East of the Mountains

by David Guterson

Ben rode the bus to Cashmere, where he stepped off thinking to hitchhike west in order to save on bus fare. He stood by the road with his whole life in front of him. He stood with his thumb out and his duffel bag beside him while a few dry flakes of snow descended from a strange, cloudless sky. A truck pulled over, and he rode to Peshastin, where at noon sheets of lightning crossed the orchards. He sat beneath an apple tree, waiting for the storm to pass, leaning against his duffel bag with the rain beating the leaves around him, his canvas coat pulled tightly against his neck, his hat low on his forehead. When the sun emerged, he went again to the road and took a ride with a farmer from Omak hauling hay to Gold Bar.

  He passed the night in a wood of fir trees close to the Skykomish River. It was dense, dark, and silent there, wet and uninviting. But in the early morning he rose from dreams to find the river pale and lovely, mist steaming off its waters, the fog thick on its distant bank, and he went down in the cold dawn light to wash his face at a riffle, where he saw a kingfisher flash by. Then he packed, went back to the road, and got a lift in a log truck bound for Monroe, with a driver who carefully looked him over, snapped his metal lunchbox open, and handed Ben a piece of chocolate cake his wife had baked the night before.

  At noon Ben made Seattle. He walked with his duffel bag over his shoulder until he found a diner on Occidental advertising specials in its window. He ate a plate of eggs and toast and drank a glass of milk. He sat with his plate pushed away from him and watched two men sitting low at the counter in hats and city overcoats, slouched over their stools. They drank their coffee and smoked in silence. The waitress stood tipped against the wall with a dishrag clutched between her fingers, hobnobbing with the short-order cook through the glare of the heat lamps in the pickup window. There was the low drone of her city voice, tired and cynical.

  After breakfast he walked until he came to the salt water. He set his bag by a creosoted piling crusted with mussels and barnacles and descended a pier-side ladder to dip his fingers in the sea. He tasted it while hanging from the tide-bleached rungs like a sailor from mainsail rigging. Then he rinsed his face in a baptism and looked out over the water to the west.

  Ben took a room in Pioneer Square, on the second floor of a flophouse. It was lonely and desolate in his paltry room with its dirt-encrusted window. All night through the lights burned glaringly along the street outside. In the morning, tired, he hiked to the bus station and bought a ticket to Fort Lewis. There was a chance for it while he waited for the bus, so for the first time in his life he used a pay phone, getting help from the operator, stuffing coins into the slot. He had to ask the bus clerk for change and try a second time. But when at last he had Rachel on the line, he told her simply that he loved her. It was easier to say it on the telephone. She told him that she felt the same. The time he had bought with his change ran out, and he hung up the receiver in the Seattle bus station and sat in the hall on his duffel bag, waiting with other travelers now, at the outset of a strange, new life.

  FIVE

  Tristan nudged insistently: a warm muzzle against Bens ear, a whining deep in the dogs throat. Ben stirred with the moon overhead—tremulous, improbably large, as though while he slept it had stolen closer to the earth—but with no desire to leave his dreams. The languid serenity of marijuana was preferable, its hallucinatory depths transporting him away from a present in which he was sprawled in the desert, afflicted by a terminal disease. Yet he found himself wakened against his will, and the pain of his cancer, put away for a few hours, became, once more, chief.

  Ben took stock. He was in the sagelands, alone but for his dogs, in the deepest hour of night. The cold had entered his long-suffering joints, and his bladder pressed for attention. He was as stiff in his back as if the vertebrae were fused, his left eye was swollen shut, and his fingers were numb and useless. More, his left knee seemed incapable of bending, and his arthritic ankle throbbed. Ben rose on one elbow, put his hand on Tristans head, and berated the dog for rousing him.

  Rex, he saw, was out at thirty yards, head high in the sageland. The dog pranced ahead another five yards, stopped to cast for scent and listen, then turned in Bens direction, gazed at him, and whined.

  Ben didn't know what to make of his dogs or of their present animation. He'd seen Rex and Tristan fidget in the presence of porcupines, moles, skunks, owls, voles, and rattlesnakes, but he could not surmise what bothered them now, out here in the placid desert. There were only the stars and that rich, prominent moon, its surface broken by shadows, pocked by enormous craters. And moonlight silver over everything.

  Propped on one elbow, immobilized by doubt, Ben watched his agitated dogs. He wanted to lie down again wrapped in his blanket and leave them to face, without his help, whatever was so disconcerting. Ben recollected hearing somewhere that coyotes sometimes worked in packs to lure dogs to untimely deaths, attacking viciously. For a moment he was certain there were coyotes about, and he peered nearsightedly into the desert as though to spot one against the sage. Then, thoroughly exasperated with himself for indulging his fear of shadows—of shapes that were nothing more than wraiths produced by a marijuana-addled mind—he drank from his water bottle. He hoped no effort would be required, that he might sleep again without interruption if his dogs would only settle down, stem their animal fear of the night. "Pipe down," he told them. "That's enough."

  Tristan whimpered louder in reply and came to nuzzle Ben's face again with greater urgency.

  Ben rose bitterly, then peed long and hard against the earth. It was satisfying to him here at the end of his days to pee with so much vigor. It was a ridiculous thing to be satisfied about, but still he was satisfied. His stream splashed against the ground. He stretched his back and revolved his head so that the bones in his neck cracked a little. He cleaned his glasses with his handkerchief, and when he slipped them on again, the moon appeared through his one good eye like highly polished marble. Everything it illuminated melted into shadows and was softly, darkly beautiful.

  Ben pressed the heel of his palm against his head and hawked spit into the desert. Out to the north, as he stood beside Tristan with his blanket wrapped around him, he heard what he thought was the baying of hounds, a restless din far off somewhere, a chorus of dogs just audible, and he cupped his strong ear to listen. They were hounds all right, Ben decided, and they seemed to be moving closer, coming in his direction, perhaps, though not yet visible in shape or motion, instead a wild singing in the night, a yapping, frantic tumult. "Heel," he called to Rex then. "You get in here now."

  He repeated himself more forcefully, until Rex, against his will, fell in beside Tristan, whimpering a little. The dog made several false starts to the north, turned in a circle, and whined. The baying of the hounds, though distant and faint across the hills, was audible now not just as a chorus but as a number of distinct hard-trailing hounds in the throes of heated pursuit. "Stay," said Ben. "Just stay there. We'll let them run right past us."

  He regretted, deeply, the marijuana. The world was a viscous dream. He felt inhabited by a listlessness ill-suited to what might be needed. His limbs, he knew, would resist what he asked. He was too numb with cold, too much in ruins, unprepared for a pack of hounds bounding in from nowhere. Ben hoped that nothing would come of them. He hoped they would pass, a night tableau, a spectacle, something merely to be witnessed. He hoped Rex and Tristan would keep out of their way. But his dogs, barking maniacally, bolted into the night.

  He called with threat and anger in his voice, but they ran off with a heedless certainty, beyond the sphere of his influence. He thought to call a second time, but they were moved, he saw, beyond his command, and in the next seconds he better understood them—for a shadow slid across the desert, a coyote, he saw, at a full-out run, and his dogs were giving chase.

  Ben caught only a fleeting glance: the dark coyote swift in flight, its tail low, its ears tucked back, hurtling along like a ghost in the sage, approximately the size and shape of his Brittanies but with a bottle-shaped tail and
longer muzzle. The shadow of motion passed before him and disappeared without warning, suddenly gone into a dip in the terrain, out of his line of sight. A spirit soundless across the desert, his dogs in clamorous pursuit of it, and Ben uncertain if what he had seen was real or a deception of the night.

  He dropped his blanket into the sand and took up his side-by-side. He pried two shells from their vest loops, broke the gun open, nudged them in, and snapped the action shut. The shotgun, like the world itself, seemed part of a dope-inspired dream, an object flooded by silver moonlight. It was his father's gun, also the gun he had put in his own mouth earlier that morning. For a moment he regretted every gun he'd ever held in his hands, but he shook off the urge to stand pondering this, rolled his blanket, folded his poncho, and lashed them together with the empty duffel to the bottom of his rucksack. Finally he wrestled his arms through the straps and set off in pursuit of his dogs.

  East of the breaks the land flattened out into gentle, unbroken prairie. There was moon and starlight enough to travel by as Ben twined between islands of sage, carrying his gun like the infantryman he'd been in Italy fifty-three years before. The baying grew closer, and his own dogs barked in the distance. He exhorted himself to overtake them, but the back of his left knee soon bound up, and he had to stop to knead it.

  He came on a pair of wheel ruts across the sage. Probably they'd been made by rolling stock trucks releasing and rounding up cattle, but they seemed to have no reason to be there, like most human sign in the desert. He followed them for their easy walking and because they tended in the right direction—his dogs were off to the southeast, he guessed, though he couldn't know with certainty. The ruts hairpinned and he followed them for a while, until they hairpinned again. He stopped in their bend to listen for his dogs, but the baying hounds were so close now, their cries mingled with his dogs' barking, and he found himself confused. He stood listening to no avail, and again he regretted the marijuana, its discombobulating effect.

  Ben stood as though waiting for the flush of birds, and watched the ridge line a quarter mile north, where the stars disappeared behind crenellated rock, for it seemed to him that from just out there the cry of hounds was gathering. A star plummeted down the length of the heavens, and then a roiling shadow broke over the hill, bursting forth in a duststorm of sorts, hounds pell-mell and hell-bent southward, a sinuous, frenetic pack of them barreling down the ridge. They were too far off for Ben to identify, but he took them to be a half dozen or more, and he guessed from their rolling, leaping gait—gracefully fast, like cheetahs or antelopes—that these were Irish wolfhounds, the coyote hunters of his youth.

  A potato farmer up the river road, a man named Dale Saunders, Jr., had run a pack of them when called upon by ranchers whose lambs or calves were disappearing. Saunders was known in the orchard country as a trapper, hunter, and prospector, and also a government bounty man, paid to poison coyotes and to gas coyote pups in their dens. His arsenal included spring-loaded cyanide canisters, leghold traps, and strychnine. Ben had heard Saunders holding forth on coyote killing at the county fair, where he sold his handmade coyote calls, home-welded coyote traps, and a device he called a coyote-getter, which when sprung delivered cyanide to a coyote's nose and mouth. Saunders demonstrated the range of his call, which he claimed mimicked the cry of a jackrabbit impaled on a barbed-wire fence. Any coyote deceived by such a call he dispatched point-blank with his ten-gauge; otherwise he picked them off with his .22-250 Remington, which, he added, was shot from a prone position, such was its immense precision. Still, he said, no method yet devised could match his Irish coursing hounds (which he displayed to fair-goers in a chicken-wire cage mounted on the back of his pickup truck) for pure sport and sheer drama. They were huge, confident, rangy dogs, and capable, Saunders claimed, of leaping twenty feet. Four times faster than a coyote, and also adept at treeing cougars and bringing bears to bay.

  It had been fifty years since Ben had seen Dale Saunders's Irish wolfhounds, but he remembered their vaguely terrifying size, their power and lithesome restlessness, and it seemed to him in the desert now, that these shadowy creatures spilling through the night—like wild horses under the moon—had just that sort of galloping height, that equine size and speed. They sprinted across the broken terrain without the slightest hindrance. They killed, Ben knew, for the pleasure of it. They were thought by some to be valorous dogs, desirable as guardians and companions, clever, trustworthy, gentle with children, well-disposed and tolerant, but Ben had no faith in their goodness and didn't count himself among their admirers. They were too much enamored of killing.

  They surged toward him—a pack of Irish wolfhounds—though at an angle to miss him narrowly, so that he had time to count their number and note their stride and size. Among the six he saw at least two as large as wild yearling colts, and the pack of dogs in their fury and noise reminded him of desert mustangs. In a panic he raised his side-by-side, his thumb against the safety tang, to kill the lead dog in its tracks should the pack turn full in his direction. He had no reason to believe it would, only an inchoate fear born of nothing distinct.

  Time seemed fragmented. The distance between moments was greater than usual, so that he saw the hounds at their close approach with a particular detail prominent—the bubbling slather and foam hanging from the jaws of the lead dog, glistening in the moonlight, strands of silvery mucus flying from its teeth and gums. Then all was a blur until the passing of the hounds resolved itself into a crystalline frieze: the last hounds high-speed gait broken down into two clear frames of suspension, of airy, springing levitation, the acrobatic feat of touching the ground with only one paw—impossible—at any given moment. Even as Ben made all this out, the hounds went by him as though he was nothing but an apparition in the desert. He lowered his gun and checked the safety.

  Then they were gone, fading to the south, their baying squalls still trailing them, and Ben, suspended briefly in their wake, stirred himself into action. He fell in behind and gave chase with as much zeal as he could muster.

  It was a matter of proceeding as if on a forced march. He couldn't hear beyond his own breathing, nor could he stop to let it subside, since speed, he felt, was essential, his dogs had innocently tossed themselves between these hounds and their quarry. Spurred on by thoughts of the worst that could be, he gave himself to a fretful haste that magnified his pains. He limped ahead as fast as he could, making his way by the light of the moon and squinting into the distance.

  It occurred to Ben that his feverish anxiety made no sense at all. What could it matter to him in the next world if he submitted to the will of this one instead of plunging on against it? Why exert himself painfully to alter the course of things? There was solid ground for apathy. He had no duty to recover his dogs. He was bound to leave them soon anyway. Let them wander where they would; when finished, they would find him again. And if they did not, so be it.

  But out of long habit, he pushed ahead. It was not so much his dogs as his conscience that would not allow him to give up. He did not want to be careless, or transgress against his obligations: he wanted to be himself, a doctor seeing to every detail, a man tuned to his duties in life, and he found that even in the shadow of death it was not easy to be otherwise. In this frame of mind, bent on clarity, he stumbled awkwardly in the sage. With only one good eye he had a false sense of distance and caught his boot against a wrinkle in the sand, then lurched to his knees so that his lower back twisted, causing him a sudden pain. He dropped his head against his chest and set the butt of his shotgun down to lean on its length. Ben rubbed his back for a long while, and then, absently, his side. His breathing subsided. Again he heard the cries of hounds. Struggling to his feet, he pressed on.

  In fifteen or maybe fifty minutes, he worked his way to the bottom of a draw choked with sumac and willows. The place was mad with the noise of hounds, their guttural fury and desperation, and as he thrashed through the thickets it seemed to him he was in their very midst. He could see no sign of t
hem, only hear, though the full moon poured over everything, illuminating close details. He felt certain the doomed coyote was here, having found a covert where trickery might triumph over speed. The hounds were trying to roust it out, rooting and tearing at the bramble to expose it lying low. Like any animal brought to bay, the coyote had nothing to lose by waiting. It would cling to the earth, deep in its covert, its smallness now its only salvation, while beyond the thorns its enemies thrashed to get it by the throat.

  Ben beat his way to the lip of the draw, stood above it in the open sage, then dropped wearily to one knee and called for Tristan and Rex, beseeching each by name. He wished he could catch a glimpse of them. His apprehension was greater now. They should have come at the sound of his voice. He had no trust in the wolfhounds, and the cries emanating from the thickets below were fraught with cruelty.

  A dark shape plunged from the sumac thicket not twenty yards from where he knelt, a soundless shadow low to the ground and almost formless in its haste, though Ben noted its bottle-shaped tail, canted left and deployed like a rudder, as the animal became aware of his presence and instantly changed course. He watched it twist off in a puff of dust and disappear into the sage. Behind it, three times as large, with arched loins and pointed muzzle, a wolfhound cleared the tangled draw with as much loud bucking as a lassoed horse, and charged after it. Then four more hounds emerged, and amid them he saw Rex.

  Ben stumbled to higher ground. Out in the sage the hounds held moonlight, their flanks shimmering as they ate up ground, their long tails curled. Rex, already, had fallen far behind, while the distance between the hounds and the coyote diminished with astonishing speed. The lead hound surged, the coyote veered in a twisting evasion, the hound found it smoothly. The coyote wheeled to face them all with its teeth bared, snarling.

  Two hounds leaped to hamstring the coyote; a third locked jaws between its shoulder blades, while the lead dog spun and drove in low to seize it by the throat. The coyote cartwheeled in a spray of dust but the hounds clung heedlessly to it, addressing its death from various angles, thrashing as though to rend the animal, pinning it to the dusty ground. Then Rex drove into the fray.