They climbed around the ridge and then down the other side and into the steep vee of a gully that ran whitish blue with a small stream. All she could hear was the rush of water. The horses picked their way along and the boulders that were strewn along the shore were large and rounded by the force of the current from spring melts. The farther they followed the stream the more she came to hear the silence beyond the rush of water. She looked up and the tree tops cut the sky into a serrated edge. The spruce and fir grew thicker and the talus boulders gave way to smaller, variegated stones and pebbles and gravel. The bed of the stream dipped into an abrupt angle and she had to lean back on the horse to hold her seat. It was a long traverse. Eventually the trail levelled out and they snaked downward and out into a broad valley that was surrounded on all sides by mountains, and the stream bellied out wide and smooth and languid, then pooled and became dotted with beaver lodges and spotted with juts of alder and birch and willow, and she thought she had never seen anything so beautiful.
The sun was a slip of itself against the western cut of mountain. There was a golden light to everything that eased downward to orange and crimson and a hint of the profound purple to come. Starlight walked the horses deeper into the valley and stopped them at the head of a wide pool. She could see fish finning in the shallows. There was the ghost of an old fire ring and he dismounted and walked to it and kicked at the grass that poked up around it. She slid off the back of the mare and stood there looking at everything. While she and Winnie walked to the edge of the stream Roth and Starlight tied the horses to a clump of willows and hefted the stones out of the fire ring and reassembled them atop the twitches of grass. When she looked at him he hooked a thumb toward the trees and they followed him, stepping over logs and rocks and clumps of bushes thick with berries and flowers. He carried a small hatchet and a knife, and they walked to a copse of saplings that he chopped down. When they had an armful they walked back.
He directed them wordlessly. He showed her and Winnie how to strip the bark in long thin strips and then how to use the strips as rope. They pitched the frames of lean-tos and then pulled swatches of fern and cut branches from spruce and willow and laid them across to form the roof.
“We sleep under these?” she asked.
He nodded and they walked off to gather firewood. He led them out to the bush and showed them what to gather and they returned to the camp with armfuls of twigs and bracken. He showed them how to press it all into an oblong like a hornet’s nest and set them down in the middle of the fire ring. When he helped Winnie put a match to hers it flared and she laughed when the flames caught. He showed her how to add bigger pieces of wood to it and the fire crackled to life and they stood around it, all orange and wavering in the dying light. He used an alder sapling to make a spear and got them four fish for supper. She cleaned them and flayed them out on forked sticks to cook while Roth and Winnie gathered herbs for a salad.
They ate in silence. The night descended around them. Emmy built the fire back up as he directed and they leaned on logs while he whittled at a piece of dried wood.
“I’ve been on campouts before,” Emmy said. “But I never knew how much you could do with so little.”
“The old man used to say the land’ll always teach ya what you need to know,” Starlight said.
“Do you miss him?”
Starlight studied her a moment then laid his knife and whittling stick at his feet and leaned forward and gazed into the fire. “I don’t know as I do. We come out here so much together the things I know and love about it are all connected with him. I can’t feel the wind on my face without thinkin’ he’s touchin’ me. Can’t hear a moose bawling across a distance without thinkin’ he’s speaking to me outta that. Them kinda things. I kinda figure he’s a part of all that. So I come out here and I get comforted.”
“Sounds like you loved him a lot.”
“Like I said, he was my father even if he wasn’t my real one.”
“Why you call him the old man then?” Emmy asked.
“I guess I don’t figure father to be something you cram into one box that’ll hold the word for ya. I figure it comes to mean different things to different people. Me? It means he was my best friend. Always.”
“Because he gave you the land?”
Starlight raised his head. She met his gaze.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Starts with that, yeah.”
“I never met my daddy,” Winnie said suddenly. “Or my grampa.”
They all turned to face her. She sat beside her mother, leaning forward toward the fire with her forearms on her thighs.
“I think they’da thunk ya were a pretty special kid,” Roth said.
“I don’t wonder what they looked like,” Winnie said. “But I like to wonder how they sounded when they talked. Like how they’d sound talkin’ to me around this fire.”
“Likely sounded all worldly an’ wise like me,” Roth said.
Winnie laughed and turned to look at him. “You’re funny,” she said. “I think they would have sounded like you.”
Roth scratched at his ear. “Hard burden to bear. Rumbly, manly voice like mine.”
She laughed again. “See?” she said and looked up at Emmy.
“I do see,” Emmy said. “I think it’s okay for you to choose how you would want them to sound.”
“Like Frank then. And Eugene.”
“Do you miss ’em?” Starlight asked.
It was her turn to regard him. “No,” she said.
He studied her. “Okay,” he said.
“I feel the wind on my face, it’s just the wind,” she said, and Starlight nodded.
* * *
—
He taught them to listen. They walked out in silence, leaving the horses behind at the camp. They walked across the valley and up into the heart of the backcountry, and she could feel the nature of things begin to reshape, rearrange, and reorder themselves so that by the time he stopped the land had become a pelagic roll of greens and greys, browns, purples, black, and undulant earthen shades she found no name for in her head. Everything was the same in all directions. Yet everything was different everywhere she looked. She felt lost in its immensity, shrunken, diminished, pitiable almost and she found she could barely breathe. He led them halfway up a slope that looked out over the territory they’d just walked through. She could see the glint of the stream wending its way toward their camp, a shim of tinsel beyond the thick clasp of trees. He sat and the three of them eased down beside him.
“You paid attention coming through?” he asked.
“Yes,” Emmy said.
“So you know what’s out there.”
“Some. There’s more I likely missed.”
He nodded. “You can’t see everythin’. Every sense we got is limited somehow. It’s only when we use ’em together that we come to recognize things. Can you see right across the valley?”
“I can.”
He looked at Roth and Winnie and they nodded.
“Good. Take a good hard, deep look. Take your time. Sweep your gaze across it. Try’n know it with your eyes. When you feel like you have the whole thing recognized, close your eyes. Breathe. Long an’ deep an’ slow. Imagine there’s a point of light between your eyebrows. Focus on that. Push your attention toward it. When you feel like you’re there, in that space, start listenin’ to the sounds around you. Don’t force it. Stay in that small space and just listen.”
The three of them closed their eyes.
“When you figure you can hear everything around you push your hearing outward. Try’n listen farther out.”
Emmy closed her eyes. She felt him move into a more comfortable position beside her and she did the same. She heard him breathing, long, slow draughts, and she copied his rhythm. It took some effort but she found the small space on her forehead he’d described. She willed her concentration to that spot. She breathed deeper. Then she began to listen.
She heard the breeze rustle the leaves of the aspe
ns and poplars. She heard it nudge its way through the grass and ferns. She felt herself pushing harder through that spot on her forehead and she heard bees and the tiny claws of chipmunks on bark and a stone loosened by the passing of some other larger creature roll briskly downhill and stop abruptly against another. The knock of it audible as a finger snap in an empty room. She heard birds hopping from branch to branch. She heard all of that. Then she willed her hearing outward beyond the downed log twenty feet in front of her. Then forward, deeper into the trees. There were even more sounds and she nudged him with her elbow.
“Okay,” she said.
“How did it feel?”
“It felt like the inside of my head got bigger.”
“It did. It got bigger because you let yourself hear deeper. We think we hear what’s going on around us but we’re only hearing a little of it. When you push out your listenin’ you start to really hear things.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You don’t have to do nothin’ to listen. Sounds gets to us anyhow. You can listen to someone while you’re doing dishes, say. Or you can listen to the radio while you’re doin’ a chore. But when you push your listenin’ out, you can hear everything. I kinda figure it’s on accounta ya open yerself up to it all.”
“What happens then?”
He smiled. “You get connected to what you hear. You become a part of it. It becomes a part of you.”
“Is that why you say you’re never lonesome out here?”
“Ya can’t be when yer a parta somethin’.”
“We get to be a part of all this?” Winnie asked.
“When ya really learn to listen. When you can push your listenin’ out and really hear where ya are, yeah,” Starlight said.
“Then let’s push out some more.”
They all closed their eyes. Emmy breathed. She found her calmness. She focused on that tiny point of light and pushed her hearing out through it. She pushed it beyond the downed log and through the trees. She heard animal movement, birdsong, the creak of trees, the gleeful babble of water from a spring coursing over rocks and the sibilant whisper of the breeze over everything. She pushed her hearing out over the tops of the trees and over the wide expanse of the valley. She breathed deeper and slower. Her focus on that point on her forehead grew stronger and in her mind’s eye she saw the expanse of land she’d looked across. She heard it. From the low bawl of a moose to the grunt of a bear busy clawing at a rotted log to the piercing call of a red-tailed hawk circling far away and downward where the wind claimed its susurrant channel through the deep cut of the valley. She heard all of that. Then lower sounds like running water, a creature digging in sand and gravel, and the distant drone of an airplane to the south and west of them. The more she let herself become open to sound the clearer her vision of the valley became. In its wholeness it was immense. She could feel it fill her and she pushed harder, willing herself to hear even more of it. Her breathing deepened and lengthened and she fell into a calm place where nothing existed but the kinetic life of that valley in her ears and chest, and she spread her arms wide as though to embrace it and there was the blue of the sky in her and the poke and jut of tree and rock and the checkerboard play of light and shadow everywhere at once, and she could only sigh and the only word she found was “Yes.”
* * *
—
Listening drew her to the land alone. She took to leaving a small rucksack that carried cord, matches, a blanket, a plastic bag of tinder, a jar of water, and a ration of seeds and nuts close to the fire. Sometimes, when Winnie was at school, Emmy would loop a knife through her belt and gather the pack and walk away. He never said a word to her. Using the skills he’d taught her she would just walk. She would stop now and then and listen. She practised sending her hearing out until she could do it automatically and hear the things going on around her. It began to take her less time to find that calm centre. Soon it became a matter of closing her eyes and sinking into it. Then it became a chosen act of awareness and she could send it out with her eyes wide open and hear the land fully. She heard bears and walked around them. She heard rabbits and foxes and small game. She heard the tentative caution of deer rustling branches in their furtive passing. In those moments she felt keenly alive and the land seemed to sing to her. Each movement and motion she discerned was like a separate note in a grand composition and all she wanted was to feel swept up in its grandeur. She’d never known this symphony existed before and she drank it in like an elixir. Coupled with its visions and smells, the land was intoxicating in its richness, and she could spend long hours alone with it before returning to the farm and sitting wordlessly on the porch while Roth and Winnie watched television and Starlight sat with her in a stillness that allowed the lowing of cattle, the call of night birds, and the slip of the wind along the eaves to pass through them.
“This is what it’s about, isn’t it?” she asked one night. “This feeling. This sense of being connected to all of it?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“But it wasn’t about the land, was it? You were teaching me to listen to myself.”
“I was.”
He seemed to move in his stillness. There was a shimmer to him. She let her gaze drift upward and in the cast of stars against the deep push of space she saw the same otherworldly coruscation, a glimmer beyond all light. He was facing her when she looked back at him. There was a hard obsidian glint to his eyes and the fading purple light threw shadows on his face so that his whole countenance seemed like the face of an old shaman, and she caught her breath.
“I never listened to myself before,” she said.
“I know. Few do.”
“That’s the real wilderness then, isn’t it?”
“I reckon it is.”
“Can you find your way through that?”
“Me? I guess.”
“And me?”
He kept his gaze on the stars. “I don’t know. I got no head for how women are.”
“Because you never knew your mother?”
“Yeah, that’s a big part, yeah. Grandmother neither. Girlfriends too.”
“You never had a girlfriend?”
“Never seemed right for me. I was always busy. I never learned to talk to girls. Grew up in a male way mostly.”
“So you never…”
He looked at her and she could see the discomfort slide over him. Then he shrugged and stood and walked away across the yard toward the distant line of trees.
THEY STRODE ACROSS A MEADOW and when they hit the thicker trees at the edge of it, he dropped into the stalking walk and she followed suit. He moved quickly. She fought with her balance at the forced gait but by the time they crested a small ridge she had the tempo. He led her down the slope and they walked to the edge of a glade that was sheltered by mountains on all sides. There was a small stream and the flat of it was thick with aspen, birch, and willow saplings. He dropped into a crouch behind a fallen pine and peered over the top of it. She moved in beside him and they sat without speaking and watched the sun splay shadows across the tufts of grass and juniper and clutches of wild raspberry. Nothing moved. She breathed as he had taught her and closed her eyes to find the calm within her and when she opened her eyes he was staring at her. He crooked his head toward the far end of the glade. At first she saw nothing but shadow and then a small movement that became a doe stepping gingerly into the lush grasses. The deer raised her head and sniffed at the breeze, and she could see the wet of her nose in the slant of the sun. They were fifty yards away from her. He shifted and sat with his back against the log. She turned and dropped down beside him.
“Touch the deer,” he said in a whisper.
“Are you kidding?”
“She’s come to graze. Use the trees, the brush. Stalk her.”
“She’ll bolt.”
“Not if you do it right. Be patient. Feel your way to her.”
He pointed downwind and she rose to a crouch and moved away from the fallen pine.
She kept the deer at her right and skirted through the trees in a wide circle until she had moved behind her and could see the flank of her in the grass. She felt her heart drumming in her chest. There was a wide birch beside her and she slipped into the shadow side of it and leaned against it and tried to calm herself. When her breathing slowed she closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth and felt the arch of the birch at her back and its minute sway in the breeze. She focused on that. The push of the trunk against her back was measured and she found the rhythm of it, and made her breathing slower and deeper until it matched the motion of the tree. She could envision the tree as a whole thing, sense the thinner limbs and branches and the tremor of them, and on up to the poke of the tip in the air, the bend of it more pronounced, and the waft of the breeze against its white and reddish bark. The feel of the tree against her began to disappear. When it did she stepped out into the clear and began to walk toward the doe.
Her breathing grew so shallow she felt as if she were absorbing air through her skin. She put her arms out wide to her side and splayed the fingers of her hands and focused on the deer that stood with its head bent down to the grass, oblivious. There was the rustle of leaves in the breeze. A bird twittered. A mouse twitched about in the dry grass. A garter snake poked its head out from under a flat rock and then wound itself over the lip of it and lay there in the heat of the sun. She stepped past the snake and it didn’t move. She could feel the texture of the land against the bottoms of her feet and she rolled each step inward like he’d taught her and allowed the sensations that came to guide the placement of each step. She did not need to look down. Instead, she kept her arms out wide and stepped slowly toward the deer. The distance shrank. The closer she got the more excited she began to feel, and she had to stop and hold her position and calm herself, and breathe and focus on the feel of the land and pull the quiet deep into her and then step again, furtively, gingerly. The doe stepped deeper into the glade, stopping to nibble at willow leaves, and she stepped when it stepped, the stalking so deliberate she felt as though she were levitating above the ground, her outstretched arms like wings.
Starlight Page 15