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| ISBN-13: | 9780547349435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 229 |
| Sales rank: | 611,132 |
| File size: | 697 KB |
RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her First Elk
She had killed an elk once. She had been a young woman, just out of
college — her beloved father already three years in the grave — and had set
out early on opening morning, hiking uphill through a forest of huge
ponderosa pines, with the stars shining like sparks through their boughs, and
owls calling all around her, and her breath rising strong in puffs and clouds as
she climbed, and a shimmering at the edge of her vision like the electricity in
the night sky that sometimes precedes the arrival of the northern lights, or
heat lightning.
The hunt was over astonishingly quickly; years later, she would
realize that the best hunts stretch out four or five weeks, and sometimes
never result in a taking. But this one had ended in the first hour, on the first
day.
Even before daylight, she had caught the scent of the herd bedded
down just ahead of her, a scent sweeter and ranker than that of any number
of stabled horses; and creeping closer, she had been able to hear their herd
sounds, their little mewings and grunts.
She crouched behind one of the giant trees, shivering from both
the cold and her excitement — sharply, she had the thought that she wished
her father were there with her, that one morning, to see this, to participate —
and then she was shivering again, and there was nothing in her mind but elk.
Slowly, the day became light, and she sank lower into the tall
grass beneath the big pines, the scent of the grass sweet upon her skin; and
the lighter the day became, the farther she flattened herself down into that
yellow grass.
The elk rose totheir feet just ahead of her, and at first she thought
they had somehow scented her, even though the day's warming currents had
not yet begun to ascend the hill — even though the last of the night's heavier,
cooling currents were still sliding in rolling waves down the mountain, the faint
breeze in her face carrying the ripe scent of the herd downhill, straight to her.
But they were only grazing, wandering around now, still mewing
and clucking and barking and coughing, and feeding on the same sweet-
scented grass that she was hiding in. She could hear their teeth grinding as
they chewed, could hear the clicking of their hoofs as they brushed against
rocks.
These creatures seemed a long way from the dinners that her
father had fixed out on the barbecue grill, bringing in the sizzling red meat
and carving it quickly before putting it on her child's plate and saying, "Elk";
but it was the same animal —they were all the same animal, nearly a dozen
years later. Now the herd was drifting like water, or slow- flickering flames,
out of the giant pines and into a stand of aspen, the gold leaves underfoot the
color of their hides, and the stark white trunks of the aspen grove making it
look as if the herd were trapped behind bars; though still they kept drifting,
flowing in and out of and between those bars, and when Jyl saw the biggest
one, the giant among them, she picked him, not knowing any better —
unaware that the meat would be tougher than that of a younger animal.
Raising up on one knee, she found the shot no more difficult for
her than sinking a pool ball in a corner pocket: tracking with the end of her
rifle and the crosshairs of the scope, the cleft formed just behind his right
shoulder as he quartered away from her, she did not allow herself to be
distracted by the magnificent crown of antlers atop his head — and when he
stopped, in his last moment, and swung his head to face her, having sensed
her presence, she squeezed the trigger as she had been taught to do back
when she was a girl. The giant elk leapt hump-shouldered like a bull in a
rodeo, then took a few running steps before stumbling, as if the bullet had not
shredded his heart and half his lungs but had instead merely confused him.
He crashed heavily to the ground, as if attached to an invisible
tether; got up, ran once more, and fell again.
The cows and calves in his herd, as well as the younger bulls,
stared at him, trying to discern his meaning, and disoriented, too, by the
sudden explosive sound. They stared at the source of the sound — Jyl had
risen to her feet and was watching the great bull's thrashings, wondering
whether to shoot again, and still the rest of the herd stared at her with what
she could recognize only as disbelief.
The bull got up and ran again. This time he did not fall, having
figured out, in his grounded thrashings, how to accommodate his strange
new dysfunction so as to not impede his desire, which was to escape — and
with one leg and shoulder tucked high against his chest, like a man carrying
a satchel, and his hind legs spread wider for stability, he galloped off, running
now like a horse in hobbles and with his immense mahogany-colored rack
tipped back for balance: what was once his pride and power was now a
liability.
The rest of the herd turned and followed him into the timber,
disappearing into the forest's embrace almost reluctantly, still possessing
somehow that air of disbelief; though once they went into the timber, they
vanished completely, and for a long while she could hear the crashing of
limbs and branches — as if she had unleashed an earthquake or some other
world force — and the sounds grew fainter and farther, and then there was
only silence.
Not knowing any better, back then, she set out after the herd
rather than waiting to let the bull settle down and lie down and bleed to death.
She didn't know that if pushed a bull could run for miles with his heart in
tatters, running as if on magic or spirit rather than the conventional
pumphouse mechanics of ventricles and aortas; that if pushed, a bull could
run for months with his lungs exploded or full of blood. As if in his dying the
bull were able to metamorphose into some entirely other creature, taking its
air, its oxygen, straight into its blood, through its gaping, flopping mouth, as
a fish does; and as if it were able still to disseminate and retrieve its blood,
pressing and pulsing it to the farthest reaches of its body and back again
without the use of a heart, relying instead on some kind of mysterious
currents and desire —the will to cohere — far larger than its own, the blood
sloshing back and forth, back and forth, willing the elk forward, willing the elk
to keep being an elk.
Jyl had had it in her mind to go to the spot where the elk had first
fallen — even from where she was, fifty or sixty yards distant, she could see
the patch of torn-up earth — and to find the trail of blood from that point, and
to follow it.
She was already thinking ahead, and looking beyond that first
spot — having not yet reached it —when she walked into the barbed-wire
fence that separated the national forest from the adjoining private property,
posted against hunting, on which the big herd had been sequestered.
The fence was strung so tight that she bounced backwards, falling
much as the elk had fallen, that first time; and in her inexperience, she had
been holding the trigger on her rifle, with a shell chambered in case she
should see the big bull again, and as she fell she gripped the trigger,
discharging the rifle a second time, with a sound even more cavernous, in its
unexpectedness, than the first shot.
A branch high above her intercepted the bullet, and the limb came
floating slowly down, drifting like a kite. From her back, she watched it land
quietly, and she continued to lie there, bleeding a little, and trembling, before
finally rising and climbing over the fence, with its "Posted" signs, and
continuing on after the elk.
She was surprised by how hard it was to follow his blood trail:
only a damp splatter here and there, sometimes red and other times drying
brown already against the yellow aspen leaves that looked like spilled
coins — as if some thief had been wounded while ferrying away a strongbox
and had spilled his blood upon that treasure.
She tried to focus on the task at hand but was aware also of
feeling strangely and exceedingly lonely — remembering, seemingly from
nowhere, that her father had been red-green colorblind, and realizing how
difficult it might have been for him to see those drops of blood. Wishing again
that he were here with her, though, to help her with the tracking of this animal.
It was amazing to her how little blood there was. The entry wound,
she knew, was no larger than a straw, and the exit wound wouldn't be much
larger than a quarter, and even that small wound would be partially closed up
with the shredded flesh, so that almost all of the blood would still be inside
the animal, sloshing around, hot and poisoned now, no longer of use but
unable to come out.
A drop here, a drop there. She couldn't stop marveling at how few
clues there were. It was easier to follow the tracks in the soft earth, and the
swath of broken branches, than it was the blood trail —though whether she
was following the herd's path or the bull's separate path, she couldn't be
entirely sure.
She came to the edge of the timber and looked out across a small
plowed field, the earth dark from having just been turned over to autumn
stubble. Her elk was collapsed dead out in the middle of it —the rest of the
herd was long gone, nowhere to be seen — and there was a truck parked
next to the elk already, and standing next to the elk were two older men in
cowboy hats. Jyl was surprised, then, at how tall the antlers were —taller
than either man, even with the elk lying stretched out on the bare ground;
taller even than the cab of the truck.
The men did not appear happy to see her coming. It seemed to
take her a long time to reach them, and it was hard walking over the furrows
and clods of stubble, and from the looks on the men's faces, she was afraid
that the elk might have been one of their pets, that they might even have
given it a name.
It wasn't that bad, as it turned out, but it still wasn't good. Their
features softened a little as she closed the final distance and they saw how
young she was, and how frightened — she could have been either man's
daughter — and as she approached there seemed to be some force of
energy about her that disposed them to think the best of her; they found it
hard to believe, too, that had she killed the elk illegally she would be
marching right up to claim it.
There were no handshakes, no introductions. There was still frost
on the windshield of the men's truck, and Jyl realized they must have jumped
into their truck and cold-started it, racing straight up to where they knew the
herd hung out. Used to hang out.
Plumes of fog-breath leapt from the first man's mouth as he
spoke, even though they were all three standing in the sunlight.
"You shot it over on the other side of the fence, right, over on the
national forest, and it leapt the fence and came over here to die?" he asked,
and he was not being sarcastic: as if, now that he could see Jyl's features,
and her fear and youth, he could not bear to think of her as a poacher.
The other man, who appeared to be a few years the elder —they
looked like brothers, with the older one somewhere in his sixties, and fiercer-
looking — interrupted before she could answer and said, "Those elk knew
never to cross that fence during hunting season. That bull wouldn't let them.
I've been watching him for five years, and any time a cow or calf even looks at
that fence, he tips —tipped — his antlers at them and herded them away
from it."
Jyl saw that such an outburst was as close to a declaration of
love for the animal as the old man would be capable of uttering, and the three
of them looked down at the massive animal, whose body heat they could still
feel radiating from it —the twin antlers larger than any swords of myth, and
the elk's eyes closed, and still only what seemed like a little blood dribbling
down the left shoulder, from the exit wound — the post-rut musk odor of the
bull was intense — and all Jyl could say was "I'm sorry."
The younger brother seemed almost alarmed by this admission.
"You didn't shoot him on our side, did you?" he asked again. "For
whatever reason — maybe a cow or calf had hopped the fence, and he was
over there trying to get it back into the herd — he was over on the public
land, and you shot him, and he ran back this way, jumped over the fence,
and ran back over here, right?"
Jyl looked down at her feet, and then again at the bull. She might
as well have shot an elephant, she thought. She felt trembly, nauseated. She
glanced at her rifle to be sure the chamber was open.
"No," she said quietly.
"Oh, Christ," the younger man said —the older one just glared at
her, hawkish, but also slightly surprised now — and again the younger one
said, "Are you sure? Maybe you didn't see it leap the fence?"
Jyl showed him the scratch marks on her arms, and on her
face. "I didn't know the fence was there," she said. "The sun was coming up
and I didn't see it. After I shot, I walked into the fence."
Both men stared at her as if she were some kind of foreigner, or
as if she were making some fabulous claim and challenging them to believe it.
"What was the second shot?" the older man asked, looking back
toward the woods. "Why did it come so much later?" As if suspecting that
she might have a second animal down somewhere, back in the forest. As if
this frail girl, this child, might have a vendetta against the herd.
"The gun went off by accident, when I walked into the fence," she
said, and both men frowned in a way that told her that gun carelessness was
even worse in their book than elk poaching.
"Is it unloaded now?" the younger brother asked, almost gently.
"No," she said, "I don't guess it is."
"Why don't you unload it now?" he asked, and she complied,
bolting and unbolting the magazine three times, with a gold cartridge
cartwheeling to the black dirt each time, and then a fourth time, different-
sounding, less full sounding, snicking the magazine empty. She felt a bit of
tension release from both men, and in some strange way of the hunt that she
had not yet learned, the elk seemed somehow different, too: less vital, in her
letting-down. As if, despite its considerable power and vitality, her pursuit of
and hunger for it had somehow helped to imbue it with even more of those
characteristics, sharpening their edges, if only just a little.
The older brother crouched down and picked up the three
cartridges and handed them to her. "Well, goddamn," he said, after she had
put them in her pocket and stood waiting for him to speak —would she go to
jail? would she be arrested, or fined? — "That's a big animal. I don't suppose
you have much experience cleaning them, do you?"
She shook her head.
The brothers looked back down the hill — in the direction of their
farmhouse, Jyl supposed. The fire unstoked, the breakfast unmade. Autumn
chores still undone, with snow coming any day and a whole year's worth of
battening down, or so it seemed, to do in that narrow wedge of time.
"Well, let's do it right," the elder said. "Come with us back down to
the house and we'll get some warm water and towels, a saw and ax and a
come-along." He squinted at her, more curious than unkind. "What did you
intend to do, after shooting this animal?" he asked.
Jyl patted her hip. "I've got a pocketknife," she said. Both brothers
looked at each other and then broke into incredulous laughter, with tears
coming to the eyes of the younger one.
"Might I see it?" the younger one asked when he could catch his
breath, but the querulous civility of his question set his brother off to laughing
again —they both broke into guffaws — and when Jyl showed them her little
folding pocketknife, it was too much for them and they nearly dissolved. The
younger brother had to lean against the truck and daub at his rheumy eyes
with a bandanna, and the morning was still so cold that some of the tears
were freezing in his eyelashes, which had the effect, in that morning sunlight,
of making him look delicate.
Both men wore gloves, and they each took the right one off to
shake hands with her and to introduce himself: Bruce, the younger, Ralph,
the elder.
"Well, congratulations," Ralph said, grudgingly. "He is a big damn
animal."
"Your first, I reckon," said Bruce as he shook her hand — she was
surprised by the softness of it, almost a tenderness — Ralph's had been
more like a hardened flipper, arthritic and knotted with muscle — and he
smiled. "You won't ever shoot one bigger than this," he said.
They rode down to their cabin in the truck, Jyl sitting between
them — it seemed odd to her to just go off and leave the animal lying there in
the field — and on the way there, they inquired tactfully about her life:
whether she had a brother who hunted, or a father, or even a boyfriend. They
asked if her mother was a hunter and it was her turn to laugh.
"My father used to hunt," she said, and they softened a bit further.
They made a big breakfast for her — bacon cut from hogs they
had raised and slaughtered, and fried eggs from chickens they likewise kept,
and cathead biscuits, and a plate of delicate pork chops (both men were as
lean as matchsticks, and Jyl marveled at the amount of work the two old
boys must have performed daily, to pour through such fuel and yet have none
of it cling to them) — and after a couple of cups of black coffee, they
gathered up the equipment required for dissembling the elk and drove back
up on the hill. The frost was burning off the grass and the day was warming
so that they were able to work without their jackets. Jyl was struck by how
different the brothers seemed, once they settled into their work: not quite
aggressive, but forceful with their efficiency. And even though they were
working more slowly than usual, in order to explain to her the why and what
of their movements, things still seemed to unfold quickly.
In a way, it seemed to her that the elk was coming back to life
and expanding, even in its diminishment and unloosening, the two old men
leaning into it like longshoremen, with Jyl helping them, laboring to roll the
beast over on its back, and inverting the great head with the long daggered
antlers, which now, upended, sank into the freshly furrowed earth like some
mythic harrow fashioned by gods, and one that only certain and select
mortals were capable of using, or allowed to use.
And once they had the elk overturned, Ralph emasculated it with
his skinning knife, cutting off the ponderous genitals quickly and tossing
them farther into the field, with no self-consciousness; it was merely the work
that needed doing. And with that same large knife (the handle of which was
made of elk antler) he ran the blade up beneath the taut skin from crotch to
breastbone while Bruce kept the four legs splayed wide, to give Ralph room
to work.
They peeled the hide back to the ribs, as if opening the elk for an
operation, or a resuscitation — How can I ever eat all of this animal? Jyl
wondered — and again, like a surgeon, Bruce placed twin spreader bars
between the elk's hocks, bracing wide the front legs as well as the back.
Ralph slit open the thick gray-skin drum of fascia that held beneath it the
stomach and intestines, heart and lungs and spleen and liver, kidneys and
bladder; and then, looking like nothing so much as a grizzly bear grubbing
beneath boulders on a hillside, or burrowing, Ralph reached up into the
enormous cavity and wrapped both arms around the stomach mass —
partially disappearing into the carcass, as if somehow being consumed by it
rather than the other way around — and with great effort he was able finally to
tug the stomach and all the other internal parts free.
As they pulled loose they made a tearing, ripping, sucking sound,
and once it was all out, Ralph and Bruce rolled and cut out with that same
sharp knife the oversized heart, as big as a football, and the liver, and laid
them out on clean bright butcher paper on the tailgate of their truck.
Then Ralph rolled the rest of the guts, twice as large as any
medicine ball, away from the carcass, pushing it as if shoving some boulder
away from a cave's entrance. Jyl was surprised by the sudden focusing of
color in her mind, and in the scene. Surely all the colors had been present all
along, but for her it was suddenly as if some gears had clicked or aligned,
allowing her to notice them now, some subtle rearrangement or
recombination blossoming now into her mind's palette: the gold of the wheat
stubble and the elk's hide, the dark chocolate of the antlers, the dripping
crimson blood midway up both of Ralph's arms, the blue sky, the yellow
aspen leaves, the black earth of the field, the purple liver, the maroon heart,
Bruce's black and red plaid work shirt, Ralph's faded old denim. The richness
of those colors was illuminated so starkly in that October sunlight that it
seemed to stir chemicals of deep pleasure in Jyl's own blood, elevating her to
a happiness and a fullness she had not known earlier in the day, if quite ever;
and she smiled at Bruce and Ralph, and understood in that moment that she,
too, was a hunter, might always have been.
She was astounded by how much blood there was: the upended
ark of the carcass awash in it, blood sloshing around, several inches deep.
Bruce fashioned a come-along around the base of the elk's antlers and
hitched the other end to the iron pipe frame on the back of their truck —the
frame constructed like a miniature corral, so that they could haul a cow or
two to town in the back when they needed to without having to hook up the
more cumbersome trailer — and carefully he began to ratchet the elk into a
vertical position, an ascension. To Jyl it looked like nothing less than a
deification; and again, as a hunter, she found this fitting, and watched with
interest.
Blood roared out from the elk's open carcass, gushing out from
between its huge legs, a brilliant fountain in that soft light. The blood
splashed and splattered as it hit the newturned earth — Ralph and Bruce
stood by watching the elk drain as if nothing phenomenal at all were
happening, as if they had seen it thousands of times before — and the
porous black earth drank thirstily this outpouring, this torrent. Bruce looked
over at Jyl and said, "Basically, it's easy: you just carve away everything you
don't want to eat."
Jyl couldn't take her eyes off how fast the soil was drinking in the
blood. Against the dark earth, the stain of it was barely even noticeable.
When the blood had finally stopped draining, Ralph filled a plastic
washbasin with warm soapy water from a jug and scrubbed his hands
carefully, leisurely, precisely, pausing even to clean the soap from beneath
his fingernails with a smaller pocketknife — and when he was done, Bruce
poured a gallon jug of clean water over Ralph's hands and wrists to rinse the
soap away, and then Ralph dried his hands and arms with a clean towel and
emptied out the old bloody wash water, then filled it anew, and it was time for
Bruce to do the same. Jyl marveled at, and was troubled by, this privileged
glimpse at a life, or two lives, beyond her own — a life, two lives, of cautious
competence, fitted to the world; and she was grateful to the elk, and its gone-
away life, beyond the sheer bounty of the meat it was providing her, grateful
to it for having led her into this place, the small and obscure if not hidden
window of these two men's lives.
She was surprised by how mythic the act, and the animal,
seemed. She understood intellectually that there were only two acts more
ancient — sex and flight — but here was this third one, hunting, suddenly
before her. She watched as each man worked with his own knife to peel back
the hide, working on each side of the elk simultaneously. Then, with the hide
eventually off, they handed it to Jyl and told her it would make a wonderful
shirt or robe. She was astonished at the weight of it.
Next they began sawing the forelegs and stout shins of the hind
legs; and only now, with those removed, did the creature begin to look
reduced or compromised.
Still it rose to an improbable height, the antlers seven feet beyond
the eight-foot crossbar of the truck's pole rack — fifteen feet of animal
stretched vertically, climbing into the heavens, and the humans working
below, so tiny — but as they continued to carve away at it, it slowly came to
seem less mythic and more steerlike; and the two old men working steadily
upon it began to seem closer to its equal.
They swung the huge shoulders aside, like the wings of an
immense flying dinosaur, and then pulled them free, each man wrapping both
arms around the slab of shoulder to hold it above the ground. They stacked
the shoulders in the truck, next to the rolled-up fur of the hide.
Next the hindquarters, one at a time, severed with a bone saw:
both men working together to heft that weight into the truck, and the
remaining length of bone and antler and gleaming socket and rib cage looking
reptilian, like some reverse evolutionary process, some metamorphic errancy
or setback. The pile of beautiful red meat in the back of the truck, though, as
it continued to mount, seemed like an embarrassment of riches, and again it
seemed to Jyl that perhaps she had taken too much.
She thought how she would have liked to watch her father render
an elk. All gone into the past now, however, like blood drawing back into the
soil. How much else had she missed?
*
The noonday sun was mild, almost warm now. The scavenger birds —
magpies, ravens, Steller's jays and gray jays — danced and hopped nearby,
swarming and fluttering, and from time to time as Ralph or Bruce took a rest,
one of the men would toss a scrap of gristle or fascia into the field for the
birds to fight over, and the sound of their angry squabbles filled the lonely
silence of the otherwise quiet and empty hills beneath the thin blue of the
Indian summer sky.
They let Jyl work with the skinning knife, showed her how to
separate the muscles lengthwise with her fingers before cutting them free of
the skeleton, and the quartered ham and shoulder —the backstrap
unscrolling beneath the urging of her knife, the meat as dense as stone, it
seemed, yet as fluid as a river, and so beautiful in that sunlight, maroon to
nearly purple, nearly iridescent in its richness, and in the absence of any
intramuscular fat. And now the skeleton, with its whitened bones beginning to
show, seemed less an elk, less an animal, than ever; and the two brothers
set to work on the neck, and the tenderloins, and butt steaks, and neck
loins. And while they separated and then trimmed and butchered those, Jyl
worked with her own knife at carving strips of meat from between each slat of
rib cage.
From time to time their lower backs would cramp from working so
intently and they would have to lie down on the ground, all three of them,
looking up at the sky and spreading their arms out wide as if on a crucifix,
and would listen to, and feel with pleasure, the subtle popping and realigning
of their vertebrae, and would stare up at that blue sky and listen to the cries
of the feeding birds, and feel intensely their richness at possessing now so
much meat, clean meat, and at simply being alive, with the blood from their
labor drying quickly to a light crust on their hands and arms. They were like
children, in those moments, and they might easily have napped.
They finished late that afternoon, and sawed the antlers off for Jyl
to take home with her. Being old-school, the brothers dragged what was left
of the carcass back into the woods, returning it to the forest, returning the
skeleton to the very place where the elk had been bedded down when Jyl had
first crept up on it — as if she had only borrowed it from the forest for a
while — and then they drove back down to their ranch house and hung the
ham and shoulder quarters on meat hooks to age in the barn, and draped the
backstraps likewise from hooks, where they would leave them for at least a
week.
They ran the loose scraps, nearly a hundred pounds' worth,
through a hand-cranked grinder, mixed in with a little beef fat to make
hamburger, and while Ralph and Jyl processed and wrapped that in two-
pound packages, Bruce cooked some of the butt steak in an iron skillet,
seasoned with garlic and onions and butter and salt and pepper, mixed with a
few of the previous spring's dried morels, reconstituted — and he brought out
small plates of that meal, thinly sliced, to eat as they continued working, the
three of them grinding and wrapping, and the mountain of meat growing on
the table beside them. They each had a tumbler of whiskey to sip as they
worked, and when they finally finished it was nearly midnight.
The brothers offered their couch to Jyl and she accepted; they let
her shower first, and they built a fire for her in the wood stove next to the
couch. After Bruce and then Ralph had showered, they sat up visiting, each
with another small glass of whiskey, Ralph and Bruce telling her their ancient
histories until none of them could stay awake —their eyes kept closing, and
their heads kept drooping — and with the fire burning down, Ralph and Bruce
roused from their chairs and made their way each to his bedroom, and Jyl
pulled the old elk hides over her for warmth and fell deeply and immediately
asleep, falling as if through some layering of time, and with her hunting
season already over, that year.
That elk would not be coming back, and her father would not be
coming back. She was the only one remaining with those things safe and
secure in her now. For a while.
She killed more elk, and deer, too, in seasons after that, learning more about
them, year by year, in the killing, than she could ever learn otherwise. Ralph
died of a heart attack several years later and was buried in the yard outside
the ranch house, and Bruce died of pneumonia the next year, overwhelmed
by the rigors of twice the amount of work, and he, too, was buried in the yard,
next to Ralph, in an aspen grove, through which passed on some nights
wandering herds of deer and elk, the elk direct descendants of the big bull Jyl
had shot, and which the brothers had dismembered and then shared with her,
the three of them eating on it for well over a year. The elk sometimes pausing
to gnaw at the back of those aspen with roots that reached now for the
chests of the buried old men.
Remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses
and gains, Jyl sometimes looks down at her body and considers the mix of
things: the elk becoming her, as she ate it, and becoming Ralph and Bruce,
as they ate it (did this make them somehow, distantly, like brothers and
sister, or uncles and niece, if not fathers and daughter?) — and the two old
men becoming the soil then, in their burial, as had her father, becoming as
still and silent as stone, except for the worms that writhed now in their
chests, and her own tenuous memories of them. And her own gone-away
father, worm food, elk food, now: but how he had loved it.
Mountains in her heart now, and antlers, and mountain lions and
sunrises and huge forests of pine and spruce and tamarack, and elk, all
uncontrollable. She likes to think now that each day she moves farther away
from him, she is also moving closer to him.
As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other
hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of hunters
other than herself, and the birth of other mountains being plotted and
planned — other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing
into distant seas — and that even more improbable than her encountering
that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that
brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had
made him hers and she his —the improbability and yet the certainty that
would place the two of them in each other's lives, tiny against the backdrop
of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time.
But belonging to each other, as much in death as in life.
Inescapably, and forever. The hunt showing her that.
Copyright © 2006 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company.
Pagans 1 Her First Elk 27 Yazoo 46 The Canoeist s 62 The Lives of Rocks 67 Fiber 124 The Windy Day 146 Goats 151 Penetrations 182 Titan 196
If you think Sartre was right on when he wrote “hell is other people,” or if you could just use a little solitude this holiday season, in between the office parties and festive traffic jams, you might enjoy these seven books that celebrate the joys of being alone.
