The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Cecil ran for some poplars by the pond, though they were not substantial enough to climb. He had no other place to run, and had been so close to the goat he’d heard the bear’s teeth in its back. He heard the female start after him again and noticed the shepherd dog still braced to die for him at the old spot—knew therefore that the dog would be spared. Though he was running for his life, he could barely subdue the impulse, formed when he was a child being chased by older kids, of falling to the ground, rolling into a ball, and surrendering, to be let off with a few slaps. The dogs couldn’t save him, at best could give him a few extra instants of life, but as she closed the gap, he glimpsed Coffee and Smoky darting with the utmost agility from either side to bite her thighs—noticed, too, with preternatural clarity, Smoky’s lips beginning to twitch and drool as if a fit was overtaking him. Cecil had dropped his rifle once and for all in wriggling through a brushy tangle, and found that he was unexpectedly next to the male, which was already chewing at the goat like a lion on a hunk of meat and rose bristling and roaring. Shedding his hat and jacket for the grizzlies to examine, Cecil turned into the water, hearing Smoky grunt as if more than just his breath had been smashed out of him. He was splashing knee high in the pond when he remembered a cruel series of rotogravures in the Pittsfield Register of a grizzly wading after salmon and biting them in two. Either of the bears could chase him like a groundhog on the land and like a fish in the water.

  He had nowhere to swim except away, and could see the dogs arrayed about the meadow in positions of collapse or stupefaction. Smoky was writhing in a fit while the she-bear rocked over him, waiting until she understood what ailed him before she finished him off. That gave Cecil another delay. He was belt deep by the time she came after him. Spotting the big beaver house, he resurrected from his trapping days the memory of the nesting chamber that would be above the water level inside, if he could somehow reach that. He floundered forward into the deepest water he could find and ducked under, pulling himself down by grabbing lily and bullrush stems. Making up for his clumsiness with the gun, which had nearly cost him his life, he swam and crawled along the bottom among a welter of branches the beavers had stored for food, grasping them to keep below the surface except when he had to gulp a breath. He could hear the dogs barking from the shoreline and the bear searching for him, thrashing across the pond with what sounded like explosive noises underwater, snuffing and sneezing as she tried to nose him out.

  He knew beavers and beaver houses from Maine, and pawed through the murk from snag to snag, past cached piles of succulents, to locate the main igloo of sticks without revealing himself. It was conical and four to five times the length of his body across its base. After he had groped for much of the way around the structure, he felt the lip of the underwater porch and finally the precious gap that was the entrance hole. A beaver swam out past him hastily like an underwater muff brushing against his arm when he began wriggling inside. He punched and ripped his way up through the claustrophobic L-bend of the passage, terrified that he would become jammed and drown before he reached the air. Would there be air? Or would he feel the grizzly grip his legs and be wedged inside that stick tomb with only his head safe in the nesting chamber while she gnawed on the rest of him? One of his arms did get pinned at his side, but he kicked and pulled himself up to where he could finally breathe, his free hand seizing the grown-up flabbergasted beaver that was cornered there, while he wrenched his other hand loose to strangle it, although he suffered a serious and bloody bite. Feeling badly scraped along his hips, he lay exhausted with just his head and chest in the chamber for a considerable while before he thought to congratulate himself.

  It was too low for him to sit up, but by jackknifing his knees he could lie wholly dry inside. The flooring was of shredded wood and moss and grass, lighted faintly from the area of the smoke hole, where in the winter the beavers’ body heat would show outside as steam. Though he was shivering and rubbing the wounds in his hand, he found the supply of air sufficient. He moved the four whining kits from where they had huddled to the edge of the exit, and sure enough, the live parent’s wet and chattering head appeared after an interval and removed each, and also the dead beaver afterwards.

  He was lucky. Well, you poor sap, you’re all right for now, he told himself, fingering the ceiling a foot or two above. His impulse was to push, push and try to make more room, but he resisted doing that lest he turn frantic, resisted thinking about the fearfully narrow passageway from which he would have to swim out of this cell—he wouldn’t have been strong enough to break through the roof, even if the grizzlies hadn’t been waiting for him.

  Exploring the weave of sticks, his fingers found a blunt-headed arrow of the type that Indians shot at ducks. The beavers must have pulled it from the bottom and treated it like any other useful piece of wood. He was so awed and so scared and wrung out that he soon fell asleep, waking horribly as the house shook. Something had stepped on it; and he heard a snuffle. Were his dogs looking for him? The whole intricate basket-weave of the edifice shook like a bird’s nest in the wind but resiliently absorbed the weight of whatever was walking on it. Figuring out whether the beasty voice he heard was bearish or only doggish ought to have been a simple matter, but he was not in good shape to decide. The creature felt like an elephant, the way his mind was running, and yet the lodge was springy under its tread as though ready to give and give if necessary but never be clawed open. Ultimately the animal did depart. He heard marsh birds flying over, which he thought a peaceful omen. Later two small birds hopped about picking at seeds or bugs over his head, perhaps a pair of wrens: tsuk-tsuk.

  Still jackknifed in this inner sanctum, he calmed down enough to nap some more, and fitfully imagined what was happening outside—the forlorn, bewildered dogs waiting about, the purplish, pussy-bodied grizzly wading after him, venting her spleen on bushes and trees in the meantime, before she climbed with her mate out of the canyon on the game trail to higher country. His mind drifted high and wide above the little creek and the Ompompanoosuc’s main valley, wondering if he had ever had three better friends than Sutton and the others. Yet he could have died so painfully and quickly. And once he’d shot his mamma bear and trained and harnessed her cubs and built his raft to float with them to the coast, he’d never see his friends again, except perhaps for Sutton, who on the other hand might never go back East. Margaret would latch on somewhere with another white trader or trapper, not with Sutton permanently, he thought—at least his jealousy made him hope not. Charley would die snugly of heart failure while hilling potatoes on his homestead. And he would return with many stories for his children, with maybe a Thloadenni wife, and a sensational bear act, for which he’d sport a green frock coat and red silk hat and wow the crowds. But the gypsy in Sutton was more powerful than the gypsy in Cecil, and Sutton’s grin as he stared at the mountains they were entering wasn’t that of a settler like Charley; it was a traveler’s pleasure at moving along, whether he ever found any gold or not. Cecil would wind up in Massachusetts, but Sutton might end up in China.

  A sow bear bred once every couple of years, and once every couple of years she wanted her privacy, thought Cecil, managing a smile at what had happened. With the return of his common sense came claustrophobia, however. He dreaded reentering the passage and becoming wedged underwater. He remembered his father’s death of cancer, scrunched up in the maple-sugar tub on the wood stove. Sucking his beaver bites, fighting his panic, he debated for a long time whether to go out head first or feet first—which would be the worst way to drown? Or if he panicked lying here, he would never get out; could rave till doomsday in this tomb, securely enchambered by the same basketry that had stymied the bear.

  He lowered his legs into the tunnel, kicking carefully to learn how far he could maneuver like that and keep his head out of the water. A bend or bottleneck stopped him, and he hoisted himself laboriously up again and turned around, under the two-foot ceiling, remembering a stillbirth he had witnessed when the child—a
nephew, his sister’s son—had died in the birth canal. Putting his head and shoulders into the icy water, he thrust his body halfway down head first, but was unable to reach the sticking point and quite quickly pulled back for breath. He was so much bigger than a beaver. But the more he hesitated, the grimmer the outlook for him seemed, so without thinking any further he committed himself, remembering that the tunnel was only ten or twelve feet long and if he went into it deep enough he’d soon be out.

  The worst moment of his life occurred after he had pushed past where his legs, crooked at the knee at the top of the passage, might still have extricated him backwards. He was completely underwater and inside, his legs immobilized, his arms struggling, but was stalled belly down at the L angle that led outward, whereas he should have been positioned belly up in order to bend and maneuver. He had to rotate himself in the corridor, inching slowly, unhooking his clothing as it caught on spiky sticks, with no chance at a breath of air if he failed. Then his right calf cramped on the last stretch when he thought he’d already twisted free. He wriggled his whole body, desperate as a hooked fish.

  Once he was breathing again, his head well out of the water, underneath an azure sky, the pond without a ripple in it, and no bears rampaging on the bank, he was sure he’d live to be ninety—he would make sure that he did. He heard a dog yelp, and another one, from where they had been waiting for his body to float up. His legs and back cramped as severely as if they would stay cramped for at least a week, the way they had one time when he had fallen into the Androscoggin River during a log drive and nearly drowned. As then, he scrabbled sideways like a crab to shore.

  Poor Smoky wasn’t dead, but his spine was broken. Nevertheless, he dragged his hind end towards Cecil, his foreparts moving as stiff as crutches, apparently in full faith that some magic touch would be able to heal him. Cecil, after retrieving his rifle, simply sank down next to the dog under a tree that he could climb if the grizzlies returned. He cleaned the gun and stroked Smoky, while preventing the others from bumping against him as they competed apologetically for recognition, and watched the hope die in his eyes.

  Moose’s left hind leg would need to be dressed and splinted. And Sally, who he hadn’t known was pregnant, was lying in a daze with a bloody litter of puppy fetuses that she had miscarried strewn around her tail. Cecil himself was dizzy and sick, and vomited. In much pain from his back, he lost his temper when White Eye started licking the stuff up, but quit shouting at him when Smoky woke up whimpering from his slide into a coma and flinched. He had to shoot him, finally, as the rest of them slunk about and crouched. Glancing at Smoky’s body afterwards, he saw that the colors of his coat were not really as much like smoke as like the marvelous salt-and-peppering of intersecting light and shadow that disguised a wolf or coyote in the brush. A beautiful dog; and of course it hadn’t been the coloring of his fur or even his epilepsy that had betrayed him to the grizzly but Cecil’s foolishness. He hated leaving him unburied for the bears to come back to.

  “No goat and no Smoke, huh? Yes, we figured we might have to slit open somebody’s gut to find ya!” said Charley, when Cecil and his sorry canines straggled into camp after nightfall.

  Margaret hugged him. Moose was injured the worst, and Sally was bleary, but Sutton pointed out that the old shepherd’s face appeared to have whitened clear back to his ears and throat. “He got two years older all of a sudden.”

  Shivering, coughing, Cecil lurched around to find a bearable attitude in which to prop his bones while telling his story of hiding in the beaver house. His hearing was sharper than usual, and when he listened to the horses munching grass, it didn’t sound peaceful; it was a violent sort of crunching, like the noise a bear would have produced if it were munching on him. When he wasn’t giddy with the tale he had to tell, he fell silent and glum, though he ate hungrily.

  “You figured you were safe, huh? A skunk bear could have dug you out—that’s how they eat all winter, tearing beaver lodges up. So if a skunk bear could have got to you, what makes you think a grizzly couldn’t have?” said Charley.

  A “skunk bear” was a wolverine, a beast Cecil hadn’t yet encountered. He wondered whether or not the skunk bear’s proficiency meant he might at last have extricated himself from inside if his life had depended upon it.

  Charley, who softened in response to his silence, remarked a bit sympathetically that when he recalled anything he wished he hadn’t done, “It ain’t what you did to a person—because there was always reasons there. Maybe the reason wasn’t good enough, maybe I’d do it differently now, but there was some good reason. No, it’s generally what you did to a dog. Do you know?”

  He was obviously reluctant to go ahead and tell them what may have troubled him. “How about you?” he asked Sutton, who laughed.

  “Oh, I guess I’ve done some dirtier things to people in my time than to doggies. I guess if you rub shoulders with thousands of people you’ve got more opportunity to do somebody in, and most of us are different when we’re young—that’s when you bash somebody.”

  Charley said his friend Ben with the hot springs, who had been murdered, had come up here from Nevada along the coast on the freight boat, starting from San Francisco, and had walked in on the Hainaino River trail, like him. He was a prospector; he didn’t mind a two-month walk, looking at all those pretty creeks and meeting Haidas, Tsimshians, Hainainos, Tlickitats and what all else. In Nevada he’d had a wonderful big dog that had been with him everywhere and understood English and Spanish and Injun or whatever was on the menu and still had a lot of life in him. He loved that dog, but all he’d heard about was how cold it was going to be up in British America.

  “He was making preparations, fussing like you do when you’re planning the best trip of your life, worrying about things you don’t need to worry about. He got so concerned about this dog not being a ‘winter dog’ or a ‘snow dog’ because its fur only went as deep as his first knuckle that he had a man take him out and shoot him. Couldn’t do it himself, and the bloke that did it for him came back and said, ‘You shouldn’t have shot that dog; I’ve never seen a dog as intelligent as that, that knew what was going to happen to him and why.’ And when he got up here, of course he had plenty of dogs, he trained a dog team, because he liked tinkering with dogs, and he learned they could either grow a coat or else get by without a coat, if they had the heart for it. He never did find a dog so bright and loyal as that dog that he’d destroyed.”

  Cecil, who’d expected from the beginning to lose most of his dogs in fracases and pursuits, asked what Charley regretted doing himself, but Charley had said all he would.

  Sutton responded with his story of letting his circus’s hippo go into the Mississippi. “He was swimming upside down, he was having such fun, eatin’ duckweed. You could argue that he froze in the winter; probably he did. But if he got far enough downriver I don’t think so. If he swam to Baton Rouge he could have got into the Atchafalaya swamp and lived forever. He was letting that current catch him and take him down and he was about the fattest fish you could imagine.”

  The Last Irish Fighter

  WEST OF TIMES SQUARE was a place sometimes to see showgirls in their daytime purple glasses and long pants. But all Kelly saw were two clean-cut nuns with boy faces, and a girl he’d never have known was a girl without looking twice, and a woman kissing her baby, and another one kissing her kid, and another, not kissing, but holding pressed lips to the neck of her child. A pigeon tossed a piece of bread like a dog with a rat, and a cat or a baby was crying, you couldn’t tell which. A lady and a street cleaner swept side by side, until they got past the front of her house. Kelly lounged by the windows of stores. He watched a cop in a phone booth clicking the switch on a tiny fan and smiling so gaily he must have been calling his girl. And in the street he saw the white and smoky flitter-whirl of pigeons: the pigeons felt so good their wings were going as fast in spurts as ducks’.

  On Eighth Avenue a card said GUARANTEED under every object in the pawns
hop windows. The bars had their guaranteed drunks. The windows of the barbershops and greasy spoons began to show pictures of fighters, autographed and with the manager’s address, and in a doorway sat a shoeshine-boy ex-boxer, his hands now agile and awhirl with brushes. That was what happened to your colored boys. But over a block, on Broadway, Dempsey had a big restaurant, and Kelly knew of plenty of other prosperous businesses that fighters owned. This was Boxing’s Street, just like it was Pawnshop Street and Whoring Street and Get Drunk Street, although a wise man never messed with those last two. Madison Square Garden was here and Ring magazine and Stillman’s Gym and the famous tavern hangouts and the managers’ offices and the Boxing Clubs and Guilds and Associations, Commissions, Corporations, Organizations. Kelly started feeling businesslike, like somebody going to work. He sauntered, though; he sauntered down to Forty-Second Street where Better Champions was.

  The door to Better Champions Gym was marked by the guys outside it—not guys you would see anywhere. Some of them seldom went inside; just seemed to mark the entrance. Old posters lined the stairs, but since there wasn’t any light nobody more than glimpsed them. At the top, by a window, was a huge white chart of ink on pasteboard which listed all the fighters whose fees were paid as of today and warned that no other fighter should attempt to enter without his money ready. Other signs were stuck at angles on the window, where you couldn’t miss them, saying, “Pay!” and signed “J. D.” Nothing had started yet and the managers and people standing around were watching who came in, and gossiping. It was like a judgment being passed, and Kelly didn’t go too well; got blank indifference. He hated it and worried that the owner of the gym wouldn’t recognize him as somebody who’d paid and would shout at him for heading for the locker room.