by Pete Fromm
Then the ranger said that in the next day or two a bunch of Forest Service brass was going to be touring in on some sort of fact-finding mission. He said the place should be crawling with biologists and bureaucrat types. Before he got a chance to ask if there was anything I needed, anything they could bring in for me, my plans had crumbled and vanished. I was beginning to feel cursed. Would I never leave this place?
I said no, there was nothing I needed. Then I thought a second and said, “Maybe some candles.” I liked their light. I made a last ditch effort, saying the slides had gotten even worse than they’d been, new ones blocking the road all over the place. He said thanks, and said he’d pass the word on to the brass. He said it’d do them good to get off their asses a little for some real work. I laughed like I should and we hung up.
I stood for a moment staring at the phone and I started shouting swear words at it. Son of a bitch! Not only had my great hike out turned into yet another pipe dream, now I couldn’t even stay here tonight. The brass would undoubtedly use the cabin.
I stomped back up the road to my pack and threw it onto my shoulders, already having forgotten exactly how heavy it really was. I groaned and started back down my own trail. I was going to walk twenty miles today anyway, in one big circle.
Going the other way killed my spirits nearly as much as turning my back on my father and brother had. Halfway back to Indian Creek I could hardly put one leg in front of the other. I’d stop every mile and rest, usually just dropping the pack and falling beside it in the snow. But I began to realize how hard it was to get the pack back on, and I started to fall over with it still on. When I peed during one of my breaks, without bothering to stand up, I knew I was getting bad. I stripped off my pack and walked to the river for a drink. I fished my cup into one of the little holes that’d been opening in the river ice and sat and drank. Then I crawled back to my pack and pulled the cookies Rader and Sponz had brought in. They were rich, homemade, chocolaty, nutty, coconut-topped things that stunned me with their incredible flavor. I hadn’t had anything like that since I’d been in. I ate the whole bag as I sat and watched my legs tremble.
I was at the old ford the Nez Perce Indians had used to cross the Selway on their journeys from their Idaho home to the buffalo hunting in Montana. On their trail it was still possible to see nearly girdled old trees. The Indians had stripped the bark off to eat, nothing else available in the hard country of the mountains. I thought I could picture their desperation to get through this country and out to the promised land of Montana.
I put on my pack and hiked deeper in the mountains, to my tent. When I passed the mule deer the bobcat had killed a flock of ravens scattered noisily and a lone immature bald eagle flapped off the carcass and flew heavily, silently downstream. I followed after it.
Back home I threw off my pack as if it had attacked me. I stoked the stove and crashed back on my bed, thinking of carrying that cat eighteen miles, when I’d found it two miles from my tent. I tried to be mad at myself, but I started to laugh out loud. And I thought Rader and Sponz had looked like greenhorns. I wasn’t ever going to get out of here, and I began to realize if I’d gone a day earlier or later I would have missed the whole bobcat story. The whole time I was worried about what I’d miss outside, in civilization, I’d never once wondered what I’d miss in here.
I sat up and slid my slipper moccasins onto my feet. I was nearly glad I hadn’t made it out. I’d have my whole life in civilization, and only a few more months in here.
After dinner I pulled the bobcat from my pack and set to work skinning it. I remembered every move Cary had made skinning the lion, and I followed them as if they were law. As the skin came off huge areas of blood-shocked meat were exposed, giant bruises over the left hip and the center of the spine. The spine was broken, as was the hip and the leg. I wondered if the cat had been caught under the deer when it hit. It certainly hadn’t landed on its feet.
I checked the teeth. The canines were split and broken, not from the fall, but from age. There was not one that was intact. They were about one quarter their healthy length and dull and flat rather than sharp. That desperate charge hadn’t had a chance with no teeth to finish the deer.
I’d never really guessed that things like this happened and I realized again that it was simply luck that I’d been able to find out about it. If I’d been in town yucking it up with my friends I wouldn’t have seen anything at all.
I finished the skinning, making one tiny hole in the belly I fretted over terribly. It was late now and I was beat. I rolled the skin carefully and set it in the cab of my truck, the one place safe from everything, even mice.
I stayed close to my tent for the next several days, waiting for the invasion of the Forest Service brass. I visited the dead deer, wondering when the coyotes would find it, wondering if I would see the eagle again. Where had it come from? How had it known there was meat available? As I kept waiting for the Forest Service curiosity and boredom drove me to the kill again and again.
I discovered that the ravens set out guard birds, one upstream and one downstream of the carcass. If I walked down the trail I would see a raven launch from a tree several hundred yards before I got to the kill. Then I would hear it cawing and by the time I was within sight of the kill there would be nothing there but raven tracks. The eagle was still working the carcass, but it would flee with the ravens. Its tracks stood out clearly in the chaos of the raven prints, as long as my hand. I could barely believe how big the eagle really was.
I began to play a game with the ravens, sneaking around through the trees trying to take them by surprise. They always caught me if I followed the river, which had become a highway for everything since it’d iced over. I tried circling wide, going up on top of the cliff and peeking my head over the edge. I had them, fifteen ravens working on the deer. I laughed and they erupted, quick black shadows flitting through the trees, fleeing danger. They never did figure out the high approach and I’d often catch them working on the deer, or, if the eagle was on the carcass, they would be standing all around, ready to move in as soon as the eagle left.
Four days passed before the coyotes finally hit the carcass. Their tracks pounded the area flat. There was a little splotch of greenery left from the deer stomach and a pinkish stain in the snow. Same as ever.
I followed their tracks into the kill, six of them coming in from across the river. They dragged the deer all over the place and it was hard to follow. But I saw the scuffs around the one hole in the river ice, the water running black three feet below the snow and ice covering it. At the downstream edge of the hole I could just make out an inch of leg and the deer’s split toes, six inches under water. The ice hid everything else and I wondered if they’d lost the whole deer or if I was only seeing a broken scrap of leg.
I grinned again, imagining the frenzied tearing, the yanking this way and that and the sudden slip and splash, six coyote faces staring down into the black water, suddenly quiet. I let my face go all stupefied, imitating the coyotes I pictured, and I said, “Oops.”
I laughed out loud. That was the last trace of the bobcat and the deer, the eagle and the ravens. If I’d left I would have missed it all.
17
The Forest Service crew never did show up. I wasn’t terribly surprised. After going through the work of digging out, something that had to be done to escape, I doubted that a bunch of office workers would do that same kind of work just to mess around in the mountains for a day or two.
I stayed close to my tent though, just in case, and a few miles upstream I discovered an otter den—two holes in the snow across the river, long slide marks connecting the holes to the water. Crushing through the soggy snow, I made a den for myself beneath the sweeping black branches of a spruce, and I waited to spy on the otters. Boone huddled with me in this cave, her coat matted with rain. But the branches kept off most of the drizzle and I staked out the otters for two full days, glad for something to do.
On the third day the fi
rst otter popped out of an opening in the ice a hundred yards or so downstream. Once on the snow it ran several steps and launched itself onto its belly, slithering across the snow, pushing with its back feet when it began to lose momentum. Then it would pop up into a run and leap again. As soon as it reached another opening in the ice it disappeared into the water. It was up at the next hole, sliding across the snow until it found another spot to enter the river. I grinned, wondering how it could find its way in that fast, black water.
Eventually I saw the whole family, four of them, and I went back up to the den day after day to watch them play. One came up with a fish—what looked like a sucker—and sat beside the hole in the ice and ate it whole, chewing on it from the head down, like a cold, bony hot dog. The busy crunching came loudly across the snow and ice.
Nights were long, cold interruptions keeping me from the play of the otters, but the socked-in weather did hold in radio waves and I spent an hour every night listening to the radio, as much as my battery supply would allow. In one of those hours I learned that in little less than a week Idaho would be right in the path of a full solar eclipse.
I spent a couple of days watching the sun and the clock, picking a spot to watch from, and found that at the scheduled time the sun was neatly framed in the notch between the ridges of Indian Creek. I chose a rocky pinnacle that would get me above the trees and hoped the weather would cooperate.
I was out right after breakfast on the twenty-sixth—eclipse day—but when I climbed up Indian Creek I found that the snow was still crusted hard and I couldn’t climb the pinnacle. I stood staring up at the snow-covered point, running my hand over its glossy burnish of ice. Without the pinnacle’s height I could only hope to catch glimpses of the sun through the trees, what suddenly seemed like the only view I’d had of anything for months.
I took out my knife and poked at the layer of ice, chipping off bright, brittle shards. Soon I cut a complete foothold and tested it, pushing my foot in and lifting my weight. It held and I cut another, and then another. I cut and climbed until I was at the top.
At the peak there was just enough room for me to sit cross-legged. Boone, stuck below, whimpered for a second or two, then curled up in the snow on the side of the ridge, glaring at me.
The sky was a solid, seemingly hopeless overcast, but I tried to believe that it seemed thinner in the east. Then suddenly the notch really did begin to brighten and I saw the edge of the bright ball of the sun in the haze. It rose quickly, and for a few minutes it seemed as if one side was darker than the other. I waited and nothing changed. I looked at the wind-up clock I had carried with me. Could that have been it? That dull dimming? I glanced around my gray world and felt pretty foolish for cutting my way up here for that, glad nobody was here to see this.
I waited a little longer, staring at the bright gray east. The wind-up clock was less than accurate and I usually set it by guess anyway. Maybe something was still supposed to happen.
By now the sun had burned through to form a clearly defined disk at the top of the notch in the mountains, the haze thick enough so I could look at it without being dazzled. Then, too suddenly to be believed, there was a piece missing from its southern edge. I double checked and there was no doubt. This was not a new thickness of clouds, a light dimming on one side or the other. An actual slice was being taken from the side of the sun.
I looked away. The radio had warned and warned about being blinded by watching the eclipse. The world got darker slowly—slowly enough that it was hard to notice. I glanced back and half the sun was gone.
The mountains were darker now. I looked down at my camp and the Selway. It looked like evening, the time of day I would usually be about here, getting back to camp before dark.
Now there was just a sliver of sun edging the left side of the dark ball that had replaced it. That was the moon, I knew, but knowing that didn’t mean anything. I stood straight up on my tiny pinnacle and watched as the last of the sun winked out.
Where the sun had been there was only a hazy, fluctuating ring of brightness. That’s all. Around me the woods were truly dark. The snow on the open slopes in front of me glowed pure blue, more definite than at any twilight, as if there were some force under there that wouldn’t be held back forever. The chickadees were silent for once. It seemed to get a little cooler but I don’t think that was possible. Boone whined and then it was completely quiet.
The vague ring of light wavered about the notch in the mountains, the sky blue-purple from horizon to horizon. The green-treed slopes across the creek faded to murky black.
I circled on my pedestal, my fists clenched and my skin tingling. It was truly dark, the snow still glowing blue, nearly pulsing. In the southwest the second dawn of the day began. A first tentative paling grew ruddy red, the color of the darkest wild rose. This spread across the sky but the intensity died, as if there were only so much color to give.
I looked back at the sun as the moon edged aside and day broke again. The snow returned to its normal white, the blue retreating beneath the surface where it was just barely visible. The sun returned to its full orb and there was no longer any trace of the moon. A bird chirped and, tentatively, others followed.
But still I circled, tingling on my little perch, trying to see what was no longer there, what I had not had enough time to see in those too full few minutes—trying to take in all that I had looked over for months, as if the second dawn had shed light on more than just mountains.
I shouted. I raised my fists above my head and shouted. As I continued my demented circling on that spire, I knew that everywhere I could see, and far beyond that, on everything the sun had just transformed, the only footprint on the land that wasn’t some animal’s was mine. I shouted again, big enough to burst.
Whooping, I slid off the pinnacle and Boone charged in. We wrestled around on the crusty snow and then we just flat out ran, as if there was nothing in the world that could ever stop us.
Later that day it rained and I tried to stay busy in my tent, but I couldn’t keep away from the pinnacle. By late afternoon I slithered back up, my toeholds grown slushy, and I stood on top, watching the notch and the rest of the world around me. I tried to squint, hoping the blurring would make it easier to picture again the morning’s transformation. But that light was gone forever. It was not something that could be captured, even in the mind. Already I was questioning the blueness of the snow, the redness of the sky. But, even though I couldn’t see it, I smiled, knowing it had been there, that I had seen what no one else had.
Then, as the day’s real dusk closed down on the Selway, I slid back down and strolled to my meat pole. There was only a steak or two left and I meant to cut them down and finish them off in one last feeding frenzy to celebrate the eclipse. But when I reached the pole I found that something had beaten me to the feast. The last bit of spine hung from its rope, the only meat left clinging in thin, frazzled strands. I found the tracks of the marten, saw how it’d climbed one tree and inched along the meat pole, sliding down the rope and gorging itself before dropping straight from the meat to the ground. The drop forced his footprints into the hard snow beneath the bones. I remembered that in the fall, during my trapping initiation, I’d mistaken squirrel tracks for marten. “Be the world’s biggest squirrel,” I said, shaking my head and cutting down the last trace of the moose and pitching it into the trees. The marten could finish it now without acrobatics.
The next day I hiked down to Paradise and picked up my cured meat. It was much lighter with the water drained away and I was glad of that. Walking back, I whittled slivers off a chunk but I’d gone pretty heavy on the spices and the meat was a little hard to handle. I guessed I’d be making a lot of chili, using the hot meat and the pounds and pounds of beans I still hadn’t figured out any real use for. I had three months left here and I wondered just how sick of chili I’d get.
It kept drizzling off and on for the first week of March, the temperature creeping up the thermometer a little higher
every day. Finally I stepped out of my tent one morning to find that the sky had cleared. The temperature that day reached forty-four, the highest point since November.
The snow was really beginning to melt and I spent the morning digging it out from around my tent. All winter long I’d used the snow as insulation, but now it was seeping through the canvas and my tent was thick with the smell of wet cloth.
The old snow was hard and stiff and I had to cut blocks to pick up and throw aside. Before I was done I’d stripped off even my union suit top, hardly able to believe how the sun felt full on my back. I smiled, watching my naked arms bulge as I lifted the blocks of snow and felt the coarse, hard crystals melt against my chest. It seemed I could feel everything.
The next day was as clear as the last and when I poked out into the clear blue I took off immediately, even skipping breakfast, my snowshoes strapped across my back for later in the day, when the night’s crust would melt off. I hiked all day, stripping off shirts one by one, eventually even unbuttoning the top of my union suit, the air against my skin a wonderful sensation.
From the very top of the mountains I studied the peaks around me, picking out drainages I knew, and though to the east Trapper Peak stood out alone, gleaming white on the edge of the Bitterroot Valley, it no longer drew my eye the way it had before. I turned back to the world I knew, picking out the drainage of the Little Clearwater, hiking south and west until I could see the Selway’s path, far below, winging through the long bend. I knew that curve was the Nez Perce ford, and I grinned, almost surprised by how well I’d learned this country, how I could know it from any angle.
I slid down the mountain, the snow this high taking on a strange, hard slickness. The top inch or two turned soggy in the sun, full of big, wet, slippery crystals. But, beneath that, the frozen crust was still rock hard. Occasionally I’d slip and go all the way down, sliding through the soaking slush without making a dent in the crust, without being able to punch through for any kind of handhold. I’d have to slide until I reached a rock or a tree I could grab on to. Though I never picked up great speed, the slips spooked me, my imagination pitching me off cliffs where, dreamlike, I could tumble forever before crashing back to the black spruce and granite-like stretches of snow.