I saw one of Bill’s boys go over to the back of Jick’s truck and stare at the dead puppies, which were all stretched out neatly, soft and gray. I saw the boy pat one of the dead puppies, stroking its head. I think a little boy would be nice. I know I’d like a little girl.
A girl!
The radio squelched and whistled, crackled and drifted. Finally, Jick found a station—a country music station. A song by Charley Pride was playing. We stood there in the smoke and listened to that, waiting for it to be over, and when it was, another song came on.
Jick turned the tuner and found another station—a bunch of commercials—and then when the commercials were over, a disc jockey came on and said that he was going to play twelve in a row.
We found a news station, finally, near the end of the dial, but there wasn’t any mention of fires, or about our valley burning up, or any other kind of disaster. More music began to play instead.
People began to grumble and stir, moving back toward their trucks. I think we all felt both endangered and protected, isolated and yet safe. If it had been real bad, I reasoned, then the people in real town would have been coming for us, trying to save us.
Still, there was the knowledge that the fires could be very close, and that we could all burn up overnight.
Maybe people in real town didn’t know what was going on up here!
We certainly couldn’t get out of the valley. We were locked in by all the thousands of wind-felled, and wind-falling, trees—by the forest collapsing on itself, the younger trees without deep roots getting blown over like grass, offering no fight at all, nothing but fodder for the forest floor.
I must live right, I thought, driving home slowly—getting out to cut several more trees out of my way, and watching carefully through the smoke for more falling trees. If I get through this, I thought, I will live even more strongly than ever—though I was not frightened, and it was not the foxhole kind of promise one often makes in such times of danger.
This day, the windy day—the day Jick came driving in with all those gassed baby pups—it was more like just a simple vow, and a positive thing. I felt good about my vow: I will live harder.
Sometimes I’d like an omen, about what I should do. But there aren’t any. Nature’s rarely that way. Nature’s slow, and we’re quick. If the windy day had been an omen, I can’t imagine what kind. I think it was just a windy day.
The next day there was less smoke, and by the day after that it had all cleared. It was just the smoke from some grass fires over in Idaho, carried over into our valley on the high winds.
…
Not far downriver from me, there is a married couple, Greg and Beth, who are expecting their first child in the spring. They’re not all that much younger than I—in their early thirties—and sometimes on my early-morning canoe rides I go along the river right past their cabin. They sleep later than I do; smoke does not begin to rise from their chimney until after daylight. I see all kinds of creatures on my canoe rides—deer by the dozens, and coyotes, ravens, and moose, bull elk, and porcupines, and once a pair of mountain lions. Sometimes I will stop outside of Greg and Beth’s cabin, about a hundred yards off, hidden back in the cottonwoods and the tall frosted cattails, and will study the stillness of their cabin: the way nobody’s moving, the way nobody’s up and about yet. Sometimes I imagine how it must be for Beth in there, sleeping, warm beneath the blankets, with that baby warm inside her. I sit there in my canoe and wait for the sun to come up—for it to strike my hair with red, to set it aflame.
Sometimes I’ll get out and walk along the shore. There are interesting tracks in the mud along the riverbank: cranes, herons, and other wading and shore birds.
There’s supposed to be a real nice man up here, a biologist, a young man, not too far down valley. I suppose I should go and visit him, but I’m scared. I’d like to wait just a little longer.
Birds rise from the river’s marsh grasses, the tall cattails, and take frantic flight as I move along the river’s edge. A beaver slips up from the bulrushes, dives into the still pond above its dam of chewed-up sticks: dives deep, plunging.
I keep walking, scaring up more birds: killdeer, snipe, and plover. They fly away fast and do not come back.
Eating
SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN, on their first date, driving north through North Carolina to go canoeing in the mountains, they hit an owl. Sissy was sitting up, leaning against Russell’s shoulder, and they had been listening to the radio, not speaking, benumbed by the lateness of the hour and the endless roll of road beneath.
They saw the underside of the owl flare up, brilliant white in the glare of the headlights—it swooped right at their faces, barely missing the windshield—and then there was half an instant of silence, so that they thought they had missed it (it was a great horned owl, and seemed as large and incongruous to the night sky in that brief moment as a flying man), but then they heard and felt the thump of the large body striking the canoe, and a few feathers swirled past their windshield, and after slowing and looking back, not seeing it, they drove on, remorseful, saddened.
“Maybe he made it,” Russell said.
They followed narrow winding mountain roads that hugged steep cliffs and the edges of rivers, from which rose ribbons of
