The Hermit's Story (3 page)

Now the dogs had the snipe surrounded, as Ann told it, and one by one the dogs went on point, each dog freezing as it pointed to the birds' hiding places, and Gray Owl moved in to flush the birds, which launched themselves with vigor against the roof of the ice above, fluttering like bats; but the snipe were too small, not powerful enough to break through those frozen four inches of water (though they could fly four thousand miles to South America each year and then back to Canada six months later—is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?), and as Gray Owl kicked at the clumps of frost-bent cattails where the snipe were hiding and they burst into flight, only to hit their heads on the ice above them, they came tumbling back down, raining limp and unconscious back to their soft grassy nests.

The dogs began retrieving them, carrying them gingerly, delicately—not caring for the taste of snipe, which ate only earthworms—and Ann and Gray Owl gathered the tiny birds from the dogs, placed them in their pockets, and continued on to the shore, chasing that moon, the ceiling lowering to six feet, then four, then to a crawlspace, and after they had bashed their way out and stepped back out into the frigid air, they tucked the still-unconscious snipe into little crooks in branches, up against the trunks of trees and off the ground, out of harm's way, and passed on, south—as if late in their own migration—while the snipe rested, warm and terrified and heart-fluttering, but saved, for now, against the trunks of those trees.

Long after Ann and Gray Owl and the pack of dogs had passed through, the birds would awaken, their bright, dark eyes luminous in the moonlight, and the first sight they would see would be the frozen marsh before them, with its chain of still-steaming vent-holes stretching back across all the way to the other shore. Perhaps these were birds that had been unable to migrate owing to injuries, or some genetic absence. Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on.

And what would the snipe think or remember, upon reawakening and finding themselves still in that desolate position, desolate place and time, but still alive, and with hope?

Would it seem to them that a thing like grace had passed through, as they slept—that a slender winding river of it had passed through and rewarded them for their faith and endurance?

Believing, stubbornly, that that green land beneath them would blossom once more. Maybe not soon; but again.

If the snipe survived, they would be among the first to see it. Perhaps they believed that the pack of dogs, and Gray Owl's and Ann's advancing torches, had only been one of winter's dreams. Even with the proof—the scribings—of grace's passage before them—the vent-holes still steaming—perhaps they believed it was a dream.

Gray Owl, Ann, and the dogs headed south for half a day until they reached the snow-scoured road on which they'd parked. The road looked different, Ann said, buried beneath snowdrifts, and they didn't know whether to turn east or west. The dogs chose west, and Gray Owl and Ann followed them. Two hours later they were back at their truck, and that night they were back at Gray Owl's cabin; by the next night Ann was home again.

She says that even now she still sometimes has dreams about being beneath the ice—about living beneath the ice—and that it seems to her as if she was down there for much longer than a day and a night; that instead she might have been gone for years.

It was twenty years ago, when it happened. Gray Owl has since died, and all those dogs are dead now, too. She is the only one who still carries—in the flesh, at any rate—the memory of that passage.

Ann would never discuss such a thing, but I suspect that it, that one day and night, helped give her a model for what things were like for her dogs when they were hunting and when they went on point: how the world must have appeared to them when they were in that trance, that blue zone, where the odors of things wrote their images across the dogs' hot brainpans. A zone where sight, and the appearance of things—
surfaces—
disappeared, and where instead their essence—the heat molecules of scent—was revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.

I suspect that she holds that knowledge—the memory of that one day and night—especially since she is now the sole possessor—as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem in one's fist: not a gem given to one by some favored or beloved individual but, even more valuable, some gem found while out on a walk—perhaps by happenstance, or perhaps by some unavoidable rhythm of fate—and hence containing great magic, great strength.

Such is the nature of the kinds of people living, scattered here and there, in this valley.

I
GOT TO KNOW
Billy and Amy, over the years, about as well as you get to know anybody up here, which is to say not too well.

They were my nearest neighbors. They saw me fall in and out of love three times, being rejected—abandoned—all three times.

And though that's not the story, they were good neighbors to me then, in those hard days. Amy had been a baker in Chicago, thirty years before, and even after coming out here to be with Billy she'd never stopped baking. She was the best baker who ever lived, I think: huckleberry pies and sweet rolls and the most incredible loaves of bread. I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner. I've read accounts of people who've died and come back to life, and their stories are all so similar I believe that's how it is.

And that's what this end of the valley—the south fork of it, rising against the flex of the mountains—smells like all the time, because Amy is almost always baking. The scent of her fresh loaves drifts across the green meadows and hangs along the riverbanks. Sometimes I'll be hiking in the woods, two or three miles up into the mountains, and I'll catch a whiff of bread, and I'll feel certain that she's just taken some out of the oven, miles below. I know that's a long way for a human to catch a scent, but bears can scent food at distances of seven miles, and wolves even farther. Living up here sharpens one's senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes stronger. I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn't pull. I've seen a child chase down a runaway tractor and catch it from behind, climb up, and turn the ignition off before it went into the river. Several old women up here swim in the river all year round, even through the winter. Dogs live to be twenty, twenty-five years old.

And above it all—especially at this south end of the valley—Amy's bread-scents hang like the smells from heaven's kitchen.

All that rough stuff—the miracle strength, the amazing bodies—that's all fine, but also, we take it for granted; it's simply what the valley brings out, what it
summons.

But the gentle stuff—that's what I hold in awe; that's what I like to watch.

Gentlest of all were Amy and Billy.

***

All his life, Billy worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land in the bottoms, six days a week. He'd take the seventh day off—usually a Sunday—to rest his machinery.

There weren't any churches in the little valley, and if there had been, I don't know if he and Amy would have gone.

Instead, he would take Amy fishing on the Yaak River in their wooden canoe. I'd see them out there on the flats above the falls, fishing with cane poles and crickets for trout—ten- and fifteen-pound speckled beauties with slab bellies that lived in the deepest holes in the stillness up above the falls, waiting to intercept any nymphs that floated slowly past. Those trout were easy to catch, would hit anything that moved. Billy and Amy wore straw hats. The canoe was green. Amy liked to fish. The hot summer days would be
ringing
with stillness, and then when Amy hooked one, it would seem that the whole valley could hear her shout.

The great trout would pull their canoe around on the river, held only by that one thin tight fly-line, spinning their canoe in circles while Amy shrieked and Billy paddled with one hand to stay up with the fish, maneuvering into position so he could try to net it with his free hand—and Amy holding on to that flexing cane pole and hollering.

They were as much a part of the valley, living there in the south fork, as the trees and the river and the very soil itself, as much a part and substance of the valley as the tremulous dusk swamp-cries of the woodcock in summer.

And the swans.

Five of them, silent as gods, lived on a small pond in the woods below Billy and Amy's cabin, gliding in elegant circles and never making a sound. Amy said they never sang like other birds—that they would remain silent all their lives, until they died, at which point they would stretch out their long necks and sing beautifully, and that that was where the phrase “swan song” came from.

And it was for the swans as much as for anyone that Amy baked her bread. She had a park bench at the pond's edge that Billy had made for her, and every evening Amy would take a loaf of bread there and feed it, crumb by crumb, to the beautiful big birds as dusk slid in from out of the trees.

Amy would toss bread crumbs at the black-masked swans until it was dark, until she could see only their ghostly shapes moving pale through the night, the swans lunging at the sound of the bread crumbs hitting the water. I had sat there with her on occasion.

On the very coldest nights—when the swans were able to keep the pond from freezing only by swimming in tight circles in the center, while the shelf-ice kept creeping out, trying to freeze around their feet and lock them up, making them easy prey for coyotes or wolves or foxes—Amy would build warming fires all around the pond's edge. Wilder swans would have moved on, heading south for the hot-springs country around Yellowstone or western Idaho, where they could winter in splendor, as if in a sauna, but these swans had gotten used to Amy's incredible breads, I guess, and also believed—knew—that she would build fires for them if it got too cold.

They weren't tame. She was just a part of their lives. I think she must have seemed as much a natural phenomenon to these swans as the hot springs and geysers must have seemed to other swans, farther south.

From my cabin on the hill, I'd see the glow from Amy's fires begin to flicker through the woods, would see the long tree shadows dancing across the snowfields, firelight back in the timber, and because I was her neighbor, I'd help her build the fires.

Billy would be out there, too, often in his shirtsleeves, no matter how cold the weather. It was known throughout the valley that Billy slept naked with the windows open every night of the year, like an animal, so that it would help him get ready for winter—and he was famous for working shirtless in zero-degree weather, and for ignoring the cold, for liking it, even. It was nothing to see Billy walking down the road in a snowstorm, six miles to the mercantile for a bottle of milk or a beer, wearing only a light jacket and with his hands shoved down in his pockets, bareheaded, ten below, and the snow coming down like it wasn't ever going to stop.

Billy had always been precise—a perfectionist, the only one in the valley—but during this year I am telling about he seemed more that way than ever. Even his body was in perfect shape, like a mountain lion's—a narrow waist but big shoulders and arms from sawing wood endlessly. But there were indications that he was human and not some forever-running animal. He was going bald, though that was no fault of his. He had brown eyes almost like a child's, and a mustache. He still had all of his teeth (except for one gold one in the front), which was unusual for a logger.

He took his various machines apart daily, in the dusty summers, and oiled and cleaned them. I think he liked to do this not just for fanatical maintenance but also to show the machines his control over them; reminding them, perhaps, every evening, that he created them each day when he took them in his hands. That his work gave them their souls—the rumbling saw, the throbbing generator, and his old red logging truck.

Even in the winter, Billy took deep care of his machines, keeping fires going night and day in the wood stoves in his garage, not to warm himself, but to keep the machines “comfortable,” he said—to keep the metal from freezing and contracting.

It would make a fine story to tell, a dark and somehow delicious one, to discover at this point that of all the concern and even love that Billy gave to his machines was at a cost, that perhaps it came at Amy's expense.

But that was not the case.

He had a
fullness
to him that we just don't often see. He was loving and gentle with Amy, and I would often marvel, over the years I knew him, at how he always seemed to be thinking of her—of how his movements seemed to be dictated by what might bring her pleasure. And I was struck, too, by the easy way he had of being with her. They seemed fresh together: untouched by the world, and as fresh as that bread.

Billy took caution to cut the lengths of stove wood to fit in Amy's various stoves for her bread-baking. He scanned the woods for dead standing or fallen trees, wood that would have the proper grain and dryness to release good and controlled steady heat—good cooking wood.