The Wild Marsh (51 page)

I have gotten what I needed; I have gotten what I came for.

It's snowing harder. We pass out of a grove of dark lodgepole and into a small opening, and I look downslope and see in the dimness, nearly two hundred yards away, a doe mule deer peering out from behind a tree—she too is about to pass on into the same clearing—and then I see the buck just behind her.

He is facing us, looking upslope, and has his head lowered, in the way that big mule deer bucks will sometimes do when evaluating something.

Unthinkingly—as if with the echo or momentum of desire rather than the previous burning essence of it—I raise the rifle to put the scope on him. Even at this distance, I can tell he's big—that it's the deer we've been following—but I can't find him in my scope. I've forgotten to keep it clean in the fog and snow, and now I've got to lower it quickly and rub it clear with my sleeve.

I do so, then lift the gun again, quickly—desire has now'resumed its path with mine, has reentered my steps—and even at this distance, he looks immense, and I squeeze the trigger.

He is gone, vanished immediately. The doe that was standing next to him is still there, prancy now—she whirls and trots away—and the snow begins coming down harder, as if the sound of the rifle shot punctured some reserve or restraint, some previous withholding, and I watch and wait, wondering where the buck went.

There is the chance that the bullet struck him and that he is poleaxed, sleeping already the sleep of eternity—but there is the chance too that I missed him cleanly. And there is the chance also, regrettable but ever present, that he is only wounded—perhaps fatally, perhaps not—and that if B.J. and I wait quietly he will lie down to rest, unpursued, and will die quietly in the falling snow.

I don't have a clue.

Under normal conditions, we'd sit down and wait. Rushing down there isn't going to change anything: if he's dead, he's dead.

But if he's hurt, I want to know it. In this falling snow, we're not going to have the luxury of letting him lie down to die quietly. We'll have to stay with him, following him, and any spotted trail of blood he might leave, through the night, before the falling snow can obscure the blood sign of his path.

As if we might be destined to follow him forever, like the wheeling revolutions of some one set of constellations, following eternally another set, across the autumn or winter skies, night after night, and with their distance never varying.

We wait about five minutes to see if he might come back out into the opening—sometimes a startled or even slightly injured deer will retreat to the edge of the woods and then stand there for a long while, as if in a trance, before finally resuming whatever he had been doing before the shot, as if intent on completing his goals—and as we walk, I measure the distance, counting the paces.

It is a hundred and seventy-five yards to the place where he was standing—farther than I'd realized. We examine his tracks—the doe ran north, while he turned and bounded down the mountain, to the west—and I can find not even a fleck of blood, or even any hair.

Always, when a bullet exits a deer, it will cut hair on the way out. There'll almost always be a fine spray of blood, bright on the snow; but always, there is hair, long, hollow deer hair that always reminds me of larch or pine needles.

There is no hair here, no blood, only air, space, snow, absence.

I thought my aim was good; I had felt good about the shot.

I examine the tracks more closely. They look awkward to me, in a way I can't explain: not the usual choreographed dance steps of whirl-and-bound alarm, but with something else, some indecision or confusion charted in the snow—or so it seems to me, or to my subconscious. Or perhaps only to my desire.

We follow the tracks down the hill. Even though I saw nothing in the blink that followed my shot, I feel as if I should have hit this deer. That I did hit this deer.

Out in the middle of the steep clearing, there is one lone bush, a large leafless willow, its limbs and branches stark against the snowy evening.

"Look," B.J. says, pointing to the base of the tree, where there are more branches, wide branches beneath the other branches, and a dense, dark sleeping body that is being covered already with snow: vanishing already now except for the memory, our memory, of the hunt.

 

He's heavy. It takes both of us to pull him into the woods, where I gut him quickly and peel the cape of his hide back to help cool him down. The bullet struck him in the neck, right where I was aiming, but his neck was so massive that it absorbed the bullet so that it never exited, which is why I never found any hair or blood.

We tuck the deer in tight beneath a big lodgepole so that he won't be buried by snow overnight. I wrap one of my jackets around him so that lions and coyotes and lynx and wolverines will be less likely to fool with him—hopefully the bears are all sleeping, this late in the year—and I scrub my hands in the snow, wipe them on the green bough of a lodgepole, thank the mountain and the deer for one of the best hunts ever, thank B.J. for being part of it, and for helping with the tracking, and for spotting the big old deer, dead under that willow tree—and then, in the darkness, we start up the
long slope to the ridge, and back down the mountain toward our truck.

The next day, we will sleep in until eight o'clock, and then return to quarter and debone and pack out the heavy deer, both of us struggling beneath fully loaded packs, and each dragging a deer shoulder behind us like a sled—and the day after that, B.J. will return to Texas and I will begin butchering and wrapping the deer for the freezer; but that evening, even though we have many more chores ahead of us, the hunt feels wonderfully complete, almost magically so; and all the way down the mountain in the darkness, I keep exclaiming to B.J., "Man, what a wonderful hunt that was!" and, alternately, "I so love to get an animal on Thanksgiving!" until I'm sure he must wonder if perhaps I haven't turned into a bit of a simpleton, living so far out in the wilderness, to be made so euphoric by such a simple act, the taking of one animal.

And except for the fact that he was there, he might think it so: that I was overreacting, with my pleasure. But he was there, and saw it, and felt it, and though he cannot know of the other 364 days, he knows of this one; and he understood, by the way I kept repeating it, that it wasn't just the one day I was grateful for, in being presented with that deer at dusk on Thanksgiving, but instead, the whole year: the entire year that just passed by, and the whole year to come, as we eat on that deer. Everything.

 

Here is what greeted us on our return to the warm, dry, well-lit house, ten minutes before dinner was to be served.

A houseful of friends, already happy and smiling, laughing, joyful, even before the news of our wonderful hunt—Tim and Joanne, and Todd and Mollie—and the girls shrieking and playing, chasing each other around the house on roller skates, and all the mixing fragrances of our Thanksgiving meal.

Someday when we are all dead and gone, not just this season's deer and elk, but this generation of mankind—someday soon enough, when we are all dust—these words will be all that is left from that evening, and for that reason, it seems important to me to put down the names of some of the dishes that night, to bear witness to some of the bounty, as I might also seek to celebrate the
existence of a wild country—entire mountain ranges—no less imperiled than the foreshortened moments of our own lives, nonnegotiable against time.

The mountains, the wilderness, should be beyond that. They should be marked and measured on another scale, if on any scale at all.

The wilderness—unlike our own lives—should not be compromised, should never grow diminished: should be as immortal as we are mortal.

Whipped Yukon potatoes, grilled salmon with fennel. Spice-rubbed organic free-range turkey with sage gravy, stuffed with garlic and leeks. A second free-range turkey, with a honey-lime-orange citrus glaze, and chipotle gravy. Venison backstrap, cooked rare on the grill. Southwest cornbread stuffing with corn and green chilies. Mango-cranberry chutney with Parker House rolls. Pear tarts with caramel sauce. Chocolate chess pie.

Each day is another growth ring secreted by the shell of the nautilus, or the cambium of a tree, in each and every tree in the forest. These layers of beauty, so available to the residents of this incredible place—a new concentric ring accreting in our lives with each passing day, and each passing night—anchor us, and keep us so grounded at this one level, in this one life, that there are times when suddenly it seems like a magic trick, and that although we know there are other levels, and other lives beyond our own brief existence, the specific presence of beauty in this valley seems so durable as to achieve a kind of permanence beyond our own participation in that beauty.

Our soft bodies will be in the ether soon enough, but the nacreous oyster shell residue of where we were, what we saw, who we loved and were loved by, beneath these mountains, and in these forests, and at the edge of these marshes, seems finally so durable as to become like a polished fossil, or even a gemstone: again a jade nautilus, perhaps, with a thousand or ten thousand chambers.

What it seems like, on certain evenings such as this one—our friends waving goodbye, walking out to their trucks with armfuls of food, a week's worth of leftovers, walking out to their trucks in the
falling snow, calling out their good wishes, and warm and contented and sleepy and happy—is that in our lives here in this valley, surrounded by such grace and bounty and beauty and mystery, not even the voracious animal of time can eat away at this residual beauty: beauty being laid in like a store of firewood against the longest winter imaginable, but enough, more than enough, so that after winter is gone, some firewood will still remain.

And that after the soft bodies of our lives are gone, these shells, polished and worn, will somehow remain, swirling and rattling around in the currents at ocean's bottom, and making a sound, occasionally, like the clinking of fine china.

As if we filter the wilderness through us, through our lives and experiences, and that these shells we leave behind are but more pure expressions of the breath of the wilderness, as much a product of this place as the shed antler of a deer, or a feather, or even the entire skeleton of a deer, quartered and rendered and left up on a mountain while the meat and hide we carried home.

More lasting than those things, though, somehow. Not as lasting as the wilderness itself, perhaps—or as lasting as the wilderness should be—but almost.

And if not quite as lasting, or durable as shell or stone, then as enduring, perhaps, as the great larch trees, with their own slow-growth rings, which live sometimes to be six or seven hundred years and then take another hundred years or more to die, and which then after life has fully left them still remain standing for another hundred or more years; and which, after finally falling over—perhaps one millennium has passed, since they were a first seedling—might take another century or more to rot, as they become covered slowly with the shedding needles of those that follow them.

It feels that way, on nights such as this one, with the year's meat secured and our friends waving goodbye and good night: that there does not need to be any other level, or any other life before or after this one; that there is no need for the concept of eternity, for it already exists, and has as its proof the chinaware sound of those little shells, sprung from the wilderness, clinking together.

Two births: the organic birth of our lives, and then the inorganic
birth, the accretion, of our shelled lives; the physical residue of whatever kind of world and breath surrounds us.

 

Not long after the grace of Thanksgiving, I'm due to gather with friends at the Forest Council office for a regular monthly board meeting—trying, as ever, to figure out how to raise some funds to keep our two wonderful part-time staffers hanging on, and to strategize about various upcoming community service projects, and how to best achieve wilderness protection for our wildest backcountry.

Elizabeth is out of town, and I've got the girls with me. The plan is for me to drop them off at Bill and Sue's, nearby, while I attend the meeting. Elizabeth will be home before the meeting is over and can pick them up.

And that's the way it goes, just as planned, except for a little alteration. On the steep drive down to Bill and Sue's, my slick summer tires spin on the ice and snow, and when I try to ascend the hill to their driveway above the river, my tires spin again, so much so that I must stop and back up and then try it again, with more of a running start; and even then, we barely gain the crest of that little hill.

I'm a few minutes late, and so although the thought occurs to me that I might really have trouble ascending the steep hill on the way out, I file the thought quickly away so that it's really just a little grass bur of a thing.

I drop the girls off at Bill and Sue's—the girls are delighted to get to play with Wendy and Tyler on a school night—and then hurry on to the meeting. In typical gluttonous fashion, wanting to have my cake and eat it too, I have made plans to fix a fancy supper for Elizabeth's return, but have run out of time. On my way out the door, however, I scooped up my preparations in all their varying stages of half readiness—diced onions, diced jalapenos, grated Monterey Jack cheese, sliced avocados, toasted cumin seeds, chopped cilantro, and so on—in the hopes of perhaps being able to work on the dish (black bean huevos rancheros) at the little gas stove in the Forest Council office, while attending the board meeting.

I've tossed the pots and pans I'll need into a paper grocery
bag, as well as our fancy twenty-dollar metal spatula with its sleek cherry-wood handle: a spatula that makes you want to fry an egg.

I hurry on into the meeting, where, of course, there's no time to cook—the discussion is too intense, the issues too clamant to receive anything other than the undivided attention of each of us—and just about the time the meeting ends, Elizabeth arrives to pick up the girls.