Where the Sea Used to Be (71 page)

The bull was at the back of the herd. All the elk knew the men had spotted them now and they picked up their pace, accelerating to a trot: leaping over logs like show horses, the whole herd moving into that powerful, flowing motion. Some of the cows and calves were already out of sight, disappearing to safety, and still Matthew did not shoot, waiting for the perfect chance.

Finally, long after Wallis thought it was too late, Matthew fired. The sound of it seemed to break the mountain open, and the bull made only a small stumble, as if he had tripped over a stone, and then moved more quickly, broke into a run, as did the rest of the herd ahead of him. They all disappeared.

Wallis felt an immense emptiness.

“I got him,” Matthew said, though his voice had a bit of doubt in it. “You'll see. I got him.”

They sat down and waited. If the bull was dead or mortally injured, their pursuing him wouldn't change what had already happened; and if he were untouched, there would be no rush either, because it would be a long time—the middle of the night, perhaps, or the next day—before the herd calmed down again.

It was too cold to sit still. Wallis and Matthew dug through the snow, pawing like horses, until they found some grasses and twigs. They built a tiny fire, trying to warm themselves, but it was useless, and they began to shiver. The sun went behind the mountain and the light turned orange. The grass and twig fire burned out and now only the lichens on the rock burned, flaming briefly then glowing incandescent in the dusk.

“Okay,” Matthew said. “He's dead now. We can go get him. It won't be but a couple hundred yards at the most.”

They went down to the spot where the bull had been when Matthew shot. At first they couldn't find any blood and Wallis thought it had been a clean miss, but then Matthew found a spray of blood farther off the trail where the bullet had passed through, and a few hairs that had been cut during the bullet's exit.

They followed the herd's tracks through the timber in the dimming orange light. About every twenty or thirty yards they would find a drop or two of blood, but it wasn't enough to kill a mouse, much less an elk.

“I hit him in the lungs,” Matthew said. “In a minute his lungs will collapse, and he'll go down.”

After a couple hundred yards, the herd's tracks continued parallel across the mountain, but the bull's veered suddenly, sharply, downhill, and for the first time Wallis believed that they were going to find him.

They came across a tangle of fallen and leaning timber. Now there was more blood: some was smeared against the fallen logs.

“I got him in the heart, too,” Matthew said with satisfaction. “The heart and the lungs.” He was not excited, only pleased.

The elk traveled another three hundred yards before dying. They found him by a little creek, hung up in a jumble of blown-down timber that he'd tried to leap. He was caught in the nest of it, the latticework of it supporting his huge body above the ground so that it looked as if he were still alive, and only in mid-leap. There was more of him, it seemed, than there had been when Matthew had shot, and even the antlers seemed larger, so that for a second Wallis wondered if there had been some mistake: if this were not their giant elk, but some even greater creature that had died of natural causes, and which they had merely stumbled across.

The blue light of snow at night began to glow. They went up to the elk and touched it—leaned in against it. It was warm and unmovable. It floated above the ground, suspended by the latticework. Wallis started to laugh, not knowing why. Matthew smiled. Years, and all errant choices, seemed to vanish.

The bull had a ripe smell that reminded Wallis of horses, of dark cool stables—the kind barn cats like to nap in in the summertime. The odor was rich enough and strong enough that it seemed you could ignite it: could strike a match and have the air all around leap into blue flame. It was a good smell. Wallis laughed again—took a glove off and pressed a bare hand to the elk's warm side—and did not know why he laughed, only that he wanted to. It was a feeling to him like standing in a garden in the spring, with the earth all turned and ready. “Shit almighty,” Matthew said, still grinning.

“What?” Wallis asked. He wanted to know the name for this happiness. That incredible scent of musk, down in the woods.

“I forgot my pulleys,” Matthew said. “We'd never have been able to budge him—wouldn't have even been able to turn him over to clean him. But this way”—he laughed—“this way I can just crawl under him, open him up, and let it all fall out.”

 

They lingered, not yet wanting to leave the elk and go get their packs and equipment. It was getting colder quickly under the clearing skies, but the elk was warm, like a stove with a bed of coals still inside it, and they were reluctant to depart, to leave that brush of air against them, which was the space, the distance, between body and spirit. It wouldn't last—or rather, they wouldn't be able to discern it much longer—and they sat there and waited for it to leave, or for the point where they could no longer feel it. It was gone soon enough—quickly—and only when the woods grew still and lonely again did they go up to their camp and pack up without saying anything.

 

They built a fire down in the woods next to the elk to warm them as they worked. There was plenty of dry wood and it was easy to make a roaring fire with flames that lit the woods for some distance. The orange light danced slowly against the elk's hide and faster against his antlers, which made it seem as if he had come back to life again. Matthew crawled under the suspended bull—if it fell it would crush him—and began cutting. Hair drifted upward on the fire's currents as he cut. The knife made a rasping sound against the coarse hair and thick skin and cartilage. From time to time Matthew would have to stop and sharpen his knife with a whetstone.

“Nothing in the world dulls a steel blade like elk hair,” he said. He was doing a neat job and no blood had touched him yet, though that would soon change. “I'd like a stone knife someday. Black obsidian,” he said. He went back to cutting. Wallis added wood to the fire. He would not have believed he could skin such an animal. It seemed like surely enough meat for the coming year.

By morning they had the hide and antlers sawed off—Matthew had brought a small wood-handled folding saw, whose blade was now ruined, and which he tossed in the fire—and they had the hindquarters and shoulders cut and hanging from trees.

Their packs were filled with the loose meat—the roasts, tenderloins, and lengths of backstrap like anacondas. They were covered with blood from where they had labored to lift the hindquarters and shoulders into the trees and Wallis was glad that the bears were sleeping.

The fire had sprawled and wandered through the night. Ashes, and charred half-lengths of timber, lay in a circle thirty feet across. They roasted some of the ribs over the coals of the fire and ate on them for a long time. They ate one whole side of the trimmings—stripped the bones clean and gleaming—and the other side they broke in half with the hatchet and tied to their packs like a frame, to help hold in place the ponderous shifting weight of all the other meat, which was still warm against their backs.

Matthew carried the antlers—settled them over his shoulders upside down, with their long tips and tines furrowing the snow behind him as if he were in a yoke—and Wallis carried the wet hide atop his pack of meat, sending the weight of his pack up to around a hundred and thirty pounds.

It began to snow again. Wallis wondered where the other elk were: if they knew that the chase was over, and if they were glad that it was over.

They stayed on the ridges when they could. They had to take small, slow steps under such a load. They would travel a mile, drop their weight, then backtrack to where they'd left the other meat, then pack the second load back to that point—each of them carrying a hindquarter on their back, and dragging an elk shoulder behind them like a sled across the snow.

In that manner they moved across the valley, continuously giving up all progress that they'd made, working hours to move the first load only one mile, at which point they were then ready to start all over again with the second—and the winter-short days passed quickly, and they slept soundly through the nights, though in their dreams they were still walking, forever hauling the meat across the frozen landscape.

 

Ravens followed them, after the second or third day, even through the falling snow. Wallis and Matthew dropped off one ridge down into a creek, ascended another, and Matthew said he knew where they were. The ravens landed in front of them and strutted with outstretched wings, drawing little tracings in the snow, barking and cawing in voices that alternated shrill and hoarse, as if they were hurling different languages at the men. Sometimes the ravens would dart in and peck at whatever elk quarter they dragged, but usually they pecked only at the fragments that were left behind. There was a moment of startling beauty on the third day. Wallis and Matthew were walking on the lee side of a wind-sculpted snow spine, the storm's fog so thick they could see no more than a few feet. Four ravens followed them, walking behind them in their penguin strut, as if grounded by all the snowy weather. Wallis and Matthew continued along the ridge.

To their left—to the west—a slot appeared in the fog. They could see pale blue sky above, and gold light fell through the slot and illuminated with ancient copper light the forested canyon below. The lens of gold light fell through that slot—the only thing they could see, in any direction—then traveled north, tracing itself down the canyon, paralleling them. As the cloud rent moved away from them—as it passed over the dense forest far below—it kept revealing more of the uncut, untouched forest. The impression it gave was that the uncut forest would never end—that the light could travel forever and always stay above uncut forest.

In less than a minute the gold light had moved out of sight—the wind was blowing thirty miles an hour—and neither Matthew nor Wallis said anything about it to each other, though they did stop and watch it, as it was leaving, as if unsure of what they had just seen.

 

It had turned cold again. They ate on the elk as they traveled. Wallis wanted bread, or potatoes; he was tired of all the meat. He wanted an apple pie, dense with sugar, and a hot bath. He wondered if the parts for the rig had arrived; if Dudley was drilling again—if even, perhaps, the oil had been reached, and the hot scented steam of its success would be waiting for them when they returned.

The antlers had sunk lower on Matthew's shoulders, so that the yoke of them was cutting deeper in the snow. Sometimes the heavy tips of them would strike a rock far beneath the snow and make a clinking sound. Matthew had cut a small strip of hide to use as a cushion over his shoulders, but the length of the journey and the weight of the antlers had worn his skin raw and then bloody, so that a thin red Y ran down his back.

The furrows in the snow behind him, wide as the antlers were, looked like the narrow borders for a small road, and within them were the tracks of the creatures that were following them: ravens, coyotes, and lions. The wolves still had not come back.

Wallis and Matthew moved down out of the high country and into the trees again. It was growing warmer at the lower elevation, so that rather than snow there was sleeting drizzle, which chilled them worse. They came across a dropped moose antler, resting upright on the snow—they could read the moose's tracks leading to it, and leading away from it—and the upturned antler was full of water and slush from the sleet. They knelt and took turns drinking from it. They were almost home. One more night, and the next day. A year's worth of meat, put away for good.

The Y on Matthew's back widened, but he was moving stronger again. Wallis was shivering hard. For a long time the effort of hauling and skidding the meat had been enough to keep him warm, but now that that balance had been lost, he needed help from the outside; his body could no longer hold off the mass of winter.

“Do you want to stop and light a fire?” Matthew asked, watching Wallis's slowing movements as the clumsiness of hypothermia came hurrying in. Wallis nodded, lucid enough to know that it had arrived. He felt as if Matthew were some great distance away watching him, now—evaluating him as Dudley sometimes did. Wallis no longer felt that they were brothers in the hunt, or brothers in anything, and as his mind began to close down, with even the hot chambers of the brain beginning to chill, he had the feeling that Matthew was going to let him freeze: that he had run Wallis into the ground, had let him haul out half the elk, and now, only a day's journey from town, he was going to let winter have him; that Matthew would carry the rest of the meat out himself on this final leg of the journey, leaving Wallis to disappear beneath the snow.

Matthew waited as Wallis knelt and slipped out of his pack. Wallis lost his balance once and tipped over in the snow. Not thinking clearly—not thinking at all—Wallis searched through his pack for matches, shivering. He found them, held the small box of them tight in his gloved hands, then remembered that he needed wood.

Matthew just stood there, watching; he hadn't taken his pack off. Wallis moved into the trees and began fumbling with branches, snapping and gathering twigs indiscriminately, dropping some while holding onto others. Matthew was drenched—and the antlers were covered with ice—but he was different: he had a fire in him that Wallis could see he himself did not have.

Wallis heaped the branches, some green and some dry, into a small pile, and began striking matches, barely able to light them; and the sodden pile of wood would not light. He tried until he was out of matches, then rose and went back to his pack to look for more. He was moving slow and was to the point where he wanted to lie down. He knew he had to keep going, but knowing it and doing it seemed vast distances apart.