We came across a small pond back in the woods that was completely frozen. Wolf tracks led us to the pond and to the dead deer that was out on the pond: nothing left to it but a few bones. Even the ravens had finished with this carcass.
“That’s how they do it,” Martha explained. “The wolves try to get the deer out onto the ice where the deer will slip and go down, or will even punch a leg through and get stuck.
“Then the wolves move in.” She made a whistling sound, drew her finger across her throat. “And then it’s over.”
We examined the bare bones and the tracks of the wolves; the brushed-out areas of snow where the ravens’ wingtips had swept across the snow. The pittery-pat markings of the coyotes that had come in to lick and crunch the bones after the wolves were through.
We continued north, then, into the beautiful day. There was some undefinable essence out there that day, which seemed to shout, simply, in the name of every mountain and every river, every deer and every wolf, that Martha and I belonged together, under that odd lingering salmon sky. I have never forgotten that day, that feeling, and I still hold on to it.
…
Because you love wolves or other predators, you have to study their food source, which is deer. It’s like learning to play the piano before you learn to play any other kind of music. You must understand deer long before you can understand wolves or anything else. I understand this, though still it strikes me as odd, mysterious.
It seems like trying to say “I love you” without using the word “love.” It’s like trying to say, “It doesn’t matter how much you change, or I change, we will always be in this country together, and whatever changes come, whatever mysteries, will be as wonderful and scary as they have always been.”
It’s like trying to say, “Let’s not let each other become small or weak or diminished.” It’s like saying, “There will always be some amount of ice beneath us.”
It’s like saying, “We must go on, I love you, there is no choice.”
Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find more books by Rick Bass.
About the Author
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.
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