by Rick Bass
Stephan sniffed the air. “I can’t smell it,” he said, “and usually I can smell anything.”
Jyl shrugged. “It’s there,” she said. “Even I can smell it.”
“What does it smell like?” Shayna asked.
“Metal,” Jyl said, pouring water into the cast-iron kettle and setting it on the stove, then opening the stove and stoking in some more kindling, which the dull coals accepted and ignited quickly. “I don’t know. Steel, platinum, copper, gold, silver. Some kind of cold metal,” she said. She waggled her jaws as if to rid herself of the taste of it.
“Is it on your breath?” Shayna asked. “Do you think we could try to smell it?”
Jyl covered her mouth and turned away. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to smell it.”
They were quiet for a while, after that. Finally Stephan said, “We really can’t smell anything like that. But if you think the deer can, maybe you should try and mask it. Maybe you should have a piece of peppermint or licorice before you go out next time. Maybe they’ll be curious and come a little closer. Maybe they’ll think it’s another animal.”
She had restocked her pantry, hoping that the children would come again. She’d bought far too much food, beyond her budget, and, not knowing what they liked and did not like, had guessed—some sugary cereals, a kind of frozen Popsicle treat, some TV dinners of mashed potatoes and cod, apples, oranges, bananas, some frozen salmon fillets, Canadian bacon, a frozen pizza, and a frozen strawberry cheesecake—and when she asked what they wanted for supper they told her they usually had rice and pineapple, and that was about all they liked. Rice and pineapple, and venison and elk.
She felt a despair, a failure that she had not known since the hardest days of her treatment. She was surprised by the tears that leapt to her eyes, and she turned to where they could not see them. When she had composed herself, she asked, “Would you eat a cheesecake?”
They nodded solemnly, as if it were a trick question, and Stephan said, “We’ll eat anything—it’s just that we only like rice and pineapple and elk and venison.” They were surprised, then, she could tell—almost spooked—when she burst into wild laughter.
She set about preparing some salmon, thawing it out in warm water. She cut the cheesecake into little wedges and served it to them first, and put a couple of the TV dinners in the stove as well, in the hopes they might find something to pick at. She needn’t have worried, for soon they were asking for more of the cheesecake, and she even had a piece, and then had to put the rest out on the porch, or they might have eaten it all.
“It’ll refreeze,” she said. “You can have the rest of it the next time you come.”
She put the salmon in the oven with the TV dinners, braised it with butter and garlic and lemon and orange, then sat by the stove and took the bolt from her rifle and began cleaning and oiling it while they sat at the table next to her and ate the cheesecake and drank hot chocolate. When she was done she put the rifle back together and hung it up in the snow room, and changed into dry clothes.
She could tell that although the children were still cold and weary, they were uncomfortable relaxing, and were anxious to be leaving. She sought to detain them with stories and knowledge. She walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down an old textbook, Ancient Sedimentary Environments, published in 1940. Dust motes rose from it as she opened its covers, and from across the room, still eating the cheesecake, both Stephan and Shayna sniffed the air, and Stephan said, “I can smell that.”
“It was my father’s. It’s got pictures,” Jyl said, bringing it over to the table. She thumbed through the pages, and her eyes blurred as she read for the first time some of the markings he had underlined in pencil a lifetime ago.
“The consensus of geological opinion is that there are a finite number of sedimentary facies that occur repeatedly in rocks of different ages all over the world. But no two similar sedimentary facies are ever identical, and gradational transitions are common.
“One of the main problems of determining the origin of ancient sediments is that, though essentially reflecting depositional environments, they also inherit features of earlier environment. The infilled sediment reflects the nature of the source rocks and the hydraulic of the current, while the rolled bones and wood and other fossiliferous inclusions are derived from non-depositional environments that lie for the most part beyond the stream’s usual reach. No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade, until they vanish from the face of the earth. And yet, even then, once reduced to windblown dust, they are reforming.”
The children had stopped eating, their forks in midair, and were listening, though Stephan was slowly raising his hand in what was unmistakably mild protest. Jyl could tell also that they were suspicious, as if they understood somehow that their fundamentalist faith might be challenged by such language. Still, she read on:
“A classic example of this fallacy can be found in a profile of the Bu Hasa Rudist boundstones, with fragments of large benthonic Orbitoline forams. The rudist boundstone passes south toward the Arabian shield into faccal pellet muds, with miliolid foraminifera. Locally, however, the basinward crest of the boundstone is replaced by a detrital grainstone.”
There was a look very close to despair on Stephan’s face—Shayna showed no such distress and was instead only staring at Jyl with utter wonder—but Jyl could see that Stephan wasn’t going to give up or back away. With his brows furrowed, he reached for a pencil and paper on the table and asked carefully, slowly, “What’s rudist?”
Jyl couldn’t hold back her laughter—it spilled from her again, clean and clear, with a feeling of release that she could not remember experiencing before, and she said, “I don’t know.”
Stephan took the book from her and looked through it, at the many such passages underlined in long-ago pencil. “But he knew all this stuff, right?” he asked. “Your father knew all this?”
Jyl nodded, her eyes stinging with pride.
“I’d like to read this book,” Stephan said. “I know it means a lot to you, and I wouldn’t ask to take it with me—I wouldn’t want to get it banged up—but I’d like to read it, and make notes from it, while I’m over here.”
Jyl smiled. “All right. But let’s start over. Let’s start at the beginning.” She took down a roll of butcher paper, spread it across the table, and began with the basics, explaining the different ways rocks can be formed from the ash and guts of the earth: the igneous rocks arising straight from the cooling subterranean fire; the sedimentary rocks the cumulative residue of dust and grit and silt being deposited with the earnestness of a mason, the sediments not settling by fiery will, but obedient instead only to the inescapable mandates of gravity; and the metamorphic rocks, her favorites: stones so substantially altered from their original form by the world’s and time’s pressures, smoothed now into graceful curves and folded into fantastic swirls and reversals, so that the geologist examining them could sometimes not tell at first in which direction the past ran and in which, the future.
As she talked, she illustrated her lecture with watercolors, sketching mountains and oceans, rivers and storms, showing how the simple forces of weather—morning sunrise, wind, frost, snow and rain—in conjunction with the earth’s own subtle movements, its faint stretches and belches and yawns, conspire across the arc of time to wear even the largest and most jagged mountains down to desert plains. She showed them how even the oceans fall back to reveal their gleaming, glittering mud, which is then lifted miles into the sky, creeping upward a thousandth of an inch per year, but leaping nonetheless, and carrying in that hardened crypt many of the fossils that had once lived far beneath the sea, and which would now be spending eons so much closer to the sun, suspended atop mountains, exposed to wind and rain and snow, the hoofs of mountain goats, and the curious eyes of man, with all the glittering green world shining below.
With her sketches, she detailed the creation of alluvial fans, tectonic plates, unconformities. The world-bene
ath-the-world, the stone world on which rested the living world, was born for the children that night, and they began to understand that it, too, was living, though at a different pace, and that although such knowledge might trouble their parents’ beliefs, they were riding on the earth’s back, and beneath the stone world there was even another, third world, on the back of which the stone world rode, and that that third and even lower world was the river and current of time.
Jyl had started painting the cross sections of geological time for them, starting at the surface and intending to work all the way down, through the dinosauric creations and into the world-flooded Devonian and Silurian, into the stone-cold Cambrian, and then farther, into the colder, utterly lifeless time of Precambrian; but Shayna reminded her of the salmon and the TV dinners in the oven, and Jyl looked up in surprise, having been so immersed in the teaching, and so unaccustomed to cooking, that she only vaguely remembered having put the food in the oven. Setting her paintbrush down and hurrying over to the stove, she found that the salmon was perfect, though the TV dinners were a little crispy.
They suspended their geology lesson for the evening and sat around the fireplace and ate their dinners. Jyl told them about her time in Alaska, and about a pilot she had known there, a young man who had flown her around in a floatplane to much of the same backcountry where her father had worked—visiting the same lakes and walking along the same beaches, looking at the same mountains. It was this same pilot who had sent her the salmon they were eating, and she told them that when she got better she had it in her mind to go back up there and visit him.
“Will you marry him?” Shayna asked. A fairy tale.
Jyl laughed. “No,” she said, “he’s just a friend. Just a bush pilot. But I like his company.”
“We were in Alaska,” Stephan said. “Just before she was born.”
“Where?” Jyl said. “Doing what?”
“Missionary stuff. We were in Seward, but Pa would fly in to the villages a lot. I’m pretty sure it was missionary stuff.”
“How long were you there?”
Stephan shrugged. “Just a couple of years. Mama didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. It was beautiful, but nobody liked it.”
They were all quiet for a while, before Shayna finally said, quietly—as if in Jyl’s defense, or defense of Jyl’s father—“I would have liked it.”
Jyl smiled. “So y’all like it here?”
Stephan shrugged. “I think so,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a little hard—the work—but I think so.”
“I do,” said Shayna. “I love it.”
It was past nine o’clock—the latest Jyl had stayed up since before the illness. She took down some old elk hides from her closet and prepared twin pallets for the children next to the wood stove, and then, feeling her weariness returning like the break of a towering wave, she barely had time and energy to clean the dishes before collapsing into her own bed. She was asleep even before the children were, even as the children were still visiting with her, talking between themselves and asking her occasional questions; and when they realized she was asleep, Stephan got up and wrote his questions down on the butcher paper with its illustrations so that he would not forget them. Questions about different minerals, and different kinds of salmon; about the floatplane, and about her father.
Then he turned out the lantern, and he and Shayna, though restless in the new surroundings, tried to get to sleep as quickly as possible, knowing that they would need to conserve their strength for the trip home and the coming day. The unfamiliar stove burned its wood differently, made different sounds, and through the glass plate in its door they could see the sparks and embers swirling and glowing, and they stared at it as if viewing the maw of a tiny volcano.
The children slept until two, when they awakened to a fire that was nearly out—Stephan built it back up—and they dressed and went out into the night to fell another tree for Jyl before leaving.
The storm had passed, leaving a crystalline glaze over the world as the temperatures fell, and the snowflakes, quick-frozen now, tinkled like glass scales as they passed through them. Their breath rose in jets of fog when they spoke, and when they came to the next dead pine, Stephan started the saw, felled the tree and bucked it as fast as possible, not wanting to awaken Jyl, and then shut the saw off, and let the huge silence of the stars sweep back in over them.
Because the snow was deep, it took them more than an hour to split and carry that wood to the porch, stacking it with as little sound as possible; and by the time they had the saw and maul and gas and oil cans stored, and the bark and snow swept from the porch, they were later getting away than they had intended, so that they had to run, galloping through the snow like draft horses, and steaming from their effort.
They made it back to their cabin—exhausted—and set about their labors in preparation for the day.
Jyl dreamed again she was running, though with difficulty this time rather than the effortless glide of the previous dream. And there was a pain in her gut as her glycogen-depleted organs cramped and sought to metabolize her muscle and bone—metabolizing anything for just a bit more available energy, in order to keep going, to keep struggling up the hill.
It was a sensation she recognized from her earlier days of strength, when she had been able to run without ceasing; and in the dream, though it was painful, she welcomed it, glad as she was to be back on the mountain.
Finally, though, the pain awakened her, and she sat up, trying to be as quiet as possible to avoid waking the children. When she went to get a glass of water, she saw they were gone; lighting a lantern to see if they had left a note, she found none, though she did see the questions Stephan had written down on the butcher paper in the middle of the night. And the sense of loss she knew was sharper than any stitch in her side, far deeper than any absence of glycogen.
Unable to get back to sleep, she built the fire up again and fixed a cup of tea, and set about answering their questions, writing the answers in the tiniest of script so she could scroll them up into some of the larger message bottles and place them in one of the larger crafts, to set sail later that afternoon.
Her answers would be a departure, a break, from the saga of the broken king, but one she welcomed; and as she worked on her notes—feeling as she had in college, laboring over an exam in which the correct answers were of utmost importance—she had the feeling also of being lured up from out of the depths and the darkness, and out into the bright light of some open and verdant spring meadow: as if she, and not her father, was the broken king, but that she was daring now, or at least desiring, to be reassembled.
It was almost dawn when she finished her answers. Though she knew she should go back to sleep, she was surprisingly restless, and the idea of going out to hunt a deer came to her so strongly it was like a summons. She rose and began putting on more sweaters and her big coat. She took her rifle down from its rack and loaded it, and went out into the darkness, past the scent of all the newly stacked firewood; and then, following the children’s tracks, she went into the woods, to the new stump.
It was almost daylight. The tops of her ears were cold, and she snuggled in tight against another big spruce, hid herself close among its lower branches, digging a little snow hollow in which to sit, and waited.
When it was light enough to see the shapes of things, the outlines of the trees coming into focus, she squinted and listened even more intently.
From across the river there came a crashing of sticks and branches so close and severe she did not believe the sound could be made by any animal as graceful and stealthy as a deer but instead that it was Stephan and Shayna—that they were still in the forest, searching for more firewood—and she was tempted to call out to them.
She remained silent, however, and the crashing came once more, followed by a silence, and then a splashing.
She leaned forward, trying to see through the gray and barely penetrable light; and, as if sensing the acuity of her attention, the deer stopped mi
dstream, just beyond her sight, and waited, weighing the danger, a hunger the deer could feel thick and living.
And as he stood there, water riffling around his ankles (Jyl could hear the different sound in it, the variance in splashing river rhythm as it braided around and past his four planted legs), the gray light grew more diffuse, and she was able finally to see the shape of him: his bulk and the rack of his antlers so startling it seemed he must be carrying in the nest of them a tangled mass of branches from farther back in the forest.
Before the excitement hit her, and the trembling, she had the thought, for half a second, that he, too, like the children, was bringing her firewood; that he was delivering it to her in his antlers.
As the light grew stronger and more detail was revealed, she saw that the cluster of his antlers was all his, all hardened bone. He stood there as motionless as a garden statue. Only his eyes showed life, and though it seemed he was looking straight at her, had spied her hiding back in the branches, he finally moved again, emerging from whatever stony reverie he’d been in, and began walking toward her.
He reached her side of the river and stepped out, dripping.
He paused again, as if he had forgotten where he was. He seemed to enter another reverie, and as she watched him at this closer range she could see the scars around his face from ancient battles, could see the clouds of breath coming from his nostrils, the old buck breathing hard from even so mild an exertion as the river crossing.
He appeared to be in some slightly other universe, some different level or plane, suffused with grace and confidence even in his senescence. She imagined she could see doubt or anxiety entering the buck’s gaze, his suspicion that something was wrong—and for a moment Jyl was overwhelmed with a feeling of unworthiness at being so close to such a wild creature, much less to be on the verge of taking his life.