A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  The locations of the tom's cries suddenly seemed to be shifting more quickly, which meant I had to get up there in a hurry. I trotted to the edge of the ridge, then all but skied down, so abundant were the oak nuts on that flank despite the foraging of the winter deer herd, the spring rodents, and the turkeys themselves. Now and then I felt brief burnings above my left kneecap: adhesions popping under the ugly scar from my Labor Day accident. But this discomfort left me unalarmed: my mind set on being where I needed to be, I even believed that the tearing of those adhesions would do me nothing but good, would turn me loose.

  And in fact, hitting the bottomland, I broke into a run, feeling less awkward and leaden than I had in months. A single hooded merganser, sojourning on his way to Labrador or wherever, made to flush as I hurried by the pond, then simply dipped underwater, waiting for me to pass. I might see the little clown again on that pond, a notion that filled me with curious delight.

  Even with a quick glance back, I noticed that the mist over the water had abruptly become general, the world now soft-edged everywhere, the top of the scarp I'd just tumbled down completely vanished. The damp combined with the sweat of my exertion to fog my glasses, which would have to be clear by the time my tom came into view, please God. I yanked them off and held them in my hand like a relay baton as I raced onward.

  My breath came with surprising ease. "Not bad for an old guy," I whispered to myself, feeling my cheek muscles tighten in a grin. Well behind me, I heard the pointer bitch let out a hound-like howl from her kennel, nothing in it to alarm a gobbler. Indeed, I thought I heard the turkey answer her, and persuaded myself that the answer came from exactly the right quarter, not far from where I meant soon to be.

  I envisioned the bird as I ran: He'd be coming out of a certain hop hornbeam grove just now, stepping into the higher hemlocks, his snood turgid and scarlet, his tail clenching and unfurling, his hens fossicking behind him.

  And before long, he'd reach that strip of stone.

  The fog was everywhere now, showing itself in weird little pilasters, each like a man walking quietly overland in a company of his familiars— thin, benign ghosts.

  You'll imagine me single-minded, as I imagined myself. But truth is, I found much to notice. By the pond's standpipe, I'd seen shoots that in a month would bend with the weight of wild iris; above, daylight's first vulture, which hadn't been there and now suddenly was, languidly riding the updrafts; a few stubborn gray frogs still quacking at each other, bank to bank; a woods-smell like chamois.

  My boots left prints in the bluets. Again I thought of snow as I watched the earth pass under me. At last, hearing the turkey startle the air in that hemlock grove, I started to climb. As I did, the delusion of infinite stamina began to undo itself. My breaths turned to something closer to sobs. Yet I went on, hiking now, to be sure, not running. So much depended on the next few minutes.

  The tom could not have been more than a few hundred yards away when I reached height of land. Squinting, I discovered a bathtub-sized depression, as if placed there by Providence, in my granite slab. I sprawled in it, belly down. There was even a cleft in the rock, like the archer's slit in a medieval turret, through which I could see 90 degrees or better, and through which, fate allowing, I'd be able to shoot.

  The turkey remained as persistent in his call as he'd been since I first heard him, and, no doubt about it, he was headed my way. I slipped my eyeglasses back on, pulled down the veil, then cursed mutely as the lenses clouded over. I could see next to nothing.

  I reached up under the veil with my gloved right hand, rubbing a small circle on either lens. Within seconds the circles misted again. The bird's gobble was as loud by now as my frantic thoughts. I pushed the glasses to the tip of my nose and peered over them, but things appeared at least as blurry that way. The cruelty of my circumstance seemed incredible, or so in my exaggeration I figured.

  And then a cold breeze kicked up. Some may think this all sounds too scripted. I can't prove a thing, having been the lone human in that place. I do know, though, that such a wind arrived. I can all but feel it again right now. My vision went clear.

  And the gobbler quit calling.

  Long, long minutes yawned. I imagined the tom, with those eyes that beggar comparison, had somehow seen through the rock to where I hid, fussing with my misted glasses. Surely he'd scooted off with his harem, not to reappear.

  I have said before and will again that I've had more moments of bounty in my life than I deserve, ones that—who knows why?—I haven't had to deserve. That foggy morning well behind me now, I think back on a bright and dear boy's terrible self-destruction, and how badly I responded on hearing of it; I scarcely recalled, say, that my wife had loved that young man as much as I ever did; it was dully that I observed the innocence of my smaller children, the decency of my older, and in particular the bereavement of the oldest son, whose friend more than anyone's the victim had been; I failed even to acknowledge the very splendors of the earth and air and water among which I'd long dwelled, or the blessing of my fine physical fortune, which I'd taken too often for granted. Today the depression I felt throughout the months leading up to that hunt seems to have been so easy, even lazy.

  A tall bird walked forth, stirring the fog with his bulk, silent. Behind him trailed an abundant procession of hens. I saw the flock through that cleft in granite. My gun barrel rested on a rocky spur, parallel to the pungent, pine-needled ground. The tom had grown cautious, as a tom will uncannily do in such moments, yet he continued to pick his way toward me, lifting and gingerly replacing each foot like a heron, until at last he stood exactly where I wanted him, his beard thrust forward like a bowsprit, glinting with dew. He stretched his neck, cocking his head northward. I squeezed the trigger.

  I thumbed back the safety and hopped up. As I rushed toward the spot, I found myself expecting no sign of a bird, expecting to awaken, that is, from a dream whose emptiness would leave me cursing and whining on that shoulder of stone. But there the turkey did lie, in all his splendid gigantism. An impossibility, but there indeed he lay. I set the shotgun on the earth, leaned over, grasping a horny shin in either hand.

  At my touch the gobbler appeared to come back to life. He kicked one leg free, his great wings pistons, his whole frame pumping to reach the cliff face just ahead, down which he would surely hurl himself, never to be found. I held tight, my heels digging vainly for purchase in the wet granite, the bird manic in my grasp, like some unruly dog on a leash who has spotted a squirrel, or some weirdly autonomous machine.

  I didn't think so then, but now that desperate wrestle seems a comic chapter in all this. What must I have looked like, a man of two hundred pounds and more being drawn by the will of a wild thing, a dead one at that, toward so freakish a conclusion?

  But the man prevailed.

  The recognitions that came to me that morning are hard to explain to a non-hunter, let alone an anti-hunter. Perhaps I'm less a hunter than once I was, but on that spangled ledge it struck me that I not only possessed at least a few remaining skills but also, and much more importantly, that I was simply blessed by circumstance.

  I remembered it was Mother's Day, and conjured the winsome smile of my spouse. I reckoned how nine months earlier, I'd sawn my left quadricep to the bone—and gotten off with three days in a hospital bed, four weeks on crutches, a spectacular and storied cicatrice the only residue of the whole ordeal. Meanwhile, a logger I knew on the west side of Champlain had cut his femoral artery, which I just missed doing, and died before he could be gotten out of the woods. Yes, my fiftyish body was slumping some, but it was certainly a lot sounder than it might have been.

  And subsuming all these emblems of my rare welfare was what I can only call a spiritual insight. I will abuse it, as I have done before, as any pilgrim must, but there it was. My mother, like Breck the suicide, like Amico the cancer victim, must die one day. As must I. As must every last one of us. And yet for a moment, a truth shone clear: be receptive and you will receive. No
t that I had truly willed my own receptivity; as I say, it seemed to have been bestowed.

  I felt, I feel, a great gratitude to a certain wild turkey. The anti-hunter winces. Be that as it may, walking down the steep ridge, the gleaming bird slung over my shoulder in all its heft, I recalled, as I do now, the perfection of the tom's coming to me. I had put myself in the right way, or something had, and a wild creature obliged me. What had been random was, for a spell at least, coherent.

  Daybook, May

  What I observe from Big Musquash Stream could be the set-up for some witless, formulaic joke: This kingbird chases this eagle . . .

  Anyone who knows about an eagle knows he's a bully who robs ospreys and other predators, furred or feathered, of their water catches. Glorious as he may appear, he also runs crows, ravens, and vultures off road-kill and other upland carrion and quarry.

  He's our national symbol. Make what you will of that. I'm not out here for complexity, or even complication. I'm taking a break from all the clutter I can. I want things as simple as simple knows. Still, I've suspended my morning paddle here beneath the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the mighty eagle's wings to watch the kingbird—no more than a flycatcher, after all, no matter his magisterial name—as he jabs at his adversary, and reflection has begun. Once that happens, it's hard to drown it merely by wanting to.

  I'm all but sure we're too early in spring for chicks in these parts. The eagle must have been looking to pillage a clutch of eggs. Or maybe he was after the sparse flesh of the incubating hen herself. Or both the meat and eggs.

  There being no one to debate with, I silently ask the air, with idiot grandiloquence, Who, knowing the wild world's unfairness, still believes in harmonious nature, let alone benign design?

  I'm addicted to the natural world, but certainly not because it ratifies the cozy oneness of the universe, nature a realm of profligacy and waste in so many regards. For every hatchling that fledges and flies, for instance, how many do not? Five? Ten? A ghastly percentage for sure. The fearsome creatures prowl the wide earth, hour upon hour, daytime and nighttime, in pursuit of the fearful.

  But again I try to avoid thorny issues, to satisfy myself here by praising what looks like plain and reckless courage. Though in spite of myself, I know I'm imposing human values and qualities on what I witness, as I watch the smaller bird in its dartings I imagine emulating him, forgetting my weakness and flying right into the face of whatever oppressor I know or have heard of. I can't be alone in wishing, single-handedly, to right every wrong, remediate every injustice, humiliate every bully. I want all this even though in my soul I know murder, rapine, and dispossession will go on carrying the day, and the day after.

  As the eagle will.

  This kingbird chases this eagle. No joke at all, I realize, envisioning the downward spiral of fluff and feather, rent from the poor she-kingbird's breast, the gold of yolk smeared over the savaged, intricate nest.

  But what's this? I'm deceived just now into thinking that foolish valor may pass for advantage after all. The eagle is finally chased over Amazon Mountain, sinking behind the tree line's green hysteria, its legion May-time shapes and shades. And the dauntless little kingbird flits back to its mate.

  But he's farther upstream from me now than he was before this insistent springtime current, scarcely perceptible from shore, made me drift all unaware back down the river.

  Ownership

  —in memoriam, John Engels (1931-2007)

  I'm in Anchorage, Alaska, when I get the cell phone call from my pregnant daughter-in-law, who is nothing if not an angel, in this case an angel of sorrow. I've been standing here and browsing Philip Roth's Everyman, which apparently chronicles a lustful codger's last seasons. The tale may be rough going for a sixty-something like me, even one who happily looks forward to his first grandchild this coming autumn, but I mean to buy it anyhow. Owning such a book will feel a little like courage, as if I could simply stare its relentlessness down.

  To hear the bad news in a bookstore, even one too cutely named "The Title Wave," seems apt. My friend of more than thirty years, the poet John Engels, is about to be dead. I knew he was headed for back surgery while we were up here. I knew he had heart problems. But, blithe as ever, I didn't figure he'd suffer a series of coronaries under anesthesia, that he'd now be in coma, and would soon be taken off life support.

  John will be gone before we get back to Vermont.

  It's also apt that together with my second son, who's living and working here, I will be looking for rainbow trout in the Kenai River tomorrow. John was an avid trout angler and the best amateur designer and maker of flies I've known in six decades of fishing. He turned out gem after gem, each as deft as his poems, which are a grand part of what I'll remember him by.

  My wife and three of our children are considering other reading prospects on other shelves. I go to the counter, buy the Roth, then step outside to bawl.

  I'm weeping for John, of course, whom I hoped the Vermont cultural movers and shakers would at last and rightfully designate our next state poet. That can't happen now. Nor will the two of us ever talk again face-to-face. Nor will I read new work by his hand, but must dwell on what remains, some of the best and most scandalously under-noticed work of its generation.

  Nor will he and I wade another trout river together, though in fact, owing to his arthritis, we haven't in fact done that for some years, and of course, sore joints and age aside, the trout fisheries we once cherished have woefully degenerated in his lifetime and mine.

  Lifetime. The abstraction has suddenly turned particular in John's case. I can demarcate it now. It's an integer.

  It's unnecessary to add that my sorrow comes too because, at 64, I realize that John's 76 is a lot closer down the road from me than I've let myself think. I'm truthfully not sure I remember particular events from when John was more or less my age now. I do know that my oldest son, the expectant father, was in his mid-twenties back then, and our youngest child, that leggy near-woman of fifteen in there by the Young Adult section—hell, I thought nothing of loading that three-year-old into a carry pack and heading up one of the local hills.

  I'd done that with all her older siblings, and just now I call to mind a certain hour in January or February of one of those years. The afternoons had come back out of darkness, and a feathery snow brightened the end of day. The son whom we visit here, now the size of an NFL lineman, lay asleep in the pack.

  There seems nothing demonstrably special about the instant: a thumbnail moon above, the clouds behind me between orange and gray, the little brook I step across to head toward home tuneful under its ice. I'd witnessed many similar moments before, and I re-witness them in memory all the time, as these pages have made plain. But just then, feeling the warmth of the child slumped against my back, I had one of those precious moments when the universe seems as skillfully engineered as it could ever be.

  Standing here in such reverie, on 4th Avenue in June in Anchorage, Alaska, I can't say why this reminiscence possesses me. To describe the quality of that earlier experience, I'd try a word like serenity, but, like any abstraction, that would cartoon the feeling. Perhaps I encountered what Paul described in a letter to the Romans: the presence in which we move and live and have our being. Why wouldn't such a thing transpire at a height of land?

  Of course, the mountain I've remembered here on the street, or any of the nearby Whites and Greens in upper New England, would scarcely earn the name in this state. Not that my local eminence, Mt. Moosilauke, isn't as high as any I can see from this urban vantage; it's just that each of these Alaskan mountains is so young, rising almost wall-like right up from the ocean, where sea lions and sea otters and orcas cavort, where halibut of two hundred pounds flap along the floor, where king salmon the size of sharks migrate up the rivers.

  Everything is simply more monumental here than at home, where our sugarloaf mountains testify to eons of wear, seeming to slump toward the incredible sea, not so far—especially by Alaskan standards—t
o their east. This year, a young cow moose wintered over at our Vermont home place, but next to the moose in this region she would look like some odd dwarf of the species. There is bull kelp as long as a school bus on these strands. Even Alaska's mosquitoes make our own appear small. Tomorrow, though I don't know it yet, I'll take a rainbow trout on the fly. A nineteen-inch trout in our own waters is a very nice fish; the one in my net will be that many inches around.

  I will not roar with pleasure over that fish, as I would have in my twenties. And yet for all that, I've been pleased by my abiding capacity for wonder on this trip. It may be somewhat reduced from what it once was, but it's still very alive. I'm looking forward to the float, to contemplating a glacier, to all manner of things, especially in this beloved company.

  But I have left the company indoors. Outside, I remember another signature moment, just after the oldest son was born, when I walked out under late December's round moon, and climbed through two meadows to a stone fence just at the edge of a stand of white birch. I sat on a rock and thought about things, chiefly the miracle of a child, everyone asleep in the small yellow house downhill. I had, and still must have, the woods-rambler's yen, or perhaps anyone's, to be alone when considering the big issues, whether sad or joyous.

  Things are a lot less than joyous just across the road on a patch of green. Though rough laughter now and then rings from it, the sound's somehow assaultive and resigned at once. Some of the winos and addicts—most of them, sadly, native people, farther from their spiritual homes than I from my literal—lie unconscious on the new-mown grass, whose bracing odor seems out of kilter with all I see of humanity there. Others pass their Sneaky Pete and weed from bench to bench.