The Sound of the Trees (6 page)

The following afternoon he came down from his horse for the first time and ate with his chin on his chest. Afterward he took his mother down from her horse. He could no longer carry her. She was so heavy in her skin, though there was not much else left of her, and in his arms there was no trace of her warmth or her spirit, nor was there that jeweled glimmer to her eyes which he had searched into all his life.

For an endless moment he stared at her. Then, with rudiments of linen that had been packed for their journey, he began to wrap her body. He wrapped her first and slowly at the face and then at the waist where the flesh was green with poison, and then with some of his extra clothes he wrapped her entire body.

When he had finished he staggered up and looked around aimlessly. He could not understand how it had happened. It had come so fast. He thought of the doctor, how he could have helped her. He remembered invoking God's name just days before at the stream but could not find anywhere the mercy for which he had called.

At last he laid his mother upon a long slab of stone.

With the final seam of cloudlight settling at his feet he bent down and gathered up a handful of pebbles into his hands. He looked back once, the thin frame of his mother wrapped in dirty cloth on that gray and nameless rock. Then he turned the pebbles over in his hardened fingers, remembering the only words in the way of wisdom his father had ever given him.
The land is your bones and your bones is the land.
He thought about that, looking long and long into the coming night, a light snow falling hushed and calm in the dark open.

Before putting his foot in the stirrup he leaned down and scattered the pebbles back onto the earth but for one nugget that he pushed into his pocket and squeezed until it was as his heart felt. Dust.

II

F
OUR

IN THE WILDERNESS of Catron County the boy made a wandering of himself. He followed no path or particular direction and he knew he would never return home nor ever lay eyes upon family again and he roamed thus for weeks. The first day out after his mother's death he crested onto another mountain meadow where he unsaddled his mother's roan and secured her tack in the saddlebag. He placed the saddle on his mule, then let the horse free with a swipe of glove across her muddy backside. She stood confused in the hazy light. He had to tell her to git, kicking his boots at her until finally the mare bolted off into the milky field. The boy stroked Triften as she watched her sister running loose, her long brown mane blowing along the white run of trees like a flag carried off in the wind. She watched her with great apprehension and the boy leaned into the mare and pressed his nose against hers, speaking to her beseechingly and telling her that was just the way the world worked.

They cleaved the mountains and rode the higher ridges with the tree line running thin and the snow snapping beneath the horse's feet, climbing into the saw-toothed rocks beneath the pendulous light as if the danger of his vigilance would foster some absolution at the mountain's end.

The days rose and fell. He ate little and sat staring at the fire every night, wherever he had stopped, and he did not consider where he had been or where he was going. But as those days alone in the mountains grew and passed, the boy could no longer fight them. He stepped into their rhythm and their rhythm was the rhythm of the wild, and the rhythm of the wild was blood-driven and raw and ruled by the bone-made body. It was the rhythm of water. It was the rhythm of the world laid bare.

*   *   *

He came down from his horse in a field of tall yellow broomgrass. Five weeks of rigid cold had passed across his body like a blade. His vest was torn. The chaps he had bought in Silver City were split at the seams. The horse stamped and flung back her head, watching him gravely as if she knew what all of it meant. He sat with the frozen grass blades to his shoulders. He rolled onto his side with the wind setting his hat to tittering where it lay on the ground beside his head, and in the half-light of a cloud-filled noon the boy fell into a deep sleep where once again the massive bears worked their forepaws through the deep swales of snow.

In the dream he was still the child he had been when they had first come to him, and he chased after them with the same heedless wonder as he had before, down the streams and across the snow, weaving through the aspens and the checkerboard light that spilled through the forks of their brittle limbs. He tromped through prairie grass and sage and into the lush green carpet at the edge of the forest, but once more he was turned away where the trees grew dense and the light flattened and the horizon disappeared into the broad-backed leaves and gray drifts of snow. He called out to them as he had before, a dark longing in his voice that went deep into the heaving wilderness. Yet in this dream, to his amazement, the last bear stopped where a final shadow stretched into the forest, and turned back to him. Before the boy could move closer the bear gathered itself on its hind paws and rose huge against the trees, the great hinged muscle of its jaw opening to reveal the white blades of its teeth glinting in the sway of light. As the bear came down again its hind legs squatted deep to the ground, then in one tremendous thrust from the earth it sprang for the boy, its teeth still bared and its eyes red and wild.

When the boy flung his arms in front of his face he awoke to the sound of his mare whinnying and the mule lowing like a cow. He was up on his knees as he had been in the dream, and in the fragmented moon glow he saw the bear lope off into the trees, the heat from its body rising like smoke, its breath thick in the cool night air.

He staggered up and stumbled across the field, then fell to his knees again. For a long time after he sat staring into the unlit trees.

Days passed and though he did not cross the bear again, he saw it everywhere. He saw it in tree shadow and he saw it in water. He saw it standing poised with all its nameless brothers when he woke among the salt cedars that surrounded the permanent camp he had made by the clearing where the bear first appeared to him. He saw it in the wind and he heard it in the night fires by which he slept.

His life had taken a shape, and it was the hunt. He slipped onward without thoughts beyond the bear, going days without food or water and forgetting to feed his horse and mule. His figure grew hard. In the night he could stand still among the pines and listen for hours. Through the diffused lens of moonlight his eyes moved pale to pale across the frozen fields. They seemed eyes that no longer resided in the world but rather in some alternate and forsaken place that the world had gone from. He was no longer the man he saw himself as on the first night of their leaving, nor was he the boy he had been.

From time to time he came upon land that was rich with thaw and these times were the only ones that gave him pause, if only for a moment, his knees straightening from their hunting crouch and his hand slackening on the knife. Here he remembered his mother as if she were a brief flash that once appeared before him. And though he did not think of their journey nor her death nor the ranch they once called home, he thought about how in such fertile land, where the earth was sodden and pliable and lush with grass, what a good gravesite she could have had.

*   *   *

DARK WERE THE
trees and darker the night. In the makeshift border of rock with which he had encircled the camp, the boy stood over a fire of mesquite and cedarwood and worked the blade of his knife with a stone. He no longer belted his guns but only that knife which he whittled to an even point every night, and he no longer sought any future past the moment when he would at last sink the knife into the bear's silent and ponderous heart.

The weather had begun to turn and the columbines opened their silken arms but the boy did not take notice. And though he and his horse and mule had all three grown thin from neglect, he would not yield.

When the moon rose high enough to see by, he flung the stone into the fire and set out in the last direction he had not yet gone. He went out on foot, hunched at the back like a harridan, the eyes peering out above the collar flaps of his vest stark and caved in the flaxen light. He moved swiftly through the swales of spring grass, jumping soundlessly from rock to rock. The hand in which he held the knife poised by his waist was raw and flaking from gripping Triften's reins. His hair floated up as one yellowed wave and of the rest of his body only his jaw remained substantial.

He wore a skullcap of gray squirrel skin under his hat. On his hands he wore nothing at all. One toe stuck out of his boot where the leather carriage had become unstitched. His overalls, pressed against the bones of his chest, were brown with mud, wet and dried so many times on his body they were almost like another husk of skin.

He pulled up at the downslope of a creekbed that trickled along the mountainside, walking gingerly to where the creek disappeared down the rocks. At the bottom of a bare slide beneath the creek a valley appeared and in that valley a lake, clear and blue and without ripple. At its edge the snow blossomed like wildflower. Ice hung from limp ragbush and nested in the craws of a stand of spruce trees. The trees loomed like silver beasts unto themselves but it was the red glaze from a distant fire that caused him to descend.

As he neared the flatland of the valley he could make out the fire two hundred yards off, where a canvas tent stood warping inside the rope-and-stake structure. Its aperture wings blustered up and whistled in the licks of wind. He went hedging down the last slope closer to the warmth of the fire, the lighting of his great heaping shadow making him appear to be the bearer of some terrible woodland secret.

In the valley everything was white snow and blue moon glow and like many places in those mountains it was ruled by silence. He stopped a hundred yards away and crouched on his haunches. The spruce branches sagged toward the fire. Around the camp and upon the tent slush fell from the trees. Stepping closer the boy could see horses of great coloring and beauty, and beside the tent he saw the shape of a man.

It was the first man he had seen since he and his mother left Silver City two months earlier. He could hear him talking. His voice came loud across the field, like a snap of twigs in the quiet, yet he could see no one else at the fire. When he was ten yards away he saw the man in full, though the man himself still did not seem to notice the boy who was out in the open now, standing erect with his arms folded across his vest.

The man was dressed in a long jacket of a fine and silky fur and his hands in front of the fire were soft and unblemished. For a moment his words sharpened and his chin bobbed up and down harshly in the direction of the tent but the words were lost to the boy in the fire's noise. Then the words ceased and the man turned back sullenly with his hands clasped together. The boy called out as he stepped into the fire's light.

Evenin.

The man who until that moment seemed insubstantial now spun and fell flat in the clearing around the fire and rolled to his stomach. In his hands he held a rifle dead set on the boy's chest. The boy did not jump or turn away but simply gazed into the fire, unfolding his arms and letting them down by his sides. I ain't huntin you, he said.

It was strange to hear his own voice after so long, yet the words came, calm and slow and without inflection.

Who are you? the man called out.

Just a hunter.

The brass hammer flickered in the firelight.

Just a hunter?

Yeah.

They were both silent. The man studied the boy, his eyes slit and his head upraised from the sighting. Then he rose to his knees. He put one hand on the ground and hefted himself to his feet. The gun stayed hoisted across his forearm with his finger curled around the trigger.

I saw your fire. The boy did not take his gaze from the flames. He made a gesture with his head toward the bluff he had descended from. I was up yonder, he said.

What was it you were doing up yonder?

The last two words he spoke more deliberately, and the manner in which he spoke seemed stately and precise.

I wasn't doin nothin. Can I sit?

Look at my jacket, the man said. He snapped the back of his hand across the muddy sleeve. Ruined.

He inspected the boy a moment longer, on his face a look perhaps reserved for things he could not name. He puckered his small mouth and raised his eyebrows, but for fear or amusement it was unclear.

Sit, he said. Please.

The boy slid his knife into his vest pocket and lowered himself onto the mud, sitting crosswise from the man, who himself leaned down again to sit high upon folded Mexican blanket. He set the gun by his side and crossed his black leather boots at his ankles. Off behind them the horses mulled about, huffing and sniffing beneath the trees. The boy peered over the man's shoulder to the tent where he could see no shadow nor hear any sound. The man pressed him with a stare and asked him if he liked the horses.

Yes sir. They're some beauties.

Is that why you came down here, to see my horses? To steal my horses from me?

No.

No to see the horses, or No to steal them?

No to both. I just came down is all.

Yes, the man said. Yes, he repeated, with the same deliberateness he had used before. Do you know these horses, then?

Not by personal name, but they're all Tennessee walkers, I can tell you that.

Yes, they are indeed.

I never seen stallions run like that in the mountains.

They weren't supposed to be.

Why are they up here then?

The man breathed deeply. He adjusted his jacket and folded his arms.

You want to know why I am here? Is that it? He looked at his mud-caked sleeve again and shook his head. Very well, he said, looking up at the boy. I will tell you. Our train derailed and slid into a ravine on one of the new mountain passes. At least that's what they call it. New. The locomotive driver said it would take a few days for the trucks to get up the mountains to bring us down, so I bought these from a man on the train who was moving them for sale to Texas.