“So both have a set of group ideals they want to uphold.”
“Well, yes, but they’re not the same. The ideals of the Apache are that everyone in the group leaves everyone else alone, to live like they want to live. The ideals of the Diné are that the well-being of the group as a group comes first, and everyone in the group is very much in each other’s business, to make the group as a group thrive.”
“Okay.”
Jack sensed he wasn’t getting across how different the Apache and the Diné really were. “The implications are bigger than I make it sound. The impression I have is that the Diné group is supposed to think a certain way. There’s a correct attitude to have about things and an incorrect attitude. You’d be stepping out of line if you didn’t share your food with everyone else or if you created a little group that you hung out with exclusively. They’d think of it as a clique and frown on it. You’re expected to work together, to actively see to the health of the group. A lot of decisions they make only after consulting with others, and that’s expected, too.”
“I can’t picture Rupert going along with that.”
“No, not at all. That old cuss would disagree just to disagree.”
“I get why Rupert and his friends think the Diné are a threat, but why would the Diné see the Apache as a threat?”
“I think the mutual mistrust is based on the same thing, that interaction with the other group will sully their own. If you’re in the canyon group, and you befriend an Apache, then just by doing that you’re watering down the cooperating mindset that the Diné have. They talk a good game of being open and inclusive and free, but there’s a consensus you’re expected to keep to. It has to be that way because there’s no leader, and no voting, and no civil government of any kind—they take pride in that fact. But at the same time, they are proud of the cooperative spirit they have. So there has to be something to keep everyone cooperative that way, and I think it’s that you’d be ostracized if you step outside the correct set of views about things.”
“The wind is picking up a little.”
“Yeah, and the snow is starting to stick already. Even Dewey looks cold. Let’s go in.”
“I’ll get the coffee if you want to stow the butane stove.”
Peter tapped the door with his foot, and Robin opened it so they could step through. Jack could feel an outward rush of warm air. The wood stove was doing its magic, now. Robin returned to her seat in front of it, where she was coaxing along some eggs in one pan, and next to it, another pan with a turnip mash that tasted better than it looked, once it was salted and loaded up with dried fennel and chopped up olives and the juice from the olive jar. They sat down to eat, enjoying the unhurried Sunday pace.
“All you said about the elkette is that ‘she’s fine,’” Jack observed.
Robin’s dark eyes took on a sparkle. “He was looking deep into her eyes, and being all earnest . . .”
“Not again,” Peter said.
“And holding the door for the poor little thing because she’s too dainty to open doors.”
“I can only imagine,” Jack said.
“Well, I could see it up close and personal. Peter is a mess.”
“I’m not a ‘mess.’”
“He was just being polite,” Jack said.
“Oh, no,” Robin replied. “He’s her knight in shining armor. Do you know how I know?”
“By the way Peter acted.”
“No. What is wrong with you people? By the way Millie acted.”
Peter looked to Robin expectantly for an explanation, trying to mask how eager he was for it. Instead of explaining, however, Robin went into the exaggeratedly coy face and body gestures of an enamored young woman, implying that this was how Millie had responded to Peter.
“That’s ridiculous,” Peter said.
“No, Peter, I’m just making it so obvious that even a man can see it. You’re blind if you don’t see that she’s interested.”
Peter looked at her quizzically, not wanting to seem greedy for more confirmation. It is among the eternal verities that a young man in this situation is helpless without female allies available to interpret. Robin just made a wide-eyed, head-waggling gesture, looking down at her plate as if putting Q.E.D. to her airtight case.
“How about the sheep summit? How did that go?” Jack asked.
Peter looked perplexed. “Summit? What do you mean?”
“Summit. You know, like a big diplomatic meeting between heads of state. You were going to talk to Rupert about sheep.”
“Oh. ‘Summit.’”
Jack was put in mind again of the age difference between himself and Peter, whom he tried to think of as a peer, and himself and Robin, though she was more the adopted daughter. But Robin was a child when she and Peter became alone, and Peter was hardly less so. Jack was impressed all over again by their strength in surviving and their wisdom, given their youth.
“I only saw Rupert for a little bit at lunch, but we talked. You’re right that he’d strictly want to trade, but that’s fine, that’s what I’d prefer, too. If we can pull our own weight, we should. And we can. So I’ll probably help him with labor in his garden in the spring.”
“I suppose I’m invited,” Jack said.
“Only if you like lamb,” Peter responded.
“That reminds me,” Robin said. “We could use a deer. I can preserve it longer in this weather, but I’m also going to try to salt it and then I want you to help me smoke some of it, so we’ll know how. If we get deer or another beef when it’s warmer, we won’t waste as much.”
“I went all my life without eating venison, and now I get it all the time,” Jack said.
Robin cocked her head to one side. “You don’t like it? You seem to be able to choke it down.”
Jack laughed. "I like it just fine. And you do a superb job with it.”
“You can put your fancy rifle to good use,” Peter said.
“I’ve never hunted before,” Jack responded.
“It’s easy. You just point it at something that’s not me and shoot,” Peter said.
“I’ll follow your lead. Sounds like fun.”
“Good. If the snow’s not too deep, we can go tomorrow. We’d need to go before sunup. The main window of opportunity is the hour and a half or so before the sun’s fully up. Even though we’re mainly going for deer, I prefer to walk if you don’t mind.”
“I guess you mean walk instead of sitting in a deer stand?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind,” Peter said.
“Not at all,” said Jack. He didn’t relish the idea of trying to sit still in this kind of weather anyway.
Peter said, as though talking to everyone present, “Well, now’s a good time to turn our attention to God, don’t you think?”
Just as he wouldn’t relish sitting in a tree in the predawn cold, Jack didn’t relish going out now in the oncoming snowstorm. Even a retreat to some other part of the house was less than ideal. The kitchen was closed off from the rest of the house, so it was the only truly warm room.
Jack sighed. “You’ve trapped me here, Peter. Your diabolical plan has worked. I’m in.”
“Good,” Peter said with just the note of satisfaction that told Jack he knew perfectly well that remaining at the cozy kitchen table, sipping coffee, was by far the best place in the world to be at the moment, but that’s where Peter’s and Robin’s “church” would take place. “I planned a Sunday snowstorm just for you,” Peter said. “I’ll be right back, my Bible is in my room.”
Robin had her Bible already on a counter next to the table. Under it was another Bible, so now she took both down, sliding one across to Jack.
Jack just looked at the Bible, and then over to Robin’s, and then realized that this had been premeditated on her part.
“Et tu, Robin?” Jack said, purposely mimicking Peter’s question to her a few days before.
Peter returned, closing the interior door behind him to keep the heat mainly in the kitchen.
“I worked up something on Noah, so we can start with that if that’s all right,” he said.
“Sure,” Jack said. “Wait. Noah? So this is the guy who was left with just a few others when God destroyed everyone else in the whole world? Right?”
“Yez?” Peter said, drawing the word out.
Jack grinned. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Chapter 18
There was no hunting the next day. Or the next or the next. They didn’t measure the depth of the snow, but it was well past eighteen inches. Jack decided that it was a western snow, not what he was used to. It was dry, and it drifted, sometimes dangerously so, as he discovered after the seeming privilege of being “holed up” ran thin.
Jack went out alone the second morning after the storm, with only Dewey struggling along behind him. It was harsh outside. The wind was not particularly brisk close to the house and the surrounding trees, but it stung his face nonetheless. It was a lot of work making progress along the path that he guessed was the driveway. Instead of going out onto the dirt road that served their ranch, Jack diverged left, out toward the unreclaimed portion of the pasture, where he knew the barbed wire had been defeated, the pasture awaiting his and Peter’s efforts to bring the area back into subjugation for their purposes. Jack paused on what he thought was the little strip of lawn between the drive–through and the fence-line. Behind him, in the east, was the cloud cover, now thinner but still leaving the sun indistinct, a silver oyster on the eastern horizon. But ahead and to his left, far to the western horizon beyond the hilltop, the sky was blue. And not just blue, but a deep, brilliant, Prussian blue. Impossibly blue. How could this be? It was as if the blanket of the cloud cover were being slowly drawn back across the heavens. Somewhere there, the sun reached, but not fully yet. It shone diffidently. Jack had walked out in the time-between-times when the earth pulls back the shroud and emerges, and he, Jack, was witness.
He plunged forward, confident that the barbed wire at this place rested on the ground, but as a precaution, he lifted his knees high—and he had to anyway because of the snow. He looked behind him at Dewey, who looked back, trusting but wondering. Wasn’t the warm kitchen better? They trudged on, into the wide pristine depthless expanse, taking one step at a time and using the treeline opposite as a guide. At least, Jack did. To Dewey, it must have been an endless sea of blue-shadowed white. He moved on because Jack did, and for no other reason. This was not lost on Jack as he proceeded toward the hillside opposite.
The pasture sloped downward here, making walking a little easier up to the drainage at the foot of the hill, and just after that drainage the hill rose abruptly. But, of course, Jack knew this topography from memory only. It didn’t match what he saw now, with the snow cover being uneven. He decided to make the circuit he’d mapped out in his mind before setting out, and that included the near mountain ridge. The snow would not be so thick on the hillside, and from there he would be able to stop and take stock of the little kingdom he shared with Robin and Peter, in peace, in the midst of the new world of man in his trifling numbers, riven already into factions.
The dog, he decided, would just have to deal with it. That’s what dogs are for. This dog, Dewey, was brighter than most, but he was a dog. Why was he different from Jack? He was loyal and trusting, and a true friend. So why wouldn’t a dog like him have been sufficient for Jack in his loneliness? He could look in Dewey’s eyes and see an aware mental state, certainly, but there was not enough. Dewey could not attribute his own mental state to himself as its subject. Dewey could never reflect back to Jack a shared consciousness, each as both subject and object. As much as a man might love a dog, though there could be companionship of sorts, there would be no “I” and “you” in shared inter-subjectivity.
As expected, the snow drifts were progressively deeper as Jack traversed the pasture. He knew the ruined far fence line was just at the base of the trees, where the pasture ended abruptly and the ponderosa pines commenced on the upslope. The blue-white expanse ahead of him suggested a different topography, however—a smooth, gradual curve from the angle of the pasture, to the top of the mountain, leveling the more acute angle of the upslope below the snow. The surface curve of the snow was a lie. The hillside ended and the flat pasture began all at one point, and at a sharp angle easily discernible when naked of snow. Jack proceeded, knowing that he was actually looking at a deep drift, and sure enough, the snow became deeper and deeper as he waded forward.
This was all very interesting and academic until Jack found himself in the soup more than waist high. He looked ahead and tried to guess exactly where the hard ground ceased its gentle downslope and turned up. Every step took him forward into the drift, rather than upward with the mountain. He looked back at Dewey, who was wagging his tail tentatively but with a look of doggy consternation. Jack’s moment of hesitation arose from the fact that this little trip was not even necessary. He had wanted to get out of the house and thought this would be a good time to explore the ridgetop above the far edge of the garden. He pressed on.
Jack knew that if he could just reach the upward bend, the going would get substantially easier, and his challenge at that point would be to retain footing and keep from flopping back into the drift. Between here and there, however, was a distance of perhaps twenty feet, through drift that was getting progressively deeper. He took to spreading his arms and flopping forward, a little to the left, and up again, then a little to the right, and then stepping up and forward to start again, making a way wide enough so that the snow wouldn’t fill in behind him, and Dewey might attempt to follow, and there would be an adequate escape for him if it came to that. This went on for ten feet, when the level of effort began to catch up to Jack. He found himself making excuses to stop, zipping his binoculars up inside of his coat so they wouldn’t flop around, turning to assist Dewey quite often, now having to heft him forward only to tread snow and move forward ineffectually, lunging inches at a time. In fact, Jack began to think that if he had to escape the way he came, it would as likely be because of Dewey as of himself.
Another few feet and the depth of the snow was close to Jack’s own height. For each step forward, he had to lunge all about him four or five times to make a body impression in the snow, as best he could—and having little success because the snow wouldn’t compress like he’d known snow to do back east. Here it was like a different substance altogether, shifting and sliding like sand. And the poor dog. No progress forward at all without Jack turning fully around to grasp him around the chest and lunge him forward to a position right behind Jack. And yet, the dog had eyes only forward, in fact eyes more on Jack and what he perceived of Jack’s confidence than on his own surroundings.
At last, Jack was ready to give up, intending to make one more big lunge forward, but this time his foot caught hold a little less deep than before. Looking around, he saw that it was quite possible that he’d beaten back enough of the drifting snow to have begun a step up the hillside, so that even though the snow was nearly as deep as he was tall, he might now begin to arise out of the drift. At this point, Dewey was making no forward progress at all but for what Jack gave him by manually pulling him forward. He appeared resigned to the pattern of Jack flailing at the snow ahead of him and then turning to pull Dewey forward, and then turning back to start the process all over again.
Now the calculus of this situation seemed to Jack to call for a rapid ascent out of the snow. He could see up the slope that the snow was less deep than on the pasture because much of what would have stayed in place, had the ground been even, had drifted downward to the morass Jack was even now fighting his way out of. Each step up the slope would represent a full step out of the drift, not just a full step forward. And in addition to that, the depth of the drift itself should rapidly diminish.
And good thing, he thought, because he was running out of steam and realizing that, at this point, going back the way he had come might have about the same level of difficulty as proceeding onward from her
e. Jack was nearly exhausted. Dewey had given up entirely and just rested, waiting for his next drag forward on top of snow well over his head. All this was taking place within sight of the house. What a stupid spot to expire, and what a stupid way to have it happen, after all he’d been through, Jack thought.
The optimistic calculations were all correct, but now a new obstacle presented itself. Now Jack was pushing off of snow piled atop unlevel ground, so that he slipped backward on each step almost as much as he went forward, with the result that all his thrashing around yielded only a few net inches forward each time. His ability to lunge forward to suppress at least some of the snow was impaired because pressing forward with his body at too much of an angle would cause him to slide back. So Jack took to sweeping back snow with his arms and taking little bitty steps with feet wedged forward as if he were tiptoeing uphill. He found that his legs were churning against a mass of snow weighing directly down on them as his steps were more up-and-down, fighting the full weight of the snow depth rather than the lesser resistance of just moving forward. Dewey was dragged forward only inches at a time and was showing signs of the kind of exhaustion that would precede hypothermia.
Jack found that the snow depth had significantly lessened on the slope, enabling him to lean forward with weight on both elbows and knees. From that position, his movement forward was much quicker—or would be were it not for having to turn fully around from an all-fours position to pull Dewey forward. After a few feet of this, however, Dewey made to move forward on his own, and he regained his feet and actually passed Jack, pausing to give a shake right in front of Jack, except this shake was oddly slow, not as effective as a dog-shake would normally be. Jack felt that he had moved forward enough to stand, but first he called the dog back to himself, unzipped his own coat, and pulled the dog close to him, partially covering him, while they both lay on the slope catching their breath before attempting to navigate the snow again.
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