outside,” or all that took place exterior of my mind. Of course this is obvious, nominal, and rather silly but it was, nonetheless, interesting.

  I spent a full week in bed and bribed a nasty old critter of a doctor to make a house call from Munising, a hundred-and-twenty-mile round-trip. He was unimpressed by my illness, gave me some antibiotics, and had the cheekiness to tease me about my unpleasant affair in Munising a few years back. It turned out the wretched, gold-digging girl was his niece. One must be wary up here where nearly everyone is related. “Why should anyone screw an old fool except for cash on the barrelhead?” he quipped, giving me a shot.

  Joe was another matter. Dick visited several times during my week in bed, bringing in and stacking a pile of wood near the fireplace. The pre—Labor Day weather had become unnaturally cold, driving most of the tourists and cottagers home early, or so he said. Joe and Ann had spent three days in his quarters only coming out for food. Joe hadn’t really recovered and Ann had made a number of hysterical calls to the doctor in Marquette who had Fed Exed over an additional experimental sedative. Dick had talked separately to the doctor who was not optimistic because they were running out of drug options. However, Joe had disappeared in the middle of the night and when the new drugs arrived the next day Dick and Ann hadn’t been able to find him at his cave until the following day at which time he grabbed the new bottle of pills and flung them off in the woods. Ann and Dick crawled around for an hour looking for the pills but then Marcia retrieved them. Ann cajoled Joe into taking one of the pills after which he became a somnolent “zombie” for several hours, an unacceptable condition for him.

  On the last day of my convalescence there was further bad news that required me to take some action. Dick rushed out and said the D.N.R. game warden had stopped by and said that he had found three illegal set-lines, a method of continuing to fish when you are absent, on a portion of the Sucker River some two miles from Joe’s cave, though he was not privy to its location. The warden had lain in wait several hours and when Joe had appeared, and the warden had tried to arrest him, Joe had run for it. What’s more, some bear hunters were tracking a large bear and when their dogs temporarily cornered the beast it was wearing a set of cowbells on a collar. This constituted some sort of violation of “tampering with wildlife” much more serious evidently than shooting the beast although they were licensed to do so. The D.N.R. was smarting over the missing telemetric collars from earlier in the season and still had their sights on Joe.

  My first impulse was to call my hotshot law firm in Chicago, but then Dick said he had already called a lawyer in Marquette who was capable in the area of fish and game violations. Since Joe was also charged with fleeing arrest, the situation was dire indeed. Dick was without the necessary retainer so I got out an old dryfly box where I store cash and took a sturdy sheaf of hundreds. Much of the rare-book business is transacted in cash and it’s fun to outwit the IRS on smallish sums when I’ve forked over millions over the years, having paid max income tax since early in my thirties. However, Dick shied away from the money saying he hoped I was well enough to meet the lawyer with him early in the evening at the tavern.

  There is the vague notion that you can’t escape the shit of life because you are also shit. I had spent a marvelous week simply being ill, at times uncomfortable but utterly diverted from problematical thinking. I ignored my large stack of brain books. A little knowledge is not so much dangerous as useless.
Nothing that god and man have invented can help this young man. He’s literally taking bites out of the sun, moon, and earth which is metaphysically illegal.

  Instead of thinking I stared at the red sky every morning through the east window, planned minimalist meals, and read my collected Chekhov, a cheapish paper edition put out by Ecco Press. A well-made book can’t live through the winter up here and any book with a nice binding goes with me when I close the cabin in mid-October.

  Unfortunately on the last true night of my petty convalescence I was harried by animal dreams, ranging from my own pathetic mutt Charley to immense and distorted wolves and bears, strange sharks, and bear hounds in my yard where, in fact, they did occasionally arrive during the hunting season. I rather like these hounds, usually Walkers, who were quite sweet and docile except when chasing their prey. Hopefully the dream meant nothing.

  Late in the afternoon while making myself spiffy to meet the lawyer a D.N.R. official showed up, a man who evidently was a supervisor of the more ordinary game wardens. I immediately took a liking to him because he was appreciative of the unique construction of my log cabin. My warmth cooled slowly when he began talking in a series of otiose clichés. He hoped there wouldn’t be a big “brouhaha” over Joe’s infractions. He somehow had found out about the lawyer we retained, evidently a fearsome creature. The official said that he felt “between a rock and a hard place” over Joe because “the law was the law.” He was being “pressured by superiors” to shoot the bear wearing cowbells because they were sure the bells and collar would yield Joe’s fingerprints. I retorted that a “pre-emptive” strike against the bear was a ghastly idea, and that slowed him down into a moment’s contemplation, but then he said his department needed to “tie up the loose ends” on the missing telemetric collars. He proposed that if Joe would confess to the cowbells and telemetric collars they wouldn’t have to shoot the bear and Joe might get off with a brief time in jail for the charge over the set-lines. I had a hot red flash in my brainpan and said that if Joe spent five minutes in jail I’d spend a cool million making the lives of him and his buddies politically miserable. He got up to leave saying that he guessed “we were at loggerheads.”