by Craig Childs
I ask, “Why would you do something like that?”
“Just to fuck with them. To hone my skills. Who knows?”
I say, “You and I are hunter-gatherers, Dirk. We go around poking and prodding, picking things apart, figuring out how the world works. You have the ability to see through veils, see how things are put together. You look at some plain feature and know that written beneath its facade is an entire evolution of motives and actions that most people never witness. You’re tireless.”
“It’s simple assessment,” he says. “You look around and see what’s going on. It’s just business.”
He is balanced at the edge of my trap. I want him to admit it. I want to hear him say that there is a sacred order to the world—not his goddamned illusion that we’re eating the same amount of food every night, but a deeper order of animal tracks and canyons and water holes. I want to hear him say that he is pursuing this order, that his relationship with it is so intimate that it guides him from place to place.
“You told me a story once,” I say. “You tracked a man through light city snow. Why is it that you had the skill to do that, while none of the other cops would have even thought of it?”
He smiles at the memory but comes back to me shrugging again. “It made sense. I was just patient. No magic mumbo jumbo. I just tracked a man.”
It was a jewel thief, I remember, a botched robbery set against a fresh dusting of snow. The man had entered through a store’s skylight. An alarm went off when the seal broke. He ran, taking nothing. Dirk was there fifteen minutes later doing the usual cleanup, compiling his notes on the crime scene. He walked into the alley behind the building, thinking, Is the guy at home watching TV right now? At the bar? Banging the babysitter? He looked below the fire escape ladder and saw fresh tracks in the snow. The thief was suddenly right there, falling helplessly into Dirk’s circle of influence. Dirk stretched far beyond his physical body, carrying his senses all the way to the man, now at home. He started running to find him, closing the gap. The game had begun.
Dirk spent the next half hour dodging street to street, a patrol car following him as he swept in and out of intersections on the thief’s trail. Tracks were lost at crossings, concealed under the prattle of more recent pedestrian tracks, regained along lesser sidewalks.
Perhaps the thief would have taken more care with his steps if there had been a good blanket of snow, a half foot of unshoveled powder trailing him home, naming his every move. Instead, the dusting captured his overconfidence. It also revealed an inexpert fear, his crossing to unlit streets, turning slightly and too often to check his back. Not a professional, Dirk thought. He had noticed the same thing in the bungled break-in, the alarm ineptly tripped—of course there was going to be an alarm on a jewelry store’s skylight! What kind of desperate fool was he?
The tracks were finally absorbed into the anonymity of a multistory apartment complex, but by then Dirk knew the man well enough. He knew how to scare him out of hiding. Two minutes of banging on doors and throwing a commanding voice drove the thief out of his bathroom window. He jumped three stories, hit the ground running, terrified. The chase went through a cemetery, out to a street-lit business district where a throng of waiting cops charged upon him and dragged him to the ground. When Dirk arrived minutes later, he counted coup on the struggling man: He walked up, turned his flashlight butt into his fist, and, with a single thrust, met the man’s stomach and said, “You’re it!”
I say, “Tracking isn’t just a technical skill. There’s something else about it, something more . . . preternatural. I think sometimes that the second you found his tracks in the snow, he knew you were there. Maybe he got up and turned off the light in his apartment and didn’t really know why.”
Dirk looks at me flatly. “Maybe, but who knows?”
“I know, Dirk.”
“You do not.”
“You track an animal until you know so much about it that it actually appears right in front of you. That’s what you did with the thief. You gathered up so much knowledge about him that in a way you became him. There was no way he could escape you. He was inside you, so where else could he go to get away? It’s the same out here. You move around until this place fills you. That’s how you find your way through.”
Dirk wipes his hands on his pants and stands. He laughs, shaking his head. “Fuck that Yoda shit of yours.”
I have to grin in return. My trap just barely swiped him. He has to laugh me off because for a second there, he believed me. And for even longer, I believed myself.
Dirk doesn’t want to step in this fragile soil because it is beautiful and ancient. He wants it kept clean. I don’t want to step in it because tracks would expose me here. This is where the jewel thief made his mistake, feet touching ground, marking a place of vulnerability. You can be named and hunted by your tracks. I do not want to be judged among the healthy, rational citizens of my species. I am something other, a strange animal in hiding, prints found only in the momentary flick and scratch. My movements are those of a desert golem.
Finally, Dirk and I have to cross the soil and leave marks of ourselves. It is inevitable. We stop in front of a stretch that we cannot get around, its tiny castles standing by the hundreds of thousands ahead of us. Dirk goes first, his pace utterly changed. I follow, trying to become light, walking along whatever passage will leave the least mark.
The crust breaks through into powdery dust below, every foot sinking. I glance back, checking my progress. My prints look like bomb craters. Dirk checks his own tracks and stops, complaining, “I hate walking through this stuff with these damned clumsy monkey feet.” I nod to that. We are giants here. Why have we not learned how to float through such places? In general, Dirk and I are difficult to track. We obscure ourselves across the soil in how we step and in the choice of our paths. Still, I see myself postholed into the ground, crashing through fragile universes.
This kind of soil is called cryptobiotic, literally meaning “hidden life”—ineffable and present at once. I know it by its hives of anchored organisms, the expansion rates of its cyanobacterial tendrils, the laminar patterns of its growth. Science is easy for me, with all of its neatly turning gears and ratios. I can put my weight against it in discussions with learners of obscure disciplines: fluvial geomorphology, osteology, microbiology. But I have also known that I should not put my weight there. With this limited human spectrum of sensations, our blithely unquestioned bias of self-superiority, how can I possibly confide in the imagined purity of science? Devastated beneath my boots are colonies of rare desert mosses and these brittle, creeping continents of blue lichen. Spore heads no larger than drops of mist bind and crush. Hard science barely allows for mystery, for true sacrifice and loss. It robs this soil of what I see right now.
I come to a crouch to relieve the pressure of my steps. I drop a hand. My finger searches the textures. I see a sanctuary in this ground, a Byzantine realm of shapes and misshapen, enigmatic creatures too small and too numerous to count. I imagine myself concealed here, an eel peering from subterranean holes, my mouth open to breathe. Here I will never be seen by those of clumsy feet, never even expected by those who thoughtlessly imagine all this to be dead. I am the hidden life in the desert. Cryptobiotic: a living man roving this delicate and barren wealth of earth.
My finger grazes the black scab of a yucca seed, and I press on it so that it breaks the surface crust and sinks below. There it might someday split open and drop a pale, vulnerable root. Hold on to the ground, I think. When you burst to the surface green and tipped like knife blades, this wind-struck environment is all that you will have.
The science tells me of symbiosis in the soil. Nutrients are stored. Vascular plants are at last given earth in which to root in this land of cold stone. Only the armored and the subterranean live here, grabbing on to one another. This is a garden of fugitives—dryland fungi, blue-green algae that were the first life to appear on the planet, and needle-proud cacti aside bayonets of yucca.
The desperate lands, the deserts and the methane-spoiled atmosphere of early Earth are their sanctuaries. They have been alive for a long time. Their memories lie long before the comforts of cottonwood shade and soft grass.
I am one of these, an older creature. I have learned to seek secret traps and crannies, like a low-tide animal waiting for the water to return. But not only on this solid earth have I found my hold. I have rooted into my family line the same way these organisms fasten to this crisp and desiccated soil. I dwell in the genetic shadows of drunken redneck nobles from southern New Mexico, composers of obscene Chaves County bonfires and all-night gun shooting into the stars. In this family of oddities I am infinitely elusive. I am the hidden life. But I must be cautious. This soil is delicate. This bloodline is perilous.
Coyote Hunting
My father was once the fastest man alive. This was not long before I was born. Back then he ran 440 yards in a couple of tenths under forty-five seconds. Those who knew him at the time said he burned. He was not on fire, he was fire. Pure and swift. Not a stray thought in his head—a talent shared among particularly skilled hunters who can run down deer. As soon as word got out about this wire-muscled high school kid from the rural high desert of New Mexico, he became material for the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Then, two things happened.
First, in time trials, he ripped a muscle down his left leg and came limping off the track as if clipped by a bullet. His coach hauled him to the locker room, fisting balm against the injury until the air smelled unbearably of eucalyptus and oil refineries. The man opened a kit, rattled out a bottle of prescription painkillers, fed them to my father, then put him back on the starting block.
Fifteen seconds into the next sprint, his muscle tore along the length of his calf like a cotton sheet. He was a plane touching ground without landing gear, legs, wings, cocking into the air as he rolled. He came to rest facedown, fingers scratching the black surface, sweat dripping uselessly onto the asphalt. Over the dizzy mask of drugs he felt severed muscles strangling around the empty space where there had been nothing but speed. Running was over for him.
Second, his consolation prize for not being awarded a gold medal in Mexico City was being told by his girlfriend that she was pregnant with me. I was the only child either of them would ever have. Their newborn marriage would last four years, punctuated by epic fighting and an affair with the woman he would marry next, whom he would later lose to another affair with yet another woman he would marry.
My blood mother became my bread and butter, my day and night. My father, meanwhile, was a distant and gleaming nebula who took me away to sleep in the out-of-doors. He was a man of excruciating cravings. When running had ended, he turned his attention to the universe at large, burying himself in philosophy and music, Nietzsche’s mind-boggling void and the dark panic of eastern European composers from the late nineteenth century. His birthday gifts to me were Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, and Dvor?255-135?ák’s New World Symphony, which I played endlessly on a tin-speaker toy record player.
I was a worshipful kickstand of a kid. I inhaled from my father what seemed to be a dense vocabulary, following him too closely, sometimes stepping on his heels, causing his summer sandals to snap against his feet. I hummed his words weeks and months after our visits together. Once, he took me coyote hunting, driving me out to the cactus-and-thorn-tree jungle of the Sonoran Desert. I was nine years old.
I loved riding in his rust-cratered truck with its cracked windshield, his hand batting against the window to get the flies out. There were strange smells in his cab—greased chains, the metallic scent of old bullet casings, and the gutted odor of cigarette smoke. I remember a small crescent wrench forever jammed into the track of his bench seat, causing the seat to jar whenever he moved it forward or back. The mass of objects behind the seat included a map of Arizona, a fishing map of Colorado, a U.S. Geographical Survey topographic map of the Chedeski quadrangle on the Apache Reservation, and a badly beaten road atlas.
As we banged over desert hill and dale, I foraged into his garage-sale floorboards, crammed headfirst in front of the seat like a cosmonaut. I found treasures down there—a stopwatch, a crop of ink pens, pieces of nondescript paper trailed with his illegible handwriting, a key chain from the insurance company where he worked.
I remember that he used words such as cosmos and quintessential, leaving me hanging on the syllables, no need for definitions. He venerated the sciences and littered my mind with plate tectonics, supernovas, and velocity, the last one particularly romantic, sliding off my tongue like light. I once announced, to the awe and disbelief of other children, that I had my very own velocity that I kept in my room and would show to no one.
I told lies to my friends at school, saying, Well, my dad is a war hero, a five-star general, when in fact I had no idea what my father actually was or how many stars a general might be able to earn. If I had discovered the truth, that he sold insurance out of a poorly lit office where he spent a good portion of his time thumbing through books on numerology and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, he still would have been a warrior—all guns and heroism.
As I grew up, he kept telling me that I was to live in both worlds, never explaining what he meant. I was baffled whenever he said it and eventually stopped listening.
Gone coyote hunting, we parked the truck along a roadless desert arroyo and got out to watch the sunset, sharing cans of mealy pink Vienna sausages under the emerging stars. I regularly asked if it was time to hunt the coyote yet, and he kept saying that it would happen soon, and to keep my voice low.
My father was lithe and strong, still built like a runner. Eventually, he would lose his shape entirely. He would become corpulent in his last couple decades of life, but for now, he was still a swift man. Leaning against a tire, he sat on the ground near me, an apparition in the fireless dark. Sausage cans rested on their side, their silver lids curled in the starlight. He talked quietly about quasars and neutron stars and the speed of light, gulping at a bottle of Yukon Jack, “a taste born of hoary nights.” He was devoted to astronomy, to its suggestion of realms beyond realms. He explained to me the distances between stars, telling me how something small and faraway does not contradict its being unbelievably huge and close.
I was attracted to this word contradict, a clattering sound like a rock thrown down a well—hitting the side once, con! then again, tra! and finally dropping into the water, dict! I could tell that it was a tool, a mechanical divider between words, flipping like the small metal wing he had called a governor in the truck’s carburetor, turning one way and the next to regulate the flow of fuel. I knew this would be a useful word in any sentence. To contradict: to separate. To not contradict: to bring together, to think of things as big and small at once.
He was drunk when he told me it was hunting time, his voice deep and slow in the dark but still intelligible. He was now calling me “my son,” the tongue-bitten edge of his words leaving me more uneasy each time they were spoken.
“My life is for you, my son,” he said. “Your Dad would do anything for you. You understand me? I have died for you. You will live in both worlds, hear me?”
And then there was a long stare into the stars, the chime of air bubbles up through the glass bottle, and the steady coal of his cigarette.
He stood, snuffing out the cigarette with his boot heel and reaching down to pocket the butt. He rummaged through a box in the truck, orchestrating the sound of bullet shells and batteries, the cab light a strange beacon in the night. He brought to me a dying-rodent call, an oversized wooden whistle. He told me to blow into it with great force, opening and closing my hand around it to vary its sound, using all of my breath until it was time to stop—he said I would know when it was time. This is the sound, he said, of desperation. Coyotes can’t resist their own curiosity. He rigged a handheld spotlight to a spare automotive battery.
Together we created a blaring circus. I threw my lungs into the horrible call, which
sounded like an animal in a garbage compactor. The whistle was immensely pleasing to roar upon, fulfilling a childhood fantasy of shattering all known silences. As I did this he swept the desert with the white shaft of his light. It was utterly unnatural, the light casting surreal shadows, stealing the subtle steamy night colors from everything it touched, turning them barren and dry. The sound continued to screech behind him, a dying goat, a squirrel gutted but still alive.
The light panned until I was familiar with each detail—a particular paloverde tree, the firework arms of an ocotillo grove, the dusty gap of an animal path into a nearby arroyo. I hunted for any shift, a shadow in a different place.
I drained my lungs to the very bottom, filling them as fast as I could so that no pause would come to the coyote’s ears. My mind glittered with colors and sensations, tiny worms of light across my eyes. I felt as if I might fall on the ground, knees buckling, but I could not, not in the presence of the great coyote hunter. So I blew even harder, spinning myself, demanding that the coyote come.
I had memorized the surrounding trellis of paloverde shadows so well that the moment the coyote appeared, its body stood out from those shadows as if burned onto paper. It ran from the thorn trees, head turned toward us over its shoulder. I dropped the call to my side.
The coyote froze across my vision. It was a strong, lean dog with heavyset fur. A tail like a bush on fire. I saw its hips rise and fall through its coat. A bone-struck face with a long, blunt snout. Brown-ringed eyes. The eyes seemed inquisitive and shocked. This was a creature of the wilds, something from out there, with a mind behind the eyes, a mind like my own.