The Dog Stars (14 page)

Sometime in the night, sometime when the Twins are over the canyon, I think about the sled and the rifle inside it. What to do with it. I feel the weight of Jasper on my knee where I have wedged it beneath him and I think: He would not approve, no. He would say: what? He wouldn’t say a thing. He never left his post ever, he would give me strength that way. We never leave our posts do we? This is just who we are.

Sometime under Gemini I fall asleep.

It is the third day. At daybreak I shift, feel him in the quilt and have a moment. A moment where I have forgotten and then a moment where I remember and still expect him to stir. Fully expect him to resurrect. Because he could. We have defied everything haven’t we? Why not this?

And then I sob. Sob and sob. And rouse myself and carry him in the quilt curled, carry him just under the trees and begin to dig. With a stick, with a flat rock, with my fingers.

Most of the morning until it is deep enough to discourage a bear. Fitting. This was one of our favorite camps in the world. Year after year. If his spirit could look out. To the changing creek, season to season. I lay him in wrapped in the quilt and I say

Goodbye, bud. You are Jasper. My heart. We are never apart, not here, not there.

Then I scrape back in the dirt.

I spend the rest of the day gathering stones. Cobbles, eggs, heavy rocks. Smoothed and rounded by the stream. I build a mound as high as my chest. In the top I don’t know what to put. I take off my old wool sweater. As much his smell as mine. I lay it over the top and pile on more rocks. To dissolve there like a prayer flag his smell and mine washing in the seasons. As if I could cover him.

Then I load up the sled and walk upstream.

Twenty times today I stopped and turned as if to call. Hey keep up. Twenty times I rolled my shoulders back into the hill. Put my head down, feet to the track.

Stopped once, turned my face full into the sun, eyes closed, let the light sear my tears. Tipped my head back further, a coyote in full throat.

The creek on my right crashing over a ledge. The sun overwhelming eyelids, pouring down like heavy water.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

It is not that there is nothing left. There is everything left that was before, minus a dog. Minus a wife. Minus the noise, the clamor of.

We think by talking and talking we can hold something off. Well. I couldn’t, could I? You couldn’t. You went along because you
thought that was your job. Was I a fool? Were we both? To love is to take one side of the argument and hold it fast unto death. To land on one side with both feet. Or all four, huh, bud?

We fools going up the trail, two fools, now one.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. Leave his venison in the trail for the coyotes the jays. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

When you walk you propel it forward. When you let go the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling beside you in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Not feeling so well. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.

That is some heavy shit, huh, Jasper? Getting all poetic on its ass when what it is is I miss you. I really fucking miss you.

I walked for three days. Barely ate or slept. The lying down in the bag was a pro forma kind of thing. I didn’t feel like making a fire or sitting by it, I didn’t feel like sleeping or not sleeping, I didn’t know what else to do. Occasionally knelt on the stones and sipped from the creek. Walked west and then north. Straight into the Indian Peaks. When I am really hunting I leave the sled and pack at a base camp or landmark and continue quietly. I bring a smaller pack for the day with the down sweater, a liter bottle so I can take to the ridges or sit the day on some slope away from water. Matches, a game saw, a parka. Now I didn’t. I hauled the sled scraping and bumping and made a racket and saw no game, only chipmunks, nuthatch, crows, alarmed squirrels raising chatter from the trees, letting the whole country know: Here comes Hig. Hig with his gun. But he’s not serious, he’s banging around with that contraption, he doesn’t look so good, Where’s his mutt? The squirrel on a limb, alarmed, tail curved forward over his back, alive and twitching, the chatter as piercing as an alpenhorn. Might as well just blow a whistle. Olly Olly Incomefree. Ready or not here I come. Even the crows alight, twist their heads, fix us, me, with a shiny eye, open beak, stretch throat and dredge a signal angry cry from croaky mutterings. I inspire them. To heights of outrage. That the hunter is careless. That he is slamming up the trail. That he is heedless, loud, unaware, bungling. That he is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him.
CAWWREAACHH
.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

The third evening it began to snow. A late spring snow but not heavy, not wet. The temperature dropped as suddenly as the passing of a cloud, cold, cold like midwinter and the wind dropped
too. We were on the edge of a small basin above treeline and in the bottom were patches of old snow and a small lake recently cleared of ice. We. I. It is possible to continue together. Say what you like it felt that way to me. Walking behind, ranging to the side, the same but not apparent. Not as. A lake like a gem set in a bezel of tufted tundra and rough scree, the water green with the luminous unapologetic green of a semiprecious stone but textured with the wind. Then it wasn’t. The surface stilled and glassed off, polishing itself in an instant, the water reflecting the dark clouds that massed and poured against the ridges like something molten and it was suddenly very cold and the snowflakes began to touch the surface. Ringless, silent, vanishing. I let go the sled’s bridle. I was fifty yards from the water. The snow heavier. A white scrim that darkened the air, that hastened the dusk the way a fire deepens the night. I stood transfixed. Too cold for bare hands but my hands were bare. The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children’s blocks.

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don’t we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

And I was suddenly very hungry. Took my eyes off of my left sleeve and looked around the col. The rock ridge and peak above me obscured. What the fuck are you doing here? Hig, what the fuck were you thinking? Why are you this high, this late in the day?