The Wild Marsh (46 page)

You see it in the daily rhythms of things—this sameness, this sacredness—not just in the cycle and whirl and repetition of seasons.

Twenty years ago, when I first wandered into this marsh, I found a set of fresh wolf tracks, not hours old, in the October mud, behind some willows. I never saw that wolf—indeed, wolves were not thought to even be here, back then—but this October, as I was staring out the window, daydreaming, a black wolf emerged from those very willows, paused, and then struck out across the marsh, traveling through the precise place where I had seen those rare tracks long ago.

Twenty years is a long time, to us. To the world, of course—as well as to any gods or God, much less any mathematical formula—it is so insignificant as to perhaps be unnoticeable. Even though it
could not have been the same wolf, perhaps that is a distinction known only to you and me, across time's vast landscape.

In the front yard, there was for a long time a log that we'd felled, a big leaning green but beetle-infested pine that, until we felled it, had been in a position where it could fall over onto the house.

For years, the girls and I used it for a crude balance beam, playing follow the leader on its knotted, tapering spine. When the log finally cured, we had it sawn into lumber to make a bookshelf (which might one day hold a children's book I'd like to write, about, among other things, tightrope-walking along the spine of a fallen tree).

The log lay there for nearly three years, drying, and changing, ever so slightly, the chemistry and compaction and vegetation of the soil just beneath it—forming a kind of invisible shadow, in that manner.

And when this year's first snow arrives in the valley, the rain turning one night to slushy white, in the morning the front yard is blanketed, perfectly white, and we think,
All right, it's here again, already.

A strange thing happens though, later in the morning. A mild sun appears, and by noon some of the snow is melting—as if time, and the seasons, are reversing direction, pulling back to reveal some earlier time again.

The first place to melt is the ghost shadow of where that log was. For whatever reason, that space warms faster, so that even a year later we can see precisely where that log—the ghost log, now a bookshelf—rested.

Are the shapes and paths of all ghosts so very nearly the same—indeed, often exactly the same—as those of the living? Call it the unbreakableness of things, and know, almost surely, that again this must be at least partly designed, cannot be fully accidental. And whether designed by us, or Another, or some collaboration of force between the two—between all—make no mistake: some kind of effort is being made, and it is in the fullness of the year, perhaps, that we sometimes get our best chance, our best shot, at seeing this.

W
HAT MAKES A SEASON?
What is the nature of time? How much of time's passage is a mathematical abstraction, and how much of it, if any, is a living, breathing organism, a life process, stirred and generated in part by our passage through it—a symbiotic relationship, or perhaps even at times a parasitic one, but a relationship nonetheless, in which two forces act and are acted upon by each other?

The way an injury to us on a certain date, years ago, can mar the shape or path of a subsequent year—that same date becoming as specific to the body of a year, of subsequent years, as might an injury to one's kidneys, or ribs. It's been ten years since my mother died young, died too early—dying in November—and yet each year thereafter, a heaviness enters my spirit around that time, and my dreams are filled with a sadness I seem unable to control.

And this year I find myself injured again, around that same time: not in anywhere the same fashion, or with even a fraction of the same grief, but strangely, near the same point in the year.

Less than a full day after the date on which my mother died, a stranger comes driving down our long driveway, lost, and drives over our old blind and deaf Homer-dog, killing her. Neither the grief I feel nor the circumstances of it have anything to do with the loss of my mother; it is merely another, infinitely smaller loss, at that same point in time.

Elizabeth was down in Missoula, visiting friends, and the girls were in school. I was out hunting in the rain, and when I came home at lunch, I didn't even see Homer, who was laid out next to Point and Superman's kennel. Instead, there was a note on the table, expressing how sorry the driver was, how he didn't see Homer, yadda yadda—and my mind froze, not knowing what the note was talking about and yet also knowing somehow immediately.

I went out and looked for Homer, called her name, whistled in the high pitch that sometimes she could still barely hear. Certain
she would come bounding around the corner—still spry, for sixteen and a half—and would shatter, as if with the force of the myth, the stranger's ragged note.

There was only the sound of hissing rain. The other dogs whining a little in their kennel, watching me.

The note had said she was laid out by a stump alongside the driveway. I went to the stump and she wasn't there; and again, it seemed to me that by her not being there, the myth of the note could be broken, that time itself could be reversed, as if in a river's eddy, if even only for an hour or two, or for however long it took to get her back upright, standing, and alive.

I found her by the other stump, the one at the corner of the driveway, laid out neatly enough, but soaking, sodden in the cold damned rain.

The driver had been gone only a few hours. Homer was still not yet as cold as the rain and snow around her. Not warm, but not yet cold or stiff. I kept thinking, desperately, of how she might yet be saved; how I could rush her down to the miracle vet in town, who had on so many occasions before rescued her from one calamity or another.

I picked her up to carry her back into the house. There was a certain way she would lean into you when you bent to pick her up that was meant to assist you in the act; and without it, I scarcely knew how to lift her.

I laid her on her bed and wrapped her in an old jacket. Her lips were curled back, as if she had been in pain, and her hindquarters were torn from the gravel, and again I felt desperate, felt that I had let her down. I had picked her and her twin sister, Ann, up on the side of the road in Mississippi, back in late May of 1985—indeed, there'd been a third pup with them, already dead, struck by a car or truck—and though part of me was aware that I had saved her, had given her sixteen and a half great years, there was another part of me that knew she deserved much better, that she deserved for me to be there with her, comforting her, and that she deserved a painless death. She was the most loyal and affectionate dog I'd ever had, and I was angry at the carelessness of the pilgrim who had not been more cautious, coming down a strange driveway out in the country,
and angry at the unthinking disrespect of trespass, but angriest of all that after all those years together, I had been unable to give Homer even that one small dignity of a natural death, that one small comfort, at the end: that instead, after all those years of service, she had known at the end only pain and confusion.

She was not yet decrepit. She still enjoyed being a dog: being fed and cared for, and wandering her well-worn route, her territory. Being dressed up in bows and dresses by the girls—surely the only coonhound in the world to wear frills. Even now, I'm sad and angry about the injustice of it, the unfairness, though I am also struck by the possibility that the odds were stacked against her from the beginning—that she began her life as an orphan, road dumped along the highway, and that there was or is a force in the world that asked her to end it that way, too, though for whatever purpose or reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

The strangeness of the world, and all its murmuring cycles, both beautiful and dangerous: she had died not five feet from where her twin sister, Ann, had died, also beneath an automobile, several years earlier, so that it was as if their blood was together again. Ann was buried beneath a grove of aspen trees, beneath a stone in which we had etched the word
Bravery
—it had been Ann who was always getting into tussles with coyotes, defending hearth and home—and long ago we had decided that when it was Homer's time to go, we would lay her next to Ann, with the word
Loyalty
scratched on the stone.

The bridge they build across our hearts: for parts of three decades, that bridge had been crafted, a living and specific thing, like a path or a process. And now that she is gone, the bridge still remains, as ornate and beautiful as ever, though it is no longer living, has forfeited the supple mystery of life, and has instead assumed the durable calcification of myth and memory—the residue of where our love was, the residue of the love we had for her, the residue of sweetness, of loyalty, the residue of a great dog who lived once upon a time.

 

I remember a November up here not too long ago in which a young friend of mine, Travis Shearer, son of the great Texas man of letters
Bill Shearer, who died from a brain tumor at the age of forty-two—as good and honest and loyal a man as there ever was—decided to come up and visit us over Thanksgiving, the first year after Bill died. There is a particular mountain that is special to me in this valley, a place to go to in times of sickness and sorrow as well as in joy and celebration, a beautiful mountain, and while Bill was sick, I had made many trips up that mountain, thinking of him. I would write to Bill and describe these hikes, and would send him things I'd found on those walks—a feather, a stone, a shed antler, a jar of jam made from huckleberries growing on that mountain—and it was, and is, a powerful and yet reassuring place to think about death, and cycles, surrounded by all the many cycles of wild nature that can still be found in such places. It is a comfort to go into such a place as far as you can, on foot, and no matter whether only fifty or a hundred yards in or all the way to the center, simply knowing that there is a center, and a vastness too, a vastness that will be here longer than any of us, is the comforting thing, not the amount of miles traveled into such a wild place.

It was Travis's desire to see the mountain I'd been describing to Bill. (It had been one of Bill's desires to see the mountain, and to climb it; to take a picnic on it, with his wife and two daughters and Travis.) And being from the hill country of Texas, Travis was interested also in stomping around in the lowlands, looking for white-tailed deer. He had not been able to get a hunting license in time for this trip, but I still had not yet been gifted with a deer, so that he would be able to participate in that manner: the two of us looking for and hopefully finding a deer, which I might then be able to take and which the two of us could then pack out.

He's a tall, handsome, intelligent young man, with a politeness and a consideration of others that exceed even his father's own substantial courtesy. I believe he was fifteen at the time of this trip, and that it was in '96—the year of the record snow, snow beginning on October sixteenth and falling steadily, heavily, lasting all the way deep into May—twenty feet of snow, here in the Yaak, and a brutal winter on big game, as well as upon the spirits of men, women, and children.

In November, however, it was still all wonderful, still all bright
and new. I picked Travis up in Kalispell—he was flying in from Washington, D.C., where he and some of his classmates had participated in the Close-Up program—and we drove out east, up and over the snowy Divide, and along the incredible Front Range, and then farther east, far out into the prairie, toward Great Falls, where we hunted for pheasants the next afternoon in a howling wind with a chill factor of twenty below. I had neglected to tell Travis what kind of clothes to bring—particularly boots—and so the cold was pretty wretched. The heater in my truck didn't work either, and so for warmth as we drove we took turns sharing my gaunt and shivering great hound, Colter, nudging our frozen feet under his quivering, bony frame.

At one point we visited with a rancher in one of his outbuildings, where he had a coal fire burning in a metal drum; and hunkered over that fire, still shivering, while the storm raged outside, Travis was astounded that even though he could see the fire and was holding his bare hands as close to it as he dared, he was receiving no warmth from it. I could see in his eyes the surprise, the revelation, that there could be a cold so intense and massive that it could—for a while—defeat even the miracle warmth of spark and flame, and that this was, for him, an almost frightening realization.

We saw only one pheasant that day, a rooster, which leapt up into the swirling storm about a hundred yards in front of us and then vanished into the storm like a ghost, and at dusk we turned right around and headed back toward the mountains, up and over the pass and into their heart.

Near the summit of our valley, around three a.m., we encountered a young man wearing only jeans and a jean jacket, shoveling feebly at the snow that had swallowed the front half of his truck. We could tell from his skid marks that he had almost gone over the cliff and down into the Moose Hole, but fate or chance had turned his skid and sent him into the uphill side, into the snowbank where he was now half buried.

He had been drinking—we could smell the rank, stale odor of all-night liquor on his skin, and in his clothes and his vaporous, volatile breath—and with our truck and tow rope we pulled him free of the snowbank but then told him to sit this one out for a while, to
take a nap before attempting to head on down the hill, back into the town of Libby, not just for his own sake but for the sake of anyone else who might be coming his way in those early hours. But he could not be dissuaded and set off again on his foolish way while we headed north, saddened and sobered by his recklessness, and by the waste of his hours.

The next day, we packed a little lunch and headed up toward the mountain—Bill's mountain—where more than a foot of new snow had fallen. We started up the trail on snowshoes—Travis using them for the first time in his life—and as we trudged upward, I was reminded of what it was like to be fifteen, of what an amazing confluence of strength and inexperience that is, a time and place at which you're physically and intellectually capable of doing almost anything in the world and yet at which almost everything is still—somehow fairly new, if not brand new. A time when every day brings a first. First wild pheasant seen. First look at the Front Range. First snowshoeing trip, first blizzard. And on and on and on. I remembered that, and while I may be mistaken and do not intend or claim to be speaking for Bill, it seemed to me strongly, there on the mountain, that Bill was remembering it too. And again, I could be completely mistaken—this could be only all my own emotion, with no other or outside communication going on whatsoever—but the feeling I got was that Bill was watching, or knowing, and remembering; and that the remembering was causing him something like sadness. Not quite sorrow or sadness, or futility, but something along those lines.