by C. P. Boyko
Lance gagged. “How can they stand it?”
“Oh, they don’t even notice it. The Indian’s sense of smell is much less acute than the white man’s.”
Lance peered thoughtfully at Rocky’s nose, while fingering his own.
Rocky’s house—which turned out also to be Old Moose’s house, and the house of several other men and women and innumerable children of all ages—seemed to corroborate Maury’s claim. Surely no one with a working nose could live in such a place. A fire burned somewhere, or perhaps smoldered universally under the heaps of oily rags and children, filling the air with an acrid smoke that instantly coated the lungs and sinuses. A horrific chandelier of gutted salmon carcasses hung from the rafters, infusing the smoke almost visibly with an odor of seafood and putrefaction. Mixed with this overpowering stink were several merely unpleasant smells: kerosene, rancid lard, pine needles, stale sweat, fresh sweat, rich dirt, diapers, and milk.
“Ni-ka house,” said Rocky, with blasé pride.
Maury was about to say that they couldn’t possibly stay in such a squalid hovel; but seeing Lance gasping and teetering and about to swoon, he declared that it was a grand house, and that they would be honored to spend the night in it. Lance collapsed onto a pile of rags and squealing babies. One of the women placed in his hands a bowl of fish parts swimming with some of their former spawning-season tenacity in a black broth. Without thinking, he thanked her, and this reflex of etiquette sealed his fate: to run screaming back to the train station no longer seemed possible. With a whimpering giggle, he resigned himself to a night of voluptuous misery.
But the night would not let him wallow in his unhappiness. After the lamps were put out, he detected a thin draught of fresh outdoor air, but this kept moving, and he had to move with it, clambering over sleeping bodies that merely grunted when he put a knee in their groin or a thumb in their eye. Some of the children, fascinated by his white hair, pointy nose, squeaky droning voice, and total lack of good manners, followed him in his migrations; and whenever he had enough temporary warmth and breathable air to doze off, one of the children would begin playing with his face, sniffing his clothes, or tasting his hair. By the time they fell asleep, they had learned several new King George cuss words. But after the fidgeting and murmuring of the children ceased, Lance became aware of other strange sounds and fleeting movements in the darkness. Something, not a draught, passed over his foot; then something, not a child, brushed his ear. He was utterly awake, and utterly alone in his wakefulness. He wanted to shake one of the children, but could not move. Terror filled his lungs—then burst out in a warbling shriek when something with tiny claws and a long sleek tail scurried across his face. He sprang to his feet without passing through any intermediate position and stayed as much off the ground as possible by hopping from one big toe to the other and flapping his arms for extra lift. A tremendous commotion ensued. Lamps were lit, blankets thrown off, sticks and pans and rags grabbed as weapons, and there arose from the entire household the war cry of “Tsish-o-poots! Tsish-o-poots!”
Maury rolled over, and not realizing that Lance had moved across the room, explained sleepily that Indians hated porcupines and considered them evil because they liked to chew out the brake cables from the undercarriage of automobiles. “But a porcupine doesn’t know any damn better. It’s just the salt we put on the roads that he likes.” He rolled over again, and, disgusted, fell back asleep.
In the morning, Lance was too tired to realize fully what indignities and discomforts he was being subjected to. He was prodded upright, stuffed with fish, irrigated with coffee, somehow insinuated into wool socks, wool underwear, flannel shirt, sweater, gabardine jacket, hip waders, trench socks, puttees, boots, gaiters, mackinaw overcoat, and several hats, and set marching on a trail through the forest before he knew what was happening to him. He kept seeing porcupines at the edge of his vision, and could feel them nibbling at his hair. When at last he awoke to his surroundings, he made a stand—literally. Planting his feet in the mud, he declared that he would go no farther, that he had gone far enough.
Maury squinted up through the trees at the dark blue clouds, and said that he understood. Not everyone was cut out for the sportsman’s life. “It can be glorious, and it can be rough. And mostly, I guess, it’s rough. Well, your mother’ll be glad to see you back so soon. So long, old son. Rocky, Old Moose: Kla-ta-wa.”
“But—but I can’t go back alone!”
Maury squinted at him as if he were a dark blue cloud. “Why?”
“Because! Because I don’t know the way! Because it’s not even light out! Because I’m wearing your clothes! Because!”
“Oh, send the jacket and things over to the Esquire. Guess I’m bound to drop in there again someday.”
Lance abandoned all pretense. “What about panthers!”
Maury said that the North American panther, or puma, or catamount, or cougar, or mountain lion, or Californian lion as he was sometimes called in Washington State, or hy-as puss-puss (big puss-puss) as the Indians called him, was a shifty, gutless cur who’d sneak and skulk after you for miles, howling like a street cat in heat, but would hardly ever show fight directly, and had almost never been known to attack a man unprovoked.
Lance decided that he would stay with the hunting party a little longer.
The clouds overhead changed from blue to grey and slowly filled with light, till the whole sky seemed a dull, diffuse sun. Rain did not fall so much as hang in the air in microscopic droplets, so that Lance, looking back, thought he could see the path they had cut through it. Farther on, the trees traded their leaves for needles and shaggy filaments that bristled with damp. Everything was damp and musty, like old potatoes left too long in a cellar. All the rocks, ferns, and fallen logs were spattered with a grey-blue moss like mold, and the tops of the trees were white with mildew. As the trail stretched uphill, Lance was soon wheezing, but he blamed this on the air. He imagined he could feel tiny grains, like infinitesimal spores, when he inhaled. He coughed and spat till he was completely out of breath, certain that he had acquired tuberculosis, developed several new allergies, and caught a bad cold. When they paused to let the ponies graze, the symptoms abated too much for him to raise an alarm; and when they set out again he was soon too winded to speak. This was life, he thought: a cheerless footslog towards death that left you too breathless to protest.
Maury, however, had breath to spare. To him the forest smelled fresh, and the damp affected him like wine. He gave Lance the Latin and common names of the flora around them, and told him of the habits and character of the fauna that were at present nowhere to be seen. He gave the dimensions of the mountains on the horizon and explained the origin of the region’s name. There had been a time when caribou had swarmed over these mountains like ants on a carcass, when a man could shoot a hundred in a single season with a single gun. But then had come the commercial hunters. Maury’s face furrowed with contempt. A man would kill anything anyhow if his sole aim was to sell it. He’d still-hunt in rainy season, burn down the forest in dry season, draw out stags with a cheap birch-bark horn in rutting season. He’d even stoop to trapping. And caribou had a fatal idiosyncrasy: at the sound of a gunshot, they would freeze. An unscrupulous hunter—a commercial hunter—could, as long as he stayed downwind, slaughter an entire herd with a single gun.
Lance asked when they were going to shoot something. His feet were sore.
Maury cleared his throat, sniffed the air, and spat. “When we’re off the beaten path, little brother. Anything still alive around here only comes out at night.”
Lance pointed at something moving in the branches overhead. “What about that?”
“That,” said Maury, “is a squirrel.”
Lance shuddered; he hated squirrels. “Well, let’s shoot it.”
“With an Express? There’d be nothing left.”
Lance did not understand the objection. He pointed aga
in. “There. Shoot that guy.”
“Christ on a stick. That’s a snowy owl.”
“So?”
“You don’t shoot owls.”
“Why not? He’s just sitting there.” He had the feeling that the owl was watching him; he lowered his voice. “Go on, get him.”
Rocky and Old Moose came forward and joined the discussion, nodding and pointing illustratively with their guns and encouraging Maury to give it a try.
“Hy-as gun. Ten-as kula-kula. Klo-she ma-mook poh. Easy bang-bang.”
“You don’t shoot owls,” Maury grumbled. “Owls are hunters. You don’t shoot hunters.”
Rocky’s gun went off. Lance and Maury jumped; the owl flapped its wings, but did not fall or fly away. The shot had gone wide, or had only been intended to demonstrate the convenient operation of the trigger.
“You damn idiot.” Maury yanked the rifle from Rocky’s hands. “Shut the hell up and get the hell back, goddamn you.”
When they had retreated as far as the pack train, Maury turned to the owl, held the gun up over his head, and threw it ostentatiously to the ground. The owl ruffled its feathers and blinked. Then Maury began to speak to it, in a low, soothing, clucking voice. Lance could not make out the words, but the owl seemed to understand perfectly, and to be rather impressed by what he heard. He emitted an inquisitive hoot, and hopped to a lower branch to better hear the reply. Maury held out his hands and took a step forward. The owl blinked, ruffled its feathers, and cocked its head. Then, to the amazement of Lance and the Indians, it lifted itself from its perch and floated down into Maury’s open hands.
“What’s he doing?,” Lance whispered. His view was blocked by Maury’s back.
When Maury turned around, the owl had disappeared. In its place there remained only a limp clump of feathers, which Maury tossed aside like an old newspaper.
“Kla-ta-wa,” he said, and continued up the trail.
Lance and the Indians were in raptures. Again and again they reenacted the seduction, the capture, the brutal murder. Shooting wasn’t cruel enough for this man; he preferred to strangle his prey with his own hands! What a man! What a monster!
It was not till they stopped for lunch that Lance noticed the blood on Maury’s hands. Rocky’s shot had grazed the owl after all.
While the Indians made camp, Lance sat bored and shivering on a rotten stump, watching Maury build a fire. Maury had not spoken much since that morning, but now could not resist the opportunity to instruct.
“Cedar deadfall is no damn good,” he said. “Holds the water too deep. Pine will do in a pinch. But fir is your best bet. You can see the difference in the grain. Pine’s more porous.”
Lance grimaced, his jaw too clenched from cold to permit a yawn.
Maury placed a log on end in the mud, balancing it for a moment with one finger; then, before it could tip over, he brought the hand-axe down in four powerful strokes, reducing a gnarled piece of tree to a perfectly smooth and rectangular stick of lumber about one twentieth its original size. When he had made thirty or so of these, he constructed a little tapering log cabin and stuffed it with paper from a waterproof tin. He then struck a match, and pausing conclusively, like a math teacher drawing a line under the figures to be summed, lit the paper. It burned magnificently, brightly and quickly, and left no trace. Only the log cabin remained, steaming slightly but otherwise intact.
Maury gave a grunt of satisfaction and explained that now the surface moisture had been burned off. He added and lit more paper, with the same results.
Evidently the region had received more rain than had been reported. Well, even a cold supper would taste good after a day’s hard hiking.
Suddenly the little log cabin burst into flame. Rocky had doused it with a liter of lantern oil, and now stood admiring his handiwork and basking in his employers’ unequal gratitude.
That night Maury—sitting before the fire that Rocky had started, eating the salmon that Old Moose had cooked, and drinking the blackberry wine that their wives had fermented—complained about the laziness, uncleanliness, and unpreparedness of Indians. What were they doing with lantern oil and blackberry wine, when they had not brought tents or sleeping outfits or boots? They had signed on to the expedition without even asking how long they were to be gone or where they would be going. He called that sheer suicidal stupidity. And they had lice that they didn’t scratch. They didn’t even mind. They were proud of their lice!
Lance, lying curled around the fire, paid no attention to this diatribe, but listened instead to the Indians laughing and reminiscing about their exploits. Having never learned any language other than English, and having acquired that without much difficulty, he was unsurprised to discover that he understood their language perfectly—just as long as he did not concentrate too hard. It helped perhaps that their jargon had borrowed several words from English; and from such hints as “bed,” “house,” “shoes,” “sick,” and “gun,” eked out with the Indians’ dramatic gestures and his own dramatic imagination, he was easily able to piece together their story. It seemed that Old Moose had been, as a young Moose, something of a rake and a daredevil. He would face any danger, perform any stunt, if a girl was nearby. One time, spurred on by the most beautiful girl in the village, he had climbed a tree to a panther’s nest, and with his own two hands—
“What a load of horse crap,” said Maury, staggering to his feet. “If a bear lets you crawl into his den, and take aim by his breath, and blast him in the dark, it’s because he’s hibernating—that’s all there is to it. I don’t care what you say. That’s not hunting, that’s murder.” Turning to Lance, he said, “They don’t hunt, they murder. They only eat the heart, the lungs, and the liver, then they sell the pelt to the Boston man and leave the rest rotting on the ground. I knew a Siwash whose brother was killed by a bear, so he went and killed six of them in revenge, and left their carcasses putrefying in the sun—as a warning. As if a bear understands revenge! As if a bear understands your warnings!” He sat back down, muttering that it was a damn waste.
“When are we going to shoot some bears?,” Lance wanted to know.
Maury spat into the fire and said nothing for a minute. “Rocky! Pot-latch gun-gun!”
Rocky went to fetch the guns. Lance sat up, giggling.
“Before you can shoot a bear,” said Maury proverbially, “you have to learn to shoot. Now, a good gun is a good gun. This Express, for instance, puts their rusty old smooth-bore muskets to the blush. But even a lousy gun will shoot true within its ability if taken care of, and even a good gun will fail you if you fail it. Improper maintenance is the cause of most misfirings.” He brooded for a moment over the death of the owl; then said, “I’ll show you how to avoid that.”
Lance sighed and lay back down. “Maybe later. I’m comfortable right now,” he lied.
He stared into the fire, dreaming of the most beautiful girl in the village, while Maury explained the importance of testing your cartridges in the chambers each morning; the indispensability of extra hammers, mainsprings, and tumbler pins; and above all the necessity of regular and thorough oiling.
The Indians watched in amazement as Maury disassembled the gorgeous shooting stick and rubbed its parts with magic ointment. They could not understand how such a stupid man had built such a wonderful tool.
Lance did not sleep well that night either. As soon as he closed his eyes, the forest came alive, crackling with movement. Small rustling sounds made him think of rats and porcupines and little burrowing creatures with protuberant teeth and piercing red eyes; large intermittent sounds made him think of lions and bears and hulking muscular predators with razor-sharp claws and noses powerful enough to smell the meat under his skin. Instead of protecting him, the tent trapped him, depriving him of sight and preventing escape. He lay rigid and sweating as a panther came towards him with infinite patience, one step a minute; he heard it reach o
ut and hook its index claw into the top clasp of the tent’s outer fly—
The sight of Lance the next morning filled Maury with pity and contempt. To assuage his pity, he let him ride atop one of the pack ponies’ loads; to assuage his contempt, he lectured him on the importance of self-discipline in the production of literature.
“If I waited for inspiration to strike, I’d still be writing my first novel. Hell—I’d still be writing my first paragraph.”
Lance, splayed limply across the swaying mountain of equipment, mumbled that no amount of effort or strain could produce a single beautiful idea or one lovely phrase. “Otherwise athletes and energetic businessmen would write the best novels.”
Maury argued that they very well might, if they applied themselves wholeheartedly to the task. He admitted that all writing had an unconscious component; occasionally one surprised oneself. But this was not a passive process. In order to see Paris, one must leave the hotel. In order to find a bridge, one must walk along the river—sometimes for miles.
Lance bleated derisively. “Miles and miles of tedious filler! Flailing about for something to say! Drowning in ink—and taking your reader down with you!”
“Once you’ve found the bridge,” said Maury, “you can go back and cover your tracks.” He slapped down a qualm. “Besides, you can’t just cross bridges all day.”
Lance looked down pityingly at the top of his head. “I’m afraid that you are too old for me to be able to help you.”