Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “How old are they?” Wallis asked.

  “Helen planted them when she was a little girl. Seventy, eighty years ago. I don’t know.”

  “And they never blossomed?” Wallis asked.

  Mel shook her head. “They just grow,” she said, a little defensively.

  There were more fish, pickled in jars, and other fish packed in last spring’s ice in cedar crates, resting on sawdust. They gleamed before the light of the lantern, as Mel showed them to him, case after case, like a proud grocer.

  She lifted the lantern, and now he saw that there were iron bars in front of the windows, and his first thought was that she truly believed these creatures of the woods might still somehow by desire alone make it back into the woods, and that she was trying to prevent their escape.

  “The bears try to come in sometimes,” she said. “And wolverines. There are old tooth marks and claw marks all over this building,” she said, “beginning from when Matthew’s parents first built and homesteaded this place, on up to this year.” Mel laughed. “Sometimes in the spring, before they’ve had their greens—when their gums are still weak—they’ll bite at the sides of the building, and their teeth will come out and get stuck in the wood. The wolverines are the worst; they won’t run from you. They’ll sit up on the roof for two or three days, trying to come down the chimney, and just snarl at you. I’ve thrown snowballs at them, shot the rifle over their head, everything, but they won’t run off. Ravens and coyotes try to get in, and eagles, too. Some mornings in the fall there’ll be a pair of golden eagles sitting on the roof.

  “My father used to hunt with eagles,” she said quietly. “He went over to Russia and bought one of those big Asian golden eagles. He spent a month over there using it to hunt deer, wolves, and even bears. They used to use them in battle, to hunt men.” She was speaking calmly, with no trace of revulsion or wonder—just a quietness, as if she were unsure of even her own family’s past. As if even events of the past could not be trusted if the tracks or other proof of them were not before her, lying somewhere out into the future.

  “It was before I was born,” she said. “I’ve heard him talk about it. The authorities wouldn’t let him keep the eagle.”

  Mel was silent then, thinking of how Matthew and Old Dudley had twined together—of the way she could no longer think of one without the other, so that it was as if she had had them both taken from her—and she stepped in next to Wallis and tucked her head down. Her weight was hard and dense against him, though he could tell, too, that she was holding something in reserve: that always, she would be doing that, with anyone. He would never have guessed she was lonely. She had too much to do, it seemed, and the days were too short. Never in a million years would he have guessed that.

  The light cast a glow around their frozen feet and steam rose from their boots. All the animals hung silent, motionless, as if respecting Mel’s sadness; mouths gaping, hearts cut out, and eyes blue-blind, but still seeing, and feeling: all pointing skyward and rising, but with part of them lingering too, communicating with her—speaking some intermediary language that rested between man and the stars.

  Mel and Wallis stood there like horses in a stable, their ankles steaming from the lantern heat, for a long while, just listening to the snow fall, and to the hiss of the lantern. When the lantern spent its fuel and died with a sputter, the smoke drew back into a genie’s bottle, and as the light went away it drew with it the final, fading images of the mooneyed elk, the giant-racked deer, and the sleepy grouse, their heads hung, and the brilliant brook trout, the ascending silver rainbow trout and the blood-bright cutthroats.

  In the last wisp of gold light, Wallis saw a dark pile of potatoes in one corner, the pile assuming the shape of a bear as the light fled, and in the gathered darkness the fish and ascending game were turned into silhouetted angels.

  Now there was just the sound of the snow burying Wallis and Mel. Wallis put his arms around Mel and held on as if they were going down together.

  Mel steadied and took a step back. She said nothing of the moment. Wallis thought how to her it must have seemed as natural as holding a hand up for help, had she slipped and gone down on the ice; and because it was cold, so cold now that it hurt their lungs to breathe, and because they were shivering, they left the smokehouse.

  When they stepped outside into the night, the sound was fresher.

  The light from their cabin was gone—either burned out, or, more likely, obscured by the blizzard. Mel stood shoulder to shoulder with him, pausing for only a moment after she had shut and barred the smokehouse door behind her. She looked up the hill in the direction where her instinct and memory told her the cabin was.

  If the cabin’s lantern were out, and if she veered off her heart’s course by a degree or two in the beginning, they would never reach the cabin. They might miss it, in their errant arc, by twenty yards, or by a few inches—their groping hands catching only feathery, falling snow.

  And that is how they would die—two strangers, only beginning to know anything about each other. They would travel past their home, would feel the jungle brushing against their faces, and know they’d overshot the tiny sanctuary of the cabin.

  “Hold onto me,” Mel said, looking up the hill with resolve, almost anger—as if the cabin were hiding from her—and she started up the hill, wading through the deep snow fast, without a trace of hesitation or caution.

  It seemed to Wallis that they walked for a long time, and then he was certain that they had walked for a long time, and still they had not yet come to the cabin.

  He held onto Mel’s coat as he would the tail of a horse. She stopped when it seemed sure that they had gone too far. He moved in close, heard her grunt a curse, but he did not hear fear in her voice. Was it too late, he wondered, to hunker down—to burrow into the snow like a bear or a grouse; to let it cover them until it was warm as a blanket, and then to come back out when it stopped snowing, if it ever stopped?

  Mel turned and began moving hard to the right—almost a lunge—and Wallis nearly lost his grasp on her. She traveled another ten steps and then stopped again. They stood there in the blizzard like ghosts.

  Mel was looking hard in one direction, her stare fixed at nothing. Wallis watched too. It was as if she were listening to something, though all of the senses were gone, rendered unintelligible, meaningless. There was only the weight and pull of gravity beneath their feet.

  Her tenseness eased. Her breathing steadied. She continued to watch in the one direction, as a hunter watches a meadow. Wallis could see it, then—or thought he could see it. A paleness in the storm disappeared when he looked at it, but when he tried to look away, it came back again: not a glow, by any stretch of the imagination—not the thing they were looking for—but a lessening, a gauziness, which was inviting. It tempted them to step through it.

  Wallis wanted to move toward it immediately. Pants cuffs frozen solid. Shaking and rattling, shivering like a sack of bones. Mel held her ground: watched that different patch of storm as if challenging it.

  It began to storm harder, and the patch, the place of nothing they were looking at, disappeared. Mel took a full step toward it, and then another, and then she began moving toward it quickly. It reappeared, and now it had the faintest yellow color to it, and then more, until it was a glow, and it was exactly the opposite of how the light had gone back into the lantern.

  Inside, the boards beneath their feet. The familiar objects on her shelves, when they stepped inside: feathers, stones, shells, and the sprawl of closed, silent books—each one of them swimming with millions of hieroglyphics that were designed, upon being scanned, to ignite into light and knowledge, into images and scents and sounds.

  The pine planking of her floor. The dishes from their meal, the cold stone fireplace, and the cold air in the cabin, the lantern’s bright light, and the snow not yet melting from their boots, for already the cabin had grown so cold. Only a degree or two—the tiniest bit of correction to the angle of their arc,
in the beginning—separated them from all the snow beyond, and so much cold—too much cold, even for Mel.

  They knew better than to talk about it, or to joke about it.

  Wallis got the fire going again. Mel crouched next to him and warmed her hands before the flames. When she had feeling in them once more, she stood and walked once around the inside of her cabin, examining things—handling this river stone, or that piece of obsidian—and when she went past her desk, she paused and looked at her notes spread out there. She tapped the open notebook once, as if trying to remember all that lay beneath that open page, and she completed her lap by coming back to the fireplace, where Wallis was still adding kindling.

  It was a cold fire. That was one of the things that amazed him most about the valley: how sometimes it would be so frigid that he could see a fire’s flames, could smell them, could hear the wood snapping, but could still feel no warmth. He could pass his bare hands right through the flames and be shivering all the while.

  Wallis slept on the floor in front of the fire, wrapped in elk hides again. Mel touched his arm, then went down the hallway to her bedroom. The flames threw light all around the cabin, but gradually grew lower as Wallis dreamed his way toward darkness. When the fire had gone completely out, he woke once and got it lit again, then went back to sleep. It was so cold that his head hurt. He wondered if the trees felt pain, or sensed it, before they cracked open in the night. He could hear them splitting.

  He dreamed about the subterranean lands he would endeavor to enter in the summer or fall, and of the distant lands he had entered elsewhere, and broken apart. He dreamed of the mineralization that binds sand grains together—sometimes calcareous, other times friable and porous, easily crushed. It was hard for him to imagine the specific processes that had given rise to those individual cementings below: hard to imagine the specific processes that had held an ancient land in place; but that night, in his dreams, he imagined that perhaps those old lands were held in place by a quietness and enduringness—a smoothness of fit. The way rain falls, the way snow falls. The way birds sleep. The way lichens grow in red and blue mosaics across damp boulders and old stone walls. The way a log rots.

  The slow moths that emerge from the log’s orange rot.

  If wolves howled that night, he didn’t hear them. The snow absorbed everything.

  NOW THE WOLVES TOOK HER AS SURELY AS IF THEY HAD come in the cabin and seized her in their jaws. Each morning long before daylight Wallis would awaken to the glow of coals from where he had let the fire burn down and would see Mel in the kitchen working by candlelight to avoid waking him. She would already be bundled in her parka, breathing frost, making a little fire in the kitchen’s wood stove to boil water for tea, and fixing a slab of toast, over which she would spread thick butter and jam.

  She would eat in silence, standing on the other side of the cabin, watching him, and then she would dust the crumbs from her hands, dab a towel at the corner of her mouth, and go out the door quickly.

  And the geology, the old earth, took Wallis, just as surely as if he had died and was now only some ghost wandering the surface, trying to get back to the time when he had felt most alive, and not noticing the paradox: that in his rigorous efforts to return to that past, he was becoming more alive.

  As if he could be both numb and aware. As if a man could be both awake and asleep, or both good and evil.

  Some days he was so hungry for a taste and feel of the soil, some sighting of rock, that he would wander out into the yard, or into the woods beyond, and would begin digging in the snow with his gloved hands, or with a shovel: digging like a madman or a searcher looking for something dropped, until the shoveltip clinked against the frozen soil. He would chip away at the soil, sparks skittering sometimes as steel struck flint—that acrid odor—and then he would scrape up the small tracings of soil and study them. He would look at the towering, snow-clad mountains above, and he would want to howl at the gulf of knowledge. He would feel trapped, that for all of his laborings he could only get a few inches into the recent glacial moraine. He would feel bereft of intimacy.

  His despair would broaden from that. He would believe that Old Dudley had sent him up here to abandon him: that Dudley had found another geologist to train, and that Dudley and Matthew and that third geologist were busy cracking open old anticlines like streamside raccoons cracking freshwater mussels to suck out the meat, and him not included in any of the fun.

  The caw of a lone raven, overhead: cold blue skies, and the stillness of the north: and then after the raven’s echo was gone, only silence. He could not get to where he wanted.

  And when Mel came home in the evenings, she would sometimes notice the small mounds from where he had been digging—a faint sprinkling of black earth atop the snow—but said nothing, glad only that he was getting outside.

  Some days the coyotes would hear his labors and would appear at the edge of the woods to watch him as he worked. They could smell the blood from his barehanded labors as he tried to pluck polished moraine from frozen earth, and Wallis would not notice them until—as if to mimic him—the coyotes would begin digging also, tunneling at the snow, digging fast and furious.

  Wallis would hear the roostertails of snow swooshing up and landing in clumps and patters behind the coyotes as they dug, and he would pause in his own digging, sheened with sweat, and would watch; and after a short time, one of the coyotes would appear with a mouse in its jaws gotten from beneath the snow. At that point the other coyotes would chase the one with the mouse, all the coyotes flowing lightly across the top of the snow, dodging and feinting not like individuals but like one swirling organism—and then after a while whichever coyote had ended up with the mouse would tease both the mouse and the other coyotes by tossing it high into the air and then catching it again. Finally one of them would eat the tattered mouse, and Wallis would go back to digging, and the coyotes would sit on their haunches and watch him a bit longer, and when Wallis looked up again, they would have vanished, though later in the day he would hear them laughing and howling and yipping back in the woods, chasing something.

  He despaired. In the evenings, when Mel came home, she could see that he had despaired, could read the landscape of his frustration by the dozens of half-finished diggings that surrounded her cabin—dustings of frozen black crumbs of earth resting atop the snow—but still she said nothing, though she was sad, believing that in no way could this one be as enduring as Matthew—believing for certain that Dudley would consume him soon.

  And perhaps for this reason—believing that Wallis would soon be crushed and buried—she did not volunteer things, did not teach him the things she knew. She found reasons to stay out later, and traveled farther, tracking and mapping the wolves. When she came home in the evenings, she isolated herself from him. She read, or worked quietly in her journals. And though the romance between her and Matthew was all but over, worn smooth—Old Dudley owned him completely, now —she nonetheless found herself trying to keep track of the days and dates, knowing Matthew and Dudley would be coming up for Christmas. She thought of her own entrapments—her memories of Matthew of when he had been free. He had loved her; he had loved hunting the oil. Matthew had once said that if he remained with her in the valley and did not follow Old Dudley down to Texas, some part of him would always feel trapped, and would resent her for that. So she had turned him free—he had turned himself free—and now had gone and gotten trapped anyway. All to naught.

  So almost as if blaming Wallis—as if Wallis were some residue of her father—she shunned him now without being rude about it. She simply distanced herself from him, as many animals are said to do when one of their number becomes injured. It was only the wolves who would wait with one of their injured, and tend to it until it recovered. All the other social animals vanished when one of their kind went down—knowing that the crippled one would rob valuable resources, would disrupt delicate rhythms, and, worst of all, would summon predators.

  Wallis could feel th
e winter sickness coming on. Knowing the name of it, however, did nothing to ease his despair. The waning days, waning light, and his isolation from the world: he felt his power draining from him as if from a wound, and felt old grief rising. He suspected the nature of what Old Dudley was doing to him, why he had banished him to this place. Wallis knew he was being stripped from the secure world of data and facts, stripped of the assurances of reality he’d come not only to depend upon, but to which he had become addicted. He understood that Old Dudley was jerking his head around, forcing him, like a dog whose leash is tugged sharply, to become a creature of the imagination, rather than fact.

  He could only imagine what lay beneath the snow. It was as if Old Dudley—or the land itself—was bending Wallis’s mind, forcing it to alter shape and capability completely. Wallis could feel his mind threatening to crack, under that pressure—swelling, bucking, and folding. Some days out in the snow fields Wallis would sink to his knees and then lie down on the snow, face down. The falling snow would cover him.

  But as it covered him, he would calm, as if healed, and would sit up, ready to try again, not knowing whether it was his will—some spark within—which had lifted him back up, or the land itself, or even some thing buried beneath the land.

  And each night, upon returning home, Mel would wander around her cabin before going inside—reading clearly Wallis’s story of that day’s despair. To her the signs of floundering—the weary snow angels—were not even so much like the etchings or scribings of Wallis’s despair as they were evidences—the tracks, the prints—of Old Dudley’s awful domineering: as if the beast of Dudley himself had passed through there earlier in the day; and Mel would shiver, and, half-believing that he had, would be glad that she had not been there.

  Mel had survived beneath his thumb for eighteen years—though because his blood was hers, she sometimes did not stop counting from the day she left home, but was still counting, at thirty-eight.