Where the Sea Used to Be (70 page)

Matthew soon returned with two blue grouse. He had seen them roosting in a fir tree downslope, silhouetted against the stars, and had climbed up and caught them as they slept. To Wallis it didn't seem fair, but they plucked them anyway, feathers swirling by the fire, rising on the fire-warmed currents, and then roasted them over the flames.

They let the fire go out but were asleep before it faded to water, and steam rose to the stars. They slept in the ice and it was a sleep that Wallis did not want to come up out of, not until the long days and scent of growing things returned.

They awoke deeper into the night—the stars had changed completely, a whole different landscape of them above, as if the men had traveled to another place; and the new stars seemed closer. Matthew knew that the elk were gone: that they had moved on.

 

Matthew and Wallis dropped farther downslope, following the tracks. The snow was frozen to a crust, the temperature below zero. Their steps were cannonlike in that stillness, so they had to give even more space to the elk. Behind them, on the ridge, a few wisps of steam still rose from their dying fire.

Wallis thought of the faint black mark the fire would leave on the stones after the ashes were blown away in the spring. The fire and boiling water from snowmelt and steam would have cracked some of the rock substrate. A juniper berry would one day get caught in one of those cracks, or a penstemmon seed. It would lie dormant in that crack, awaiting soil; or perhaps it would blossom into life, and with the brute desire of its own roots break the rock a bit farther apart, creating its own soil; and then fail and wither, having created not quite enough.

Another seed would be carried in—perhaps in the excrement of a grouse or other passing animal, like words moving across the rocks—and perhaps there would still be some ash from the fire, down in some of those cracks, though surely the rains and snows would have scrubbed clean all trace of the faint smudge on the stone's surface. One of the new seeds would eventually take. It would break the crack open wider. It would live, grow, and die. If a juniper, it would drop needles. It might live a few hundred years, never growing more than a couple of feet high, but spreading tenacious roots, until its success killed it as it got too large for the austere land in which it lived. The cracks would be several inches wide now, and as the juniper died and crumbled, a fir seedling would take over, able to send its roots deeper, now that the rock had been sufficiently fragmented: a fir tree blossom from the dying juniper's heart.

It would grow slow and wide, thick-trunked, in the near-constant winds at the top of the world. It might grow for five hundred years. Green lichens would shroud it; grouse would roost in it. One cold night two thousand years from now, an animal—a lynx, bobcat, marten, or wolverine—might creep up into the fir tree and catch one, or even two, of those roosting grouse. Feathers would float up into the stars.

Wallis thought how his bones would be nothing more than salt in some distant ocean. Someone wrote or told the story a long time ago and will always be telling it, then erasing it—telling it, then erasing it, giving and then taking. The wide horizontal roots of the juniper read the sentences already written in the stone, Wallis thought—the roots clutching the rock, feeling it, as if reading Braille—while the vertical roots of the fir trees plunge as deep and far as they can, like reading the same words, or sentences, backward.

It was very hard for him to accept such a thing: that a story is already written. He laughed out loud, thinking of what Old Dudley would say to such a thought.

 

They followed the single-file tracks of the elk lower and lower, back down into a dark creek bottom. It snowed all day. Wallis was beginning to see green floaters in his vision. Their clothes were wet again and Wallis could feel the weight dropping from him already; could feel his body once more beginning to devour muscle and organ. It hit Matthew, too—the steep hills and unending travel, as well as the psychological weight of holding that herd in their mind, nothing but the image of that herd—and though Matthew wasn't as trembly and weakened as Wallis, neither did he seem to have any excess left.

In the buffered silence of the falling snow they were able to get in closer to the elk, though still the elk knew they were behind them.

They found a spruce grouse. It too was easy to catch; again Matthew walked up to it and lifted it from the branch as if taking a bird from a cage. They made another fire down in an old cedar bottom. A cow moose walked past, paying little attention to them or to the small crackling fire. The hugeness of the animal—like a mastodon—and the blackness of the coat, to absorb solar radiation in winter: everything about it had been sculpted to fit the far north, and to fit this one season more than any other.

 

On the next day Wallis's tremblings got worse again, so that he was frightened. He did not see how, if they even found the bull, they would be able to pack it out. The elk were climbing again, and Matthew said he thought this might be it—that the elk might be getting tired. It was the only thing he said all day. He touched his ribs once, carefully—the wound where he had fallen from the rig.

They spent the day climbing. It turned colder again that night—the cold rolling across the landscape like a wave—and that night, Wallis was torn between wanting to dry his clothes by the fire and going directly to sleep. In the end he settled for merely warming them—melting the crusty ice-shroud of them back into dampness—and then crawled into his sleeping bag and slept once more as if falling. He slept leaden, willing to let the elk herd get away, to empty his mind of them. He did not even think the words
I quit
, but simply slept.

He grew cold further into the night and was conscious of his damp clothes freezing around him, even in the sleeping bag, but still he could not surface. The elk slept, too. If they had gotten up and moved on, Wallis would have let them, but as he slept he could feel them sleeping, as if balanced by his own sleep, and that was when he knew they would get the bull.

He awoke at daylight to snow falling on his upturned face. On the other side of the tree, Matthew was still asleep, or perhaps dead. Wallis had a craving for pancakes, honey, bacon, black coffee. He broke off a piece of bark from the tree they were sleeping beneath and examined it, smelled it, pretended it was a piece of food: a hot biscuit with butter melting over it. He put it to his mouth and chewed slowly. His eyes watered.

Wallis sat up, and clumsily, with frost-stiff hands, made another fire: and even after he got it going, it was a long time before he could feel warmth from it. He ate a couple of handfuls of snow, pretending they were ice cream, or frozen melons in the summertime, and lay back down to rest. The snow was landing on Matthew's face and not melting, so Wallis reached up and snapped some boughs from the tree and laid them over Matthew's face like a screen. After a time the fire burned down and Wallis let it go. He was thinking about rotting logs: about how rich the soil was in a forest where old trees toppled over and were then eaten by the soil. It was nice to lie there on the mountainside with his body consuming itself and the snow burying them, and burying also the jagged, random trail of blackened campfires they had left behind them.

It was later in the day—early afternoon—when Wallis awoke again. There was a foot of new snow down, and it was still snowing. He felt better—light and empty, but better—as if the mountain had taken away some of his weakness. He went up the hill toward the ridge to see if the elk were still bedded down above them.

He came over a ridge and at first did not recognize them, covered with snow. Only their heads were visible, seeming suspended like puppets, in that world of white. Some of them were looking down the hill in his direction, but Wallis realized that in the falling snow they could not see him. Or perhaps they too were giving up. They were huddled together, twenty or more of them, looking shell-shocked, and the bull was with them.

The bull looked like something from the imagination: as if he did not belong in this world. His antlers rose six feet above and behind his head. He looked weary, but at peace. He looked almost glad that the rest of the herd had come to see him.

Wallis went back down the hill to wake Matthew. There was a moment of panic when at first Wallis could not find his tracks back, but then his eyes adjusted to the whiteness and he was able to tell, faintly, where he had been.

It was hard to wake him. Matthew appeared confused by the whiteness of sky and whiteness of the mountain, and he seemed longer in coming up out of it than Wallis had been. Finally, however, he sat up. Wallis told him the bull was just up the hill.

Matthew held his gloved hands under his armpits to warm them and looked uphill into the snow. When his hands were warm he took his knife out and began carving on the tree they were camped beneath. He carved a picture of an elk—a bull. When Matthew was done he sheathed the knife, warmed his hands again, then rose stiffly. His clothes had frozen and he twisted and stretched, bending them back to the shape of his body. He picked up his rifle, tapped the snow from it, cleaned the scope, opened the bolt, and blew through the barrel, covering it with his hand so that the flesh of his lips did not freeze against the metal. Then he started up the hill, tracing Wallis's old tracks. It was still snowing hard. Wallis followed.

It was strange to Wallis how the idea of killing had been kept focused and separate in his mind; how there were no thoughts of what might need to come afterward: no thoughts of the work of gutting and cleaning the elk, or the long pack out. There were not even any thoughts of the coming moment, the coming first moment after the killing when all the other elk would leap up in alarm, spraying snow everywhere, and run off into the snow, into the storm, as if forever pursued. The disruption of beauty.

There was only the thought of the immediate killing. Beyond that was nothing. There was only the image of the bull.

They stopped below the ridge and peered over. There was nothing in sight and at first Wallis thought the elk had moved—had heard or sensed or smelled the men coming—but then he realized it was only snowing harder. Matthew looked at Wallis with doubt and Wallis held his hand up for him to wait.

They stared back out into the snow and now sometimes through the swirls they could pick out a glimpse of ear, or the darkness of a muzzle. A spike's antler. The bull's antlers, briefly, like a ghost, quickly hidden by the storm.

“Yes,” Matthew whispered.

There was no way to get closer. They were already too close. There could be other elk, sleeping cows, all around them; if they spooked even one of them, the whole herd would explode.

They had to pick out the one thread—the bull—without disrupting any of the others. Wallis shuddered from the cold and the anticipation as the bull's antlers appeared against the sky briefly, then shrouded out again. There was the momentary temptation—if Wallis had had the rifle—to measure down blindly below where the antlers disappeared, and to shoot at nothing, on faith.

Matthew crouched lower into the snow. He laid the rifle beneath him to keep the snow from it and lowered his head like an animal and waited. It started to snow harder. Wallis burrowed down too. They could see nothing now. Forty yards up the ridge, on the flat, the elk rested. Wallis emptied his mind of them, as he knew he must, so they would not know he was among them.

It was warm down in the snow. After an hour or so, he slept.

When they awoke it was late afternoon and the storm was clearing. There was patchy fog, spits of snow still falling, but milky blue above them, and a new sound in the world, the loud sound of snow-not-falling: a brittleness.

Another half-foot had fallen and as they sat up from their snow caves they saw that the elk were gone. Wallis felt despair and failure—felt that the elk had cast a spell on them, to send them down into sleep, when they had been so close to killing—but Matthew held a hand up to caution him, to tell him to keep hunting.

They eased up to where the elk had left their snow-beds. The ice sculptures of where they had been had six inches of snow in them, indicating the elk had gotten up and moved out just as the men had gone to sleep. Wallis wanted to go back down to their camp and gather their packs and sleeping bags and snowshoes, if they were going to follow them, rather than wandering blindly off into the mountains—the elk's tracks were sealed over and hidden by the new snow, as were the men's own tracks leading back to camp. It would be night soon, and seemed a recipe for disaster, a kind of willful death, to go pushing off into the late afternoon, directionless and unequipped—but Matthew said that he thought he could smell them, that they would be just a little ways upslope, and feeding, because they'd be hungry after having bedded for so long. He started up the mountain, with each step punching through up to his waist.

Wallis turned and started to go back down to camp. But the lure was too strong. He followed in Matthew's snow-churned wake. More clouds were breaking apart; an immense sky was opening above. The sun was striking the new blue and white world but gave no warmth, and Wallis knew how cold it would be when the sun went down.

Matthew cast slowly up the hill. After half an hour they had finally broken a sweat. He paused at another ridge, having lost the scent, and looked up the hill, which led toward nothing but blue sky. Wallis turned and looked below and saw the elk moving slowly and in single file through some timber below. The bull was still with them, but was so much larger that he looked like some kind of monster. They had seen the men and smelled them, and were trying to sneak away. Wallis didn't see how the bull could move so much mass through such timber without getting tangled. He pointed them out to Matthew, who had already seen them and was raising his rifle. There was a lot of timber below and Wallis thought that if Matthew did not get a clear shot he would rather die than spend another week chasing the elk.