by Rick Bass
But she had extended herself too far, that day, and in the end she simply sat by the wood stove, shivering, and feeding it more wood. One of the propane lanterns in that corner of the cabin sputtered and coughed into darkness, leaving only one remaining lamp hissing over on the far side of the cabin; and though the silence was still lonelier, in the subdued lighting she took a short fragment of firewood from the wood box and got out her pocketknife and tried to begin carving a new toy ship.
She had not carved more than three minutes, however, before fatigue overtook her—not so much physical exhaustion or the brutishness of fear, but instead the cumulative fatigue of loneliness combining with all those other exhaustions —five percent chance of survival, the doctors had told her, five percent, five percent—and yet somehow, frugal and efficient to her core, she managed to rouse and walk the ten paces over to the other side of the cabin and turn off the lone remaining lamp.
She was chilled immediately, however, away from the stove, and so she pulled a quilt off her bed and went back over to the fire, stoked it up again, and, too tired to even change out of her damp clothes, curled up against the stove’s base, wrapped herself in the quilt, and fell asleep there on the floor, with no padding, no comfort, no thoughts, no anything, only falling; and with the pocketknife still open beside her, and the block of wood with less than a handful of shavings carved off beside it.
Despite the depth of her fatigue, she dreamed: as if the mind or spirit requires no energy, or, rather, feeds from some source other than the body, flowing almost continuously.
She dreamed of traveling her mountain again: of traversing it that night, at times following the same trail the children had made going home, and other times making her own. In the dream it was still snowing, and the snow was over her knees, as it was in the real life just outside her door; and there was something about the dream, some synchronized in-the-moment aspect to it, that made it seem extraordinarily vibrant and refreshing. It was almost as if her spirit was trying to heal or repair itself, even where her body could not or had not yet; almost as if so severe was the damage to one, the vessel of her, that the other current was also becoming abraded. And as if it would do whatever was necessary, for the healing.
She moved with strength and steadiness up the trail. It was not easy going, but the labor felt good. The snow was falling on her face, and though she was wearing a heavy coat and gloves and gaiters, her head was bare, and at times she would stop and shake the snow from her hair.
She ascended steadily. Even though she was only walking, time seemed to pass more quickly than it ever had—as if an hour were now only a second—and in no time she was back on the ledge that ran along the high cliff of the mountain’s west face.
Looking down through the slanting snow, and down through the snow-shrouded canopy of the dense forest so far below, she could see lights moving, a handful of lanterns scattered through the trees and along the river, some coming and others going.
The lights looked like the flares from torches, or drifting sparks from a campfire, or scattered wildfires seen on distant mountains at night in the autumn; but the slow carriage of them was distinctly that of humans, on foot.
At first Jyl thought the lantern carriers were searching for something; but, pausing to watch the course and pacing of their lights, she understood they were engaged in some sort of labor, and, as she stood there a while longer, with the snow piling up on her back and shoulders, the picture became even clearer for her, and she understood that it was the children, passing back and forth through the woods, carrying buckets of water for the family’s baths, the family’s cooking, and the family’s drinking.
The loaded-bucket travelers moved slowly, on their way back from the river to the cabin, the lights of which were not visible—perhaps extinguished for economy at that hour. The empty-bucket travelers, going from the cabin back down to the river, moved faster while passing through those same woods, and when one of the going-away lanterns passed one of the coming-up lanterns, there was no pause—each kept traveling in his or her own direction—and though Jyl had no real way of knowing, it seemed to her that in such weather and amid such weariness, and at so late an hour, no words were passed between the travelers.
Jyl remained standing, watching, as if turned to a statue. The snow kept piling up on and around her, and after a while—long hours, perhaps, though in the dream it seemed like only moments—the procession ceased; the water tanks had all been filled.
The lanterns assembled in one place on the front porch, and then one by one they blinked out, until only two were remaining.
These two did not blink out, but instead turned and moved back into the forest, again barely visible through the falling snow—disappearing, at times, beneath its burden, as if having been submerged before reappearing a little farther into the forest.
The river, though not visible, was identifiable as a wandering line between darkness and light, an imaginary border in the forest, at which all the lanterns had previously paused at the end of their bucket-filling marches.
Jyl watched as one of the lanterns went slightly farther than any of the others had—the traveler, either Shayna or Stephan, crossing snow-covered mossy stones to stay dry.
And it was a helpless feeling for Jyl, being up there on the mountain, on the cliff, knowing she had not sent out a vessel that day, or a message, a missive, no little painting or inscription.
She tried her best to call down to the searchers, but the words seemed lost even before she uttered them; as if all the world was snow and as if speech were a phenomenon that could not exist in this dream-world—and so she tried to will the children to turn around and give up, not to waste their time, though still they came on, moving slowly, one on either side of the river, stopping and starting, and searching: lifting up fallen logs, she supposed, and peering carefully into riffles and eddies, hoping and searching.
And in the dream, it was too sad to watch, and Jyl was eager to be moving again, eager to be on her mountain again, having had her strength and energy restored to her, even if only for the evening; and so reluctantly, the statue of her melted, turned from its frozen position, shedding that thick mantle of snow, and hurried on farther up the mountain to the top, pushing on through the knee-deep and then thigh-deep snow like a plow horse, on past the faint and lost-looking smatterings of light so far below, and on up to the mountaintop where she had been so many times before—a place she had previously taken for granted, but which she did not that evening, in the dream.
Instead, she lay spread-eagled on its top, face upturned to the whirling, sifting snow, and, in its embrace, she slept—just for a little while, just long enough to grow warm, and long enough to remember, and savor, what it had been like to be healthy.
And in the dream she did not have to descend, did not have to pass back by the searchers, but instead woke at daylight by her cold extinguished wood stove, her breath frosty in her cabin.
She poured a glass of water for breakfast. She ate two crackers, which was two more than she had the stomach for. She built the fire back up and sat beside it and resumed whittling, falling asleep sometimes with the knife still in her hand and her head leaning against the cabin wall, only to jerk awake again, having returned in her nap to the mountaintop, and with too much snow atop her now—having slept too long.
What story to tell them, in the little bottles? Was her own childhood of any importance to them, or was it better to help them create their own?
Should she tell them, for instance, that her father, a bush pilot, had invented a system for retrieving rock samples from the sides of mountains by using a dangling claw hook, like a backhoe’s digging bucket, which trailed below the plane like a kite tail and snatched at the side of the mountain, gouging and clawing at it, as he flew past—jarring the plane terribly, but managing to grab, in that manner, a bucketful of stone, in country that might otherwise have taken weeks to get to on foot?
Should she tell them that he helped pioneer a metho
dology of analyzing the tops of trees—isolating and identifying by chemical analysis the minerals present in the green needles and leaves—and from those assays he would fashion a map of the mineral content of the subsurface formations below, as if the spires of the trees were but extensions of those rocks, those minerals—still fixed in place, but born now into towering life?
He would fly over vast stretches of forest, lowering his claw-bucket sample-chopper, and would snatch up one treetop after another, reeling it up like a fishing line, flying the plane with one hand and running the crank with his other; and in this manner he covered thousands of square miles more effectively than entire squadrons of geologists could have done, achieving in a single field season that which might have taken less daring or driven geologists a lifetime to accomplish.
Should she tell them that many days she considered being—desired to be—a mother?
Or should she tell them fairy tales—stories of princes and princesses of extraordinary power and purity, beings unhindered by flaw or imperfection—durable, enduring, even immortal? Myths and tales toward which the children could move, as if sighting a lantern lit in the night, not too far ahead of them?
Still frightened of the past, she chose the latter. She kept her father’s stories within her illness-racked body, and even her own stories, and instead worked on a story about a prince and princess.
In the story, the ruler of the boy and girl’s country, a kind and wise king, is washed over a waterfall while trying to save a small girl in distress, a girl caught out in the rapids; though the child is saved, the great king is swept over the falls and broken into pieces below, with his parts carried downstream for miles.
Over the years, the great king’s parts—head, arms, legs, feet, hands, back, chest—wash up on shore from time to time and become hardened into stone, or driftwood; and walking along the river, the prince and princess occasionally come across his remnants, and gather them up to take back home.
Slowly, over the years, they collect enough pieces to begin reassembling the great king, and one day they come to understand or believe that if they can fully reassemble him he will come back to life, in all his previous goodness and fullness and glory and power.
But the boy and girl are growing up now, and soon it will be time for them to assume the responsibility of becoming the leaders of their country; and as they find more and more body parts of the old king—a finger, a foot, a nose, an ear—they are hesitant to finish putting him back together, hesitant to bring him back to life.
Still, they cannot stop searching. Each day they walk along the river, looking, and they search at night, too, with lanterns: for sometimes there are parts of the old king that emerge from the depths, from beneath the gravel and silt, under the pull of the moon.
Sometimes a muscled driftwood arm will float in the dark waters in the night, glinting beneath that moonlight, only to sink again at dawn; and the children, nearly grown now, continue searching, but cannot decide whether to complete their search or to finally turn away from it and travel on into the future, leaving the broken parts behind.
The tedium of her days, the tedium of her new life: for a long time it had been getting harder and harder for her to summon the strength to get in the truck and haul herself to town for the treatments. She thought she might be getting better, though, when the fatigue began to give way to boredom. It wasn’t a regular boredom, but was instead so overbearing as to masquerade at first as continued fatigue. Slowly, however, she came to realize the subtle difference—the subtle improvement. The cancer was gone, and her normal cells, with their normal mandates, were returning slowly, whirling and dancing and executing their ancient motions of electrolysis, glycogen transfer, oxygenation, and tissue repair—and even as the darkness of winter fell over the land, she could feel faintly the dynamics of light returning to the fragile, fire-bombed husk of her body.
She continued to carve her ships in the waiting room, where the doctors, nurses, and other patients were amazed by them. She sanded and polished their bows and hulls of willow and pinewood until they were smooth as eggs. She wrote each day’s sentence in a careful script of calligraphy, watercolored each illustration, and launched the ship each afternoon upon returning home from the treatment.
There was no way for her to visit the Workmans. They had no mail service, no phone. The ships were the only way in.
Upon returning home from her treatments she would nap, and then rouse herself at dusk and go out into the woods with her rifle. The deer were more active now, with the rut ongoing, and with the deepening snow forcing them to travel almost constantly, searching for food, using the trails they had cut through the snow, used over and over again, becoming almost pedestrian in their regularity—but still she was not seeing any.
Sometimes she would hear their feet crunching through the snow and ice, and she would even catch a glimpse of a dull silhouette of a deer as it was already turning away, having sighted or scented her just before she noticed it. She would see a glint of antler; and in the leap of adrenaline that rushed upward in her like fire at such a sight, she knew more than ever that she was getting better: but still, the deer would not let her have it.
Her father had been gone twenty years now. Her father had never known her diminished. Were she and he like two different mountains, she wondered, slightly different kinds of stone through which the same river of time ran, or were they like two braids or forks of a river separating—running across, and cutting down into, the same one mountain, the same one face and body of stone?
And what if we had it all backwards, she wondered. What if it is the mountain and the past that are living, while the river and the present are the unliving: merely a physical force, like wind, or electricity, but not really alive, not in the sense that blood or memory is alive?
It was nonsense, she knew. Of course rivers were alive. Of course mountains and stones were alive. And of course the world possessed an invisible topography of spirit, with ridges, valleys, glaciers, volcanoes, tides and creeks and bays and oceans of spirit, and with as many different carriers of spirit, in that invisible world, the world of the past, as there were carriers of life in the visible, physical world: elk, bison, man, woman, child, antelope, deer, bear, tree, bird…
Her father had collected fossils and gemstones—tourmaline, topaz, opal, jade, malachite, amethyst—and upon his death, she had carted all the various shoeboxes of minerals back to her home, where she kept them stored in the basement.
And, believing now that her stories and illustrations were no longer sufficient to summon the children, she began putting little gems and crystals in the ships, as if laying treasures before young kings and queens.
Whom should she serve—the future, or the past? How much time did she have left to serve? What value was any mineral, any fossil, compared to the spark of life? She felt guilty, releasing some of her father’s finer treasures, but each day she filled the boats higher and higher with glittering bounty.
It was nearly a week before Stephan and Shayna returned. They came on the weekend before Thanksgiving.
She was out hunting again, or if not actually hunting, sitting with her back propped against a spruce tree, beneath the protection of its branches, watching the snow, mesmerized by the snow, and waiting for a deer to perhaps walk past.
When she heard the children’s voices coming over the mountain, she did not understand at first that they were coming her way, coming to visit her, but thought instead she was dreaming again, and was traveling to go see them, to meet them in their little valley, and that as she drew closer she was now able to hear them more clearly. When she saw them appear from out of the woods, barely visible at first in the falling snow, her first thought was that they were wolves, or even bears. There was something about their movements that did not make her think of people.
Even as they crossed the creek, stepping carefully from stone to stone, trying to stay dry, they did not appear through that screen of falling snow to be fully human;
and when she saw they each carried in their arms burlap sacks filled with something, still they did not remind her of her own kind; and while the drift of their voices, more audible now, was the sound of children, their conversation did not seem to be connected to the figures she saw tiptoeing across the river.
She unchambered her rifle and rose to greet them—they were already knocking on her door, calling her name, and, not hearing a response, going into the cabin—and as she moved toward them through the snow and darkness, there seemed to be little difference between how she felt now and how she had felt in her earlier dream of ascending the mountain and looking down upon their wandering lights; though she was aware, tripping and stumbling, of a palpitation of her heart, and an overarching eagerness that had not been present in the dream.
She had been leaving one lantern burning low each night, in case they should come after dark—in the hopes that they would come, so that they, too, would be able to look down from the mountain through the falling snow and see her own light, visible in the storm, and home in on it, not so much as if lost but instead sighting the thing they had been searching for.
As she approached her cabin, she saw the lantern flare more brightly—illuminating the thousands of individual snowflakes floating past the windows—and she felt safe, and as if life had not yet even called out to her, as if her life had not yet even begun.
She saw them moving around inside the yellowing dome of light, talking to one another and looking up at the books on her shelves; and when she stomped the snow from her boots and went inside, still wet and snowy from her vigil beneath the spruce, she was warmed by the relief on the boy’s face, and by the joy on the girl’s.
“Did you see any deer?” Stephan asked, straightaway.
She shook her head, hugged them—they seemed glad to receive the hugs—and shook her head again. “I think they can smell my illness,” she said. “I can hear and sometimes see them coming closer, but at the last minute they turn away.”