The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  Back before Harm had broken off the gramophone horn to take with him, Judith would stay in bed with Trapper all through the hot part of the day, the sweet middle, falling in and out of sleep, languishing, rousing only to put a new record on the gramophone: both of them abed in the cool shade of love, never suspecting that in a few short years the desert would be gone. Shitting cattle would scour it, and water-robbing mesquite would grow out of their manure, muffins cast like steppingstones across the land, and with that the rarest and wildest creatures would leave, vanishing.

  The last music Judith heard, other than the howls of wolves, was in 1904. She listens for the northern lights that Trapper says he can hear, but still she hears nothing: though even the sound of nothing, with enough space around her, is pleasant and sweet. Not as good as the sound of running water, which she knows will be coming, but in winter the sound of nothing is just right. The howls of wolves reassure, and comfort her: as though a deal has been struck whereby they will take sadness from her heart and assume it for themselves.

  Judith builds a tiny cabin out of wind-felled timbers, stretches her hide over it for a roof; packs it with snow.

  Trapper didn’t look sick, she thinks. Maybe he has gotten better without me.

  This inspires in her the desire to capture him and see if it is so. Judith’s not sure she wants him to be better off without her.

  ***

  It isn’t about children, Judith tells herself. She remembers the old woman they met in Yellowknife who introduced herself as having had thirteen children by her first husband, but her new husband, Art, “his seed is bad.”

  Judith knows women with children who’ve run, and she knows women without children, such as herself, who have also run.

  Uncle Harm trapped or killed almost everything in Arizona and then died in 1909 at the age of ninety-one. He’d taken to shooting cows when there was nothing else around; dropping them like buffalo, fifteen and twenty at a time, and then hiding out and waiting for the coyotes and the last few lobos to come skulking in. It was easier to find him, once he started shooting the cows. Buzzards would spiral above wherever he’d made his stand.

  His dogs were by his side, guarding him, the day that Trapper and Judith found him for the last time. Wizened, Uncle Harm had already been gone about half a day, headed toward wherever he was going beyond this life. His gramophone horn was curled up tightly in his little fist and Judith took it from him gently. After they’d buried him she tried to hook it back up and play it, but it wouldn’t work, not even after they cleaned all the dust and grit out of it.

  They had to bury him off in the desert so he wouldn’t foul the spring. Piled rocks up on his grave forming a cairn, but still the remaining coyotes and wolves came and gathered around it and howled every night for a month. The summer rains came, and they could see where a few grizzlies had appeared from hiding and circled the cairn as if having to see for themselves that yes, it was true, they were safe now. Ravens circled the cairn for weeks, diving and spiraling. Damnedest thing either of them had ever seen, with the exception of Uncle Harm himself.

  They sold his dogs to a cattle rancher, opened all the doors and windows of the adobe houses to let the desert enter, and went up through the Rockies in the spring. But the grizzlies and wolves and Indians had vanished there, too, so they kept going farther north.

  Trapper and Judith didn’t reach the Yukon until fall.

  When they started hearing wolves, they felt better. As if they had come home; as if what mattered lay south or north of their country, but not in between.

  2

  It’s Trapper’s aim to catch wolves and martens and wolverines on his trip to the coast, and pull the hides behind him on a sled, arriving at the coast a rich man and trading for gold, for groceries. Coffee from Africa and sugar from the tropics, to maybe keep Judith happy this time. Maybe while she’s staked out in the yard he will bake her things with sugar in them. Maybe she would enjoy his new riches so much that he wouldn’t even have to keep her staked, at least not all the time.

  She’s lost her mind, Trapper muses, moving through the woods, shaking and stutter-stepping. She hit that window like a bat out of hell. It was like something old Harm might have done.

  Big smoked salmon, and new traps, new ammunition, too—lead and gun powder. And jewelry: he’ll trap her with gold jewelry, he thinks; he’ll string it all through the woods and then set snares, or hide up in a tree, so that when she reaches for the glittering-with-sun necklace he can catch her wrist in a wire noose, and he’ll have her, again. The mistake last time was that he didn’t hold her tight enough, that he gave her too much rein...

  He’ll build smaller windows.

  More leg-hold traps: more tobacco. Fuck horses! He’ll pull it all home on a sled himself, the way he’s always done. Fuck dogs! Whiny crybabies anyway, always wanting to rest. Always getting eaten by wolves. His beard and eyebrows are shining dull whitish-blue with frost—it’s thirty below—and he howls.

  The wolves that have been following him at a distance draw closer, knowing they are safe when a fit wells up from within him; at such times they know that he is not a man, but rather is one of them. They seem to believe he would be loath to kill one of his own kind—a brother, a sister.

  It’s so lonely without her.

  What if she’s not even up here any more? What if she’s back in Arizona at this very moment? He’s ashamed that his heart is a weak little muscle, incapable of matching the great strength of the chest in which it is housed. Can it be true that he is as weak in heart and mind and soul as Harm was in body? Can it be that he might have an animal’s soul trapped within his body? Maybe that’s why trapping never bothered him.

  Delicate ladylike weasels with their front leg bent sideways and shattered in the trap quiver and look at him in fright as he approaches; they grasp the jaws of the big trap with the slender fingers of their uninjured paw. Already the beautiful shawl they wear does not belong to them...

  A man can be a horrible thing. Trapper sits on a log and howls and weeps, but there seems to be no escape. And he does not know where he wants to escape to.

  He hears a movement in the brush and snow behind him. He grabs his rifle and turns and raises it and sees a pale silver wolf running away from him. Trapper fires and sends the wolf tumbling, but he’s only wounded it; the wolf is back up and running again. There are other wolves with it, and so he will not go into the brush after it, though the blood trail tempts him.

  It’s not his fault that Judith got away, part of him tells himself, when he’s shaking, when he’s trying to become whatever it is his body’s trying to make him become, even if only fodder for worms; but the other part of him, the stronger part, says, “She was in your dominion, and you had control of her, and you lost her.”

  For thirty miles slogging through snow he thinks of words like “dominion” and replays every day of their life together, putting the days together like tracks, but he’s puzzled, can find no sign of error, no proof of her unhappiness with him.

  He’s got four wolf pelts, six foxes, a dozen weasels, a coyote, and a wolverine on his sled, his stone boat, which he drags through the forest. He tries to think like the animals, and yet at the same time tries to keep his wits about him and keep from plunging off the cliff of human reason and into some abyss where he believes that man, having failed at something, descends to a level equal with the animals.

  Loopy with fatigue, Trapper snaps off the branches of winter-thin willows along a creek and weaves them into a crown, and continues on his way, carrying his traps with him as he goes.

  ***

  On the coast, Trapper asks around, speaking all three languages—Yupik, French, and English—awkwardly: the damn woods having swallowed his tongue. But no one’s seen her.

  The men and women cluck their tongues. One old woman laughs at him, and says to Trapper in Yupik, “If you lived here she would be easy to trap, for she would have nowhere to run to but the sea.”

  He s
tays a night, buys sex from a villager for one wolf pelt—an outrageous price—and makes his trades the next day, and turns and heads back across the tundra, back to the woods, with another storm coming in behind him from off the Arctic Ocean. He’ll trap on the way home too, though he must be careful and hurry, or he’ll run out of snow in places and ruin his sled pulling it across the bare rocks.

  And then there’s the river. Trapper can’t swim. He can do all manner of things, spectacular things, with his body, if not his mind, but he’s so freighted with muscle that whenever he gets in water he goes straight to the bottom. Like a rock.

  Trapper moves through the woods herking and jerking, pulling his load, trying, with his mind alone, to trick his central nervous system into not disintegrating further; into not acknowledging that disintegration. He notices that he’s trying to tie his knots backward, and it scares him.

  To keep his mind off how far this nonsense can go, he concentrates on bears. He imagines how the woods are full of sleeping bears, all denned up beneath him, six feet beneath his snowshoes and curled, waiting to come to life. He thinks of bears, and goes over the facts versus the myths.

  Bears do not suck their paws in hibernation. They merely sleep with their paws pressed up against their faces. The Indians in southern British Columbia maintained that a grizzly sighting a lone man in the forest would stand up and hold out one paw toward the man, even if seen or scented at a distance, to try and tell if the man was skookum—brave.

  What’s it going to be like to be dead, Trapper catches himself wondering. He views the trembling as accelerated old age, or fatigue, but now he remembers Uncle Harm spinning in the desert on his back, looking up at those clouds.

  The thing was, Uncle Harm always got better. They’d lie him down in that cool water, and then later in the evening they’d see him come stepping out of the Arizona darkness in that glowing white linen suit. They’d smell his pinon tea. He’d sit down on their porch and tell them stories: true stories, amazing things that seemed capable of holding even death at bay.

  The bear up near Prescott that kept raiding Uncle Harm’s family’s garden when Harm was a boy. Harm and his friend Dobie, fourteen years old, waiting up and watching in the moonlight as the silver-tipped grizzly came ambling into the garden and began swatting down the corn. July night thunder, monsoons walking across the far horizon, illuminated by heat lightning. A feeling, with all that thunder coming, Uncle Harm said, that you had to kill something.

  With lanterns and rifles, Harm and Dobie would start yelling and sic their dogs on the great bear and head out for the garden, running hard: half-crazy and half-brave, even then. (Dobie died young.)

  The bear would gather up all the corn it could carry, holding it under one arm, and run. A grizzly can hit speeds of up to forty miles an hour, and runs as strong going up a hill as down, due to the excessive piston musculature of its hind legs. Certainly even on three legs the grizzly could outrun two boys and their pissant dogs. The boys tracked him more by following the spilled ears of corn than with the aid of their cowardly pet dogs, but could never catch up with the grizzly, could never bring it to bay.

  The grizzly kept coming back every night. Sometimes the boys heard him; other times they slept through his raids.

  Finally one night Harm and Dobie stole a real dog, an Airedale that belonged to a friend of Dobie’s father. The neighbor lived a half-mile away. They muzzled the dog so the owner wouldn’t wake up in the night and hear his dog off on a bear trail, alone, and they tied double leashes to him so that he couldn’t get away. Tied the other ends around their waists.

  Lay down on the dark porch in ambush and waited. August, now, and the corn beginning to dry up. They could feel something was nearing an end.

  “Tonight we get him,” Dobie whispered.

  After midnight they heard the bear in the corn again, and they waited, letting him fill his belly so he’d be easier to chase. There was a wind in their faces, and the Airedale, with cloth wrapped around his muzzle, whined softly, but the breeze carried his sounds away from the bear. Lightning storms rippled across the plateaus to the south.

  When the bear stood and began knocking down roasting ears to take with him, Harm and Dobie turned the Airedale loose, and were snatched off the porch and out into the garden after him.

  Uncle Harm said they each broke an arm; that the Airedale took them seven miles up into the mountains, that he would not stop, and that Dobie split his chin on a rock.

  Still, the Airedale carried them on: across tiny mountain creeks, farther up into the mountains. They’d spy a dropped ear of corn every now and then. Sometimes they’d see the silver bear disappearing over a ridge: running hard on all fours now, with the Airedale hard after him. Dobie had dropped his lantern and rifle when he split his chin, then had been whisked on, snatched along by the Airedale’s mad rage. The lantern had started a small fire where he dropped it, and then, climbing farther up the mountain, the Airedale jerked Harm off his feet, and Harm lost his lantern as well; then was dragged along.

  As they neared the top of the mountain, they could see the two small fires burning in the piñon below them. At the top of the mountain, with the Airedale close to baying the bear, the Airedale summoned a last charge and broke free of his harness, which probably saved the boys, allowing Harm to continue on his way to becoming an old man, and Dobie to live another two years.

  The Airedale engaged the grizzly up against the mouth of a cave. The dog must have known it couldn’t bite the bear, with his muzzle still bound up in the tight-knotted muzzle, but such was his fury that he flew at the bear anyway.

  Harm and Dobie crested the mountain, gasping. They saw the bear swat the Airedale through the air, the dog limp even as he flew away. The bear was standing at the mouth of a penned-up cave. Four or five pigs were grunting and squealing behind him in the cave; there were corn husks everywhere, as the bear had been feeding the pigs, fattening them up.

  The bear squinted and raised his paw slowly, still standing, and held it out toward the boys as if trying to feel their heat: holding it the way a man next to a campfire might turn his palms to the flames to warm them.

  Harm, with his rifle, was shaking so badly he couldn’t begin to lift it; it was all he could do to keep from dropping it.

  The bear didn’t run. It kept standing there, holding its paw out toward the boys and sniffing the night-storm air. Uncle Harm said that both boys had the feeling—unspoken between them at the time, but passing through the air like an electrical current—that that bear wanted to catch them alive and put them in that pen with the pigs, and fatten them up.

  They ran down the mountain stumbling and bleeding, with lightning booming all around them, and never told anyone where the Airedale had gone. Told their parents they’d gotten in a fight, is how they busted each other up.

  The storm put out their fire, though for forty years, Harm said, you could see where they’d been: and the bear never came back to the garden.

  “Cave’s still up there,” Harm had told Trapper. “Pig skeletons, too. And dog skeleton. Never did find a bear skeleton on that mountain. Could have been that bear was God.”

  “Could be too that we’re all little pigs that the real God’s got penned up on this earth,” Harm said, and then laughed.

  “I want to know what happened to Dobie,” Judith had said.

  Harm laughed. “Drowned,” he said. He looked at Trapper and laughed again, his old face stretching and then falling slack, stretching and falling slack. “You and him resemble each other in the face,” he said, meaning Dobie. He reached out and tousled Trapper’s wild hair.

  ***

  He finds one stretch of woods that’s rampant with game. He knows he shouldn’t linger—he knows he should get on back to the river, and across—but he cannot help himself. He camps for a week and takes not one, but two, wolverines—the second one being the mate of the first, who kept coming around after the first one was taken—and he traps foxes, too.

 
And wolves: always, wolves.

  He pushes on again, but he’s running late. The snow’s melting, and freezing again at night. It’s rough and chopped up; roots and boulders are emerging. Trapper slips, falls often. Sometimes he can’t get up and has to struggle to reach for his sled, pulling a bloody wolf or fox hide from the stack to drape it across himself for warmth as night falls. The hide itself freezes during the night, fitting itself to Trapper’s shape. He hears wolves howl and has to bite his cheeks to keep from joining in—they’d come investigate, otherwise, and then his dreams might come true: the pack swarming him, casting judgment for all the pack members, the brotherhood that he’s killed—all the days of life he’s robbed.

  Trapper knows there aren’t any proven stories of wolves killing a white man. Uncle Harm’s told him that for some reason they used to eat the hell out of Frenchmen, Eskimos, and Russians, but that’s no consolation as he quivers in the night, caught in the form-fitting frozen fox hide.

  Oh, for a wife or a dog!

  3

  The river ice changes color in the last days of March, from white to gray, and from gray to thin blue, and Judith sits on the bluff and watches this. She listens to the ice groan and creak as it strains to move again. She listens to the wolves howling. It is harder for them to hunt once winter is gone. In winter they can chase hoofed animals, the weak ones, out onto the frozen lakes and ponds.

  Poor wolves, she thinks, watching the woods for Trapper’s return. The days are warm enough now that she doesn’t need fires, but finally, she builds them along the bluff, and throws wet duff on them to make them smoke.

  It’s terrible without the thought of him out there chasing her, hunting her. It’s horrible. There’s too much space.