Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.
That is some heavy shit, huh, Jasper? Getting all poetic on its ass when what it is is I miss you. I really fucking miss you.
I walked for three days. Barely ate or slept. The lying down in the bag was a pro forma kind of thing. I didn’t feel like making a fire or sitting by it, I didn’t feel like sleeping or not sleeping, I didn’t know what else to do. Occasionally knelt on the stones and sipped from the creek. Walked west and then north. Straight into the Indian Peaks. When I am really hunting I leave the sled and pack at a base camp or landmark and continue quietly. I bring a smaller pack for the day with the down sweater, a liter bottle so I can take to the ridges or sit the day on some slope away from water. Matches, a game saw, a parka. Now I didn’t. I hauled the sled scraping and bumping and made a racket and saw no game, only chipmunks, nuthatch, crows, alarmed squirrels raising chatter from the trees, letting the whole country know: Here comes Hig. Hig with his gun. But he’s not serious, he’s banging around with that contraption, he doesn’t look so good, Where’s his mutt? The squirrel on a limb, alarmed, tail curved forward over his back, alive and twitching, the chatter as piercing as an alpenhorn. Might as well just blow a whistle. Olly Olly Incomefree. Ready or not here I come. Even the crows alight, twist their heads, fix us, me, with a shiny eye, open beak, stretch throat and dredge a signal angry cry from croaky mutterings. I inspire them. To heights of outrage. That the hunter is careless. That he is slamming up the trail. That he is heedless, loud, unaware, bungling. That he is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him.
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
The third evening it began to snow. A late spring snow but not heavy, not wet. The temperature dropped as suddenly as the passing of a cloud, cold, cold like midwinter and the wind dropped too. We were on the edge of a small basin above treeline and in the bottom were patches of old snow and a small lake recently cleared of ice. We. I. It is possible to continue together. Say what you like it felt that way to me. Walking behind, ranging to the side, the same but not apparent. Not as. A lake like a gem set in a bezel of tufted tundra and rough scree, the water green with the luminous unapologetic green of a semiprecious stone but textured with the wind. Then it wasn’t. The surface stilled and glassed off, polishing itself in an instant, the water reflecting the dark clouds that massed and poured against the ridges like something molten and it was suddenly very cold and the snowflakes began to touch the surface. Ringless, silent, vanishing. I let go the sled’s bridle. I was fifty yards from the water. The snow heavier. A white scrim that darkened the air, that hastened the dusk the way a fire deepens the night. I stood transfixed. Too cold for bare hands but my hands were bare. The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children’s blocks.
Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don’t we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?
And I was suddenly very hungry. Took my eyes off of my left sleeve and looked around the col. The rock ridge and peak above me obscured. What the fuck are you doing here? Hig, what the fuck were you thinking? Why are you this high, this late in the day?
Shouldn’t be. Benighted above treeline. Storms that move fast this time of year migrating like everything else. The cold. Exposed.
An old panic rose in my chest. The panic of nightfall, of storm, of being alone on open ground. Surprised the shit out of me.
Had to get down, get lower.
I mean the panic was familiar the way a dread nausea or hangover is familiar but so long absent I thought it banished. Like stuck between living and dying there is no use for panic. It wasn’t. Banished I mean. Not a stranger at all. Panic close and familiar with its own smell, its own way of compressing the edges. I picked up the pull rope on the sled. Looked back at my own tracks over a field of crusted leftover snow. At the dark that thickened with the flakes. Too late to move. Fuck.
One thing is that Jasper always calmed me down. He didn’t get too excited by much except maybe a wolf track, so I didn’t either.
But it was calm. Without wind there was no danger. I could make a lean-to of the tarp against a boulder and snuggle into the bag and sleep. Tomorrow morning if the snow was not too deep I could head down and gain the shelter of the trees without trouble, I could fish the creek easy within half a day. A few hours down.
I had eaten all the jerked venison. A hunger deep, ravenous, alive. Had I not thrown out the other meat, Jasper’s, I would have eaten it now. Who to judge? What matters if it is he or I, we are the same. But I had emptied the bags on the trail days ago.
Alright. There was water. There was a boulder pile on the other side, the slope side of the lake. I tugged on the sled and took a step and stopped.
There was a shadow on the ridge. All of this was very close: lake, slope, tumbled scree, sharp ridgeline behind it climbing out of the snowstorm and straight into the low lid of cloud. Just there on the razorback of the spur, just where it disappeared into cloud, a large dark shape. I rubbed the ice out of my eyelashes with the back of my arm and when I focused on the ridge again it was gone.
Made a slant roof of the blue tarp against a rock, tossed out the smaller stones to make a smooth place to curl up, and covered myself and slept. Slept without dreams, without whelming grief, slept to wake in near absolute darkness to hear the ticking of the snow on the plastic sheeting to sleep again. Woke thinking the shape was large enough to be an elk. Thinking that I had seen no sign and wondering whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to wish for things that aren’t there.
Tenth day out when I beeped Bangley on the walkie talkie. Early morning. I wasn’t worried much about being covered for the few miles in the open, of being shot or followed out of the trees, but it was our ritual. Also it gave him a little time to readjust to me landing back in his world, maybe a couple of hours to remember how to be human. Maybe. Also if he was scoping the perimeter from the tower in the mansion which he would do every hour, it might save my butt from being fodder for friendly fire. How I go one way or the other never much concerned me but somehow that was one way I refused. I mean the thought of it: Bangley’s mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe a half mistake, unacknowledged like poor old Francis Macomber. That was it. Didn’t want to be him in the Short Happy Life. So I turned on the unit for the first time and squeezed the mike button twice.
Had two deer in the sled. They were smallish does, but there were two of them, enough maybe to justify the time gone, probably not. Didn’t give a shit. He could say what he liked. Wasn’t his rodeo anymore, wasn’t mine really either, when I thought about it I knew less every day. Didn’t know a goddamn thing.
One minute, less, then static, and
Considered pause, kind of long. Stops him in his tracks every time. Reflex like pushing a button. Maybe his mom the only one who ever used the name. When she was mad.
No irony now. Which surprised me. Bangley almost sounded concerned. Hard to tell, though, over the walkie talkies.
Pause.
I held the hand radio out and looked at it. Bangley sounded like a frigging human being. Must be the reception, the static, something in the bending of the radio waves, some kind of solar flare kinda thing, distorting.
