A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  The scale of the backdrop of nature—particularly of wilderness—encourages and instructs us to see large, think large, dream large.

  Maybe you see only what you want to see. Maybe we have the ability to almost always find what we are looking for. But the other day, I had not been thinking of these things—the illuminating moments of childhood—when one seemed to pass before my youngest daughter, Lowry, and me, rising not from the buried humus of centuries below us, nor from the braid-and-twine of the blood within us, but passing before us instead like fog—the fog-cloud migrating slowly, in the manner of an animal moving through the woods—a moose, perhaps, or a bear—and intersecting, that day, with our own curious wanderings.

  It was a rainy day in January, raw and ragged and dark. The old snow already down was the only light in the world, and even it was dull. The moss hanging from the trees was sodden, and it was one of those days when dusk seemed determined to arrive two hours early.

  The girls were home from school and were hanging out on the couch, eating slices of apples and slices of cheese, watching some movie on the video—The Princess Diaries, or something like that. I can’t remember how it happened. Mary Katherine might have discovered she had some homework undone, but Lowry and I ended up going outside to ski for a while. I have to confess, I kind of forced the issue—something about the comfort with which they were ensconced alarmed me, the fact that they had not been outside all day, and that dusk was coming on—and there might have been a little of my own winter-craziness at play too, for I ended up issuing a mandate, a proclamation, acknowledging to Lowry that while, yes, I understood she didn’t want to go outside, it was going to be a requirement, this rainy day, that we go outside for a moment, even if only fifty yards up the driveway. That it was for our health, and to break the braid, the pattern of the couch.

  I don’t know why I felt we had to get out that one afternoon. Certainly, other days have passed—rainy, foggy, drizzly days in the winter—in which none of us venture outside.

  But this nearing-dusk day I was agitated. It didn’t seem that I was asking too much. “Fifty yards,” I told her. “I know that you don’t want to go outside today. We’ll come right back in. But we have to go fifty yards up the driveway. We just have to get out for a minute or two. We don’t even have to have fun,” I said. “Think of it as work—like emptying the cat litter, or something.”

  Maybe this was shaping up to be a train wreck. Cat litter equals the great outdoors? What surer way to dull a child’s innate curiosity and even enthusiasm for the natural world? Had I snapped, in the seasonal deprivation of light, and turned into one of those awful eco-fascist parents? How was this dictum any different, really, to a six-year old from forced wind sprints, or a hundred push-ups? Dad the drill sergeant.

  I’ll tell you the truth, there were a few tears as Lowry got up and turned the movie off, and then pulled on her snow pants, and laced up her cross-country ski boots. “Why do we have to go fifty yards?” she asked—a very valid question—to which I answered, “We just do.”

  Maybe I was feeling something after all. Some summons. Or not. What does it matter?

  Lowry stamped outside. She can be more obstinate than a mule. She can be more obstinate than me. Why, she asked again, and now that I had her outside, into raw nature this nasty, foggy day—now that we had broken somehow the cycle of the couch, where, now that I remember, she had spent the previous afternoon also, I was able to negotiate downward, and said, “Okay, you don’t have to ski fifty yards, I’ll pull you in the sled for fifty yards.”

  She dug in further, sulked deeper. She’s not one to negotiate. Was I going to have to physically lift her in the sled? “Oh, wah,” I said, “please, Daddy, don’t pull me around in the sled, please don’t make Princess ride in the sleigh, oh, wah.” For a moment she started to giggle—it was enough for me to lift her in—but then she folded her arms and the Great Lip came back out.

  “I don’t want to go,” she growled, and I felt like I had gone too far, and yet I felt I had made too much about it—the importance of getting outside for a breath of fresh air, even if only for a minute—to back down. I felt as if I had presented her with a choice, at least—skis or sled—but that I had gone too far. So far that I certainly couldn’t turn back. The child-rearing books, I knew, would have all sorts of lucid and correct advice, but that didn’t do me any good, for Lowry was already in the sled.

  We started up the driveway, into the gloom. I pointed out the fifty-yard mark. She pouted and griped the whole way, milking her full fifty yards’ worth. My God, how I hope she ends up on our side; how formidable an adversary she would be on the other side.

  At the fifty-yard mark, I turned around, true to my word, and began running down the steep hill, and finally, that broke the ice-shell, the plaster cast of displeasure, and as she laughed and then asked me to do it again, I felt like an alchemist or magician.

  It was the most amazing feeling: as if I had held her unhappiness cupped in my hands, and had done some trick—rolled it around for a moment as if mixing dust and water to make clay—and when I opened my hands again, there was happiness, where previously had existed only unhappiness.

  It wasn’t me, of course. It was the woods, and the earth—the slope of the hill, the laws of gravity, and so forth—and the condition of childhood, which seeks so earnestly, relentlessly, joy—but it was wonderful nonetheless to be witnessing it, and participating in it.

  I pulled her a few more times, and then, truth be told—raging hypocrite!—I began to long for the warmth of the woodstove, the winter cabin light of hearth and home. Lowry was all bundled up, but I had neither coat nor gloves, having been certain we would travel only fifty yards.

  Each time I suggested that we head back inside, she coaxed me into one more run, but then, finally, when we truly had made the last run, the one-more after the one-more after the one-more after the one-more, rather than going inside to warm up (hot chocolate, I urged her, and Harry Potter), she became absorbed by the myriad of deer tracks stippling the snow in the driveway: the regular herd of half a dozen (twenty-four hoofs) that wanders down the driveway at various times of the day.

  There were tracks everywhere, traveling in all directions—days and days of tracks—but Lowry, with her typical singularity of focus, seized upon one track among all the hundreds of others, and then began following it, hunched over like Inspector Clouseau.

  As best as I could tell, she stayed with it, too, parsing out for a little while that one deer’s tracks among so many others, identifying it by size and shape as well as smoking-gun freshness, the blue-glaze sheen of that one set of tracks among dozens possessing a slightly brighter glow. Soon enough, she was tracking in a wandering maze of tight little circles, with me behind her, so that seen from above, our path would resemble that of these little teacup-bumper-rides in amusement parks.

  It was nearly full dusk now, and darker still farther into the woods, and again, now that my goal was accomplished, I kept wanting to quit and to go back to the house and call it a day, even as Lowry was growing more and more engaged with following those tracks.

  What it felt like to me was that something around her was unspooling—that if I had had her on some sort of psychic leash, it suddenly no longer applied, for whatever reasons—and so I followed behind her, careful not to comment or correct her, letting her believe instead she was hot on the trail of that deer, stalking it, inch by inch and foot by foot, and that we might come upon it at any moment.

  So lost was she in following the one set of tracks through the maze—traveling in slowly widening circles—that I felt certain she had lost track of time and was so totally into the tracking that in her mind we had traveled miles, rather than continuing to circle back to more or less the same starting point.

  Eventually, however, the circles widened enough that we found ourselves coming nearer the marsh, and as if still believing she was following the same deer, Lowry left off her circling-style of tracking and began foll
owing the tracks on a line, like an eager hunter closing in now, having solved both the riddle and the challenge.

  The deer—still one among dozens, or hundreds—traveled, according to Lowry, down toward my writing cabin, where it circled my cabin before heading off farther into the woods, with so little light remaining now.

  Do I know for certain that Lowry was entranced—illuminated—during this strange trailing, this impromptu, wandersome exploration? Not at all. And even during the traveling, the thought had not yet occurred to me. It was only when we heard the eerie whooping dusk cry of a pileated woodpecker, and she took my hand and led me to a clump of winter-bare alder, and hunkered down into a hiding position, that I began to consider that she was deeply in another world—or rather, deeply in this one.

  “If we hide,” she said, crouching behind a slender tree, “maybe he won’t see us. Maybe he’ll come closer.”

  The woodpecker called again, from high above, and not very far away, and Lowry pressed herself in closer against the spindly little alder and motioned for me to hide myself better.

  We watched intently, waiting for the woodpecker to show itself. I could feel Lowry’s focus, patient and keen, and I marveled at the purity of her desire. She didn’t want to trap or hunt the bird, or even sneak up on it: she just wanted to see it, and to watch it, unobserved.

  There was no way we could hide sufficiently behind that bare little alder, but Lowry didn’t know that, or didn’t believe it, and we waited longer, watching and listening. It was only when we finally heard the bird call again from much farther away, and with a deeper dimness—almost, but not quite yet, true dark—that we rose from our crouch and began walking back up the trail toward the house, with Lowry leading the way, excited and fulfilled, with the tears of less than an hour ago completely vanquished.

  So strange was the turnaround in her mood and demeanor that I wondered if the woods-euphoria hadn’t somehow been set up by the chemistry of the tears, allowing her to feel the day more sharply.

  Goofy thoughts, I know. But she seemed so self-assured, curious and confident both, that foggy dusk, that I couldn’t help but wonder if the images of the day weren’t etching themselves indelibly upon her, like light coming through a brief lens opening to expose itself to the waiting film within.

  There’s no way to tell, of course, other than to one day ask her, far into the future—to see if that memory has withstood the test of time—and it may be that she won’t remember at all: that the moment was not for her the vertical illumination of light that I imagined I was witnessing, but instead simply more of the regular daily braid of her life; that the moment was not a landmark pivot point, a boulder emplaced in the center of the river’s current, forever after influencing all downstream flow, but that it was instead simply the river itself, always flowing.

  My point being that none of it can be controlled.

  And again, perhaps it is this simple: how powerful, natural, and necessary it is to our imaginations that that wild and rare bird had a place to fly off to. It just vanished from sight and hearing, when it went off deeper into the woods. But it didn’t really vanish. It—and our imagination with it—kept going, drawn on farther and further and gracefully, into the wild.

  Maybe this is what I’m getting at, working my way toward it in much the manner of Lowry trying to parse out those tracks, making wider and wider circles—glimpsing the one path, then losing it, picking it up once more, only to have it vanish into the brush again.

  Wilderness is not necessary to develop a love of nature in children. I’m convinced we’re born with a reverence for the natural world and that that affinity can then be strengthened, maintained, corroded, or buried—like anything else in the world.

  The joy, the realization or remembrance of that love, can be stimulated by one ant, one sparrow, one seashell held to one’s ear. In this regard, the pastoral can be as powerful as the wilderness. But wilderness is still the long-ago mother of the pastoral and occupies a critical place in our imagination, which is one of the things that most defines us as humans.

  Without wilderness, we ultimately compromise our ability to imagine further.

  Without wilderness, we ultimately become less human. Whether we like it or hate it or are indifferent is beside the point: we need wilderness.

  Surely there will almost always be ants, geraniums, deer tracks, and bird calls for children to ponder over and be smitten and captivated by.

  But they should have the choice—should retain the choice—of being able to decide whether to travel even farther and further then, with that love, and that imagining, if they so desire.

  We should all have that choice. It is, and should remain, one of the tenets of our culture, and one of the spiritual as well as physical riches of any great and powerful civilization.

  Back at the farm, the wild Montana girls are sitting in lawn chairs, out in the cow pasture, feet propped up, wearing their sunglasses and swimsuits, beach towels over their shoulders, books in hand. The only sight more surreal to this image than the scraggly bonsai-reach of the thorny limbs of the weesatche and gnarled mesquite trees around them is the endless anthill-like mounds of manure, the scattered horse pods and cow pies.

  But there’s space, a comfortable amount of space, and there’s also the exquisite luxury, to our Pacific Northwest psyches, of sunlight in the winter. A physical model, perhaps—that yellow light pouring down upon us—for how it is in our interiors, on those unmappable but deeply recognizable moments when that larger grace, and the hint of a larger understanding, or at least a larger acknowledging, pours down upon us.

  Will these vacation days spent in another, more pastoral landscape, become some of their illuminating moments—and if so, how might that affect who these girls become, as opposed to the daily and nightly presences of mountain lions and bull elk?

  Again, only after we have traveled farther downriver will any of us be able to pause and look back and remember, or not. But once more, the answer seems clear: we need as many natural places—as wide and diverse a mix—as is possible. Whatever the wild or natural world has, it is part of who we are and always have been, as well as who we are becoming. And that as we lose those various landscapes, we run the risk of becoming ever more brittle, until one day our imaginations and spirits might be as barren as a gully in a dry land, through which water once murmured, and alongside which cool shade trees grew, but no more.

  You don’t have to go down to that river—you don’t even have to like such rivers—but we must retain them in our culture, all the different kinds of nature, and we must afford the most immediate and secure protection to the rarest kinds—the fast-vanishing big country, the gold standard of wilderness.

  I was speaking of children, earlier in this essay, but now I understand that I am speaking to and of myself, and of the person I have become, and of the child I was, of one of the various paths that have opened before me, and that I had the freedom to choose.

  Traditions and rituals, then—secure, predictable, and repeating—can be their own kind of vertical structure upon the landscape of who-we-are and who-we-become; and the repetitions or constancy of traditions can be like currents influencing boulders emplaced midstream, allowing for growth and complexity and creativity and movement downstream. It sounds at first like a paradox—how can something identified by its quality of sameness, of unchangingness, bring forth the fruit of change and spur the imagination?

  But to know, or believe, that there are places in the natural world that are not likely to change too dramatically in a lifetime, harbors and refuges against the world’s dynamic essence, can be a powerful and vital force that helps shape the growth of a child, and even the continuing growth of an adult.

  So tradition can be a landscape unto itself—and story, or memory, can be like another of the physical senses, as deeply felt as any touch or odor or taste or sight, as deeply felt as any intuition or song.

  Imagine, then, please, the sweetness I encounter on those occasio
ns when I am able to bring my Montana girls out of the wilderness and down to the same pastoral landscapes I inhabited at their age—the pastoral farm, with its muddy stock tanks to fish, rather than high, pristine mountain lakes, and then, later in this vacation, to the deer pasture itself, the one-time ultimate arbiter of wildness, to a young boy, but a quantum step down, in wildness, to these girls.

  Imagine the wonderful disorientation I feel as we arrive there at night, with jackrabbits bounding in front of the beam of our headlights, zigging and zagging in all directions as Mary Katherine gets out to open the gate.

  The same scents, the same sounds, and even the same stories, there at the camp house that night. We build a bonfire of cedar in the same firepit and sit outside looking up at the same stars, and despite the fact that the lions and bears and wolves and jaguars are gone, it is still its own kind of wildness, to me, if not to these girls; though I can also say truthfully that if the farther horizons of Montana’s wildernesses no longer existed, this place, too, and even its stories and traditions, would lose some of its wildness, wildness finally seeping out of this place, and all the other ones like it, in the manner of blood trickling from a wound that will not heal.

  The sameness of security of these things allows us—encourages us—to change: to grow and reach and stretch, to dive deep and travel far. To go away, and to return—becoming as shaped, in our travels, as any of the other enduring shapes in the world.

  The child standing next to a creek in the fog with a flashlight, peering down through the ice at a school of translucent, suspended fish, appears little different, thirty years later, from the young girls stalking along that same creek, trying to sneak up on, with their own flashlights, the night frogs and crawdads.