The moose looked down on her from the wall. Its glassy brown eyes were calm. The long pugnacious snout both endearing and cruel. Lost shitkicker hooves that would’ve stomped her to pulp. Rutherford had shot it outside Cut Bank near the Canadian border. She tried to imagine how she’d see him if he wasn’t her father, just another of her customers in the Montana Café. As a simple man, like Sylver did? Or a fool? One of many subsisting in trailers scattered across the Bitterroot Valley, struggling to find work, to keep their dignity, afraid and uncomprehending of the massive forces shifting around them. Rising waters and falling trees. All the mills moving to China. All the wealth moving to hard drives. Their beliefs becoming outdated and repugnant. She knelt and ran her fingers through the wolf’s fur, stroking downward as if it were still alive. She imagined—as she always did—the muscle and bone beneath the skin. The lips relaxing over the bared teeth. The animal standing, shaking itself, and loping off into the woods.
Could it really be why her mother left? The reason she hadn’t called once in thirty years? This spirit here on the floor, its name nailed in wood letters over the TV.
35.
Rutherford’s party went late into the night. Dancing and drinking and shouting. People filled the yard and crowded in and out of The Last Wolf, carrying tallboys and boxes of wine. Pharaoh bounded around greeting everyone with his mouth open, spit flying, his butt wagging in a frenzy. The property was a second home to him. Freed from the responsibility of his death, Rutherford welcomed him as his own. Most days, Ruthie dropped him off here on her way to work.
The entire extended French family was present, including Delilah, visiting from Spokane. A mess of Pompeys also, Kent Willis, Danette and Judy, June and Reed Breed (old and quiet and seemingly content), Cook, Pip, Badger, Tracy Trimble and her twelve-year-old daughter, even M. Happel, alone and drinking determinedly from a handle of whiskey in the far corner of the yard. Pip was five months along and visibly showing. Her skin had a ruddy glow. Her pale legs had thickened to hold her new weight. She threatened Kent with her knife when he tried to get her to have a drink. Ruthie hugged her beside the firepit. She felt guilty for the way she’d pulled away when her friend told her she was pregnant, but Pip was smiling at her. “I want you to be the godmother,” she said.
“Of course,” Ruthie said. “Of course I will.”
They played games of Stump and Cornhole, cursing back and forth in the night. Hand-rolled cigarettes, a bonfire, microwave taquitos; the smell of hair spray, spilled whiskey, and peppermint chewing tobacco. The long folding table was covered with chips and booze. Small bills changed hands. Badger slow-danced awkwardly with Pip to “Low Places.” His chin grazed the top of her head; her arms reached wide around his shoulders. Ruthie danced with him to “Thunder Rolls” and he told her she looked beautiful, with no makeup and the hood of her sweatshirt raised against the chill night.
“You just tell me what to do,” he whispered in her ear as the song ended. He now lived alone in the same apartment above the old mercantile where Ruthie had for years. He could lean from the window and yell for men fighting in the street to keep it down. Terry and Billy swayed by arm in arm. Billy held a burning torch from the bonfire in his right hand. He waved it at Ruthie, as if they might charge together into some unseen battle. His expression was loose and drunk. Dawn was off visiting her daughters in Ronan—she hated to be around drinking of any kind. Young Evers Pompey trailed the Frenches with a plastic Super Soaker full of tequila, threatening to burn the entire place down. Ruthie touched Badger’s cheek. She felt a softness within, as if the sharp edges were finally wearing away.
“You owe me a painting,” she said to Badger, and turned and walked off by herself to the corner of the yard, where Rutherford’s topper trailer still stood, unused, rusting on its metal poles driven into stumps. Behind it, the nailed front boards were all that remained of her blind. The view of the Breeds’ yard was completely blocked by dense brush that had grown up over the years. Moses’s grave was covered also, his little bones somewhere underneath. Ruthie leaned back against the topper. She watched the people of her life together: laughing, dancing, shouting back and forth. Pharaoh charging around their legs.
Rutherford and Terry drank shots with Happel over a stump. In the way they leaned together—Terry much taller with his long black hair, Rutherford below, the eternal little brother, always going first—she saw a love that transcended logic. Shot through with starlight as it hurtled toward its demise.
THE PARTY WAS still in full swing when midnight struck. Things turned rowdier, louder, more prone to fighting—the mark of any quality gathering in the Bitterroot Valley. Kent Willis lumbered around the periphery, preparing to speak. The Breeds were sitting on folding chairs under the porch lights with Rutherford and Sylver. Pushing seventy, June stood and twirled in a full circle, her long orange dress flowing around her. The sight made Ruthie feel like a little girl. The moon overhead was tinged red, reminding her of the red in her childhood hair. She looked into No-Medicine Canyon beyond the yard. The great mystery that had always loomed on the edge of her life.
Perhaps all her visions had meant to tell her only one thing: You are not the center. There is more here than you can see.
Danette tugged Kent’s shirt, begging him not to make a scene, but he ignored her and climbed onto the fence. Perched unsteadily on top, he began a speech about Rutherford that quickly transitioned to a screed on the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. The irreparable damage its scientists were doing to the water table, and how the weapons being made there would surely be turned on the valley’s populace. Danette stood below him with her arms outspread in her flower-print muumuu, as if to catch him. Everyone else went back to the party. Sylver turned up the music. Cook and Pip flail-danced in front of the fire. His hair, loosed from his hairnet, whipped around his face. She stomped her pale legs in the dust. Her body seemed to orbit around the faint rise of her belly. Badger watched from a camp chair with two beers in his lap and a dreamy smile on his face, as if in the one-bedroom apartment where he now lived beside them, he was finding a peace of his own.
Janine was already engaged to another cop in Stevensville. Ruthie figured she’d be pregnant before the wedding.
The wheel-turns of fate. Ruthie ran her fingers along the cool, corrugated side of the topper. She thought of how her father had slept out here when she started puberty. The memory made her sad. This can’t last, a voice said in the back of her mind. Pharaoh came running out of the fray and butted against her legs. Sylver had tied a blue bandanna around his neck, giving him the dashing look of a sailor. Ruthie scratched his ears. He smiled up at her and flopped his pink tongue over her palm. “I know,” she said. He licked her again, then lifted his head, sniffed, and bolted. He made a diagonal across the corner of the yard and ran headlong, without hesitation, into the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon.
Stunned, Ruthie stared after him into the darkness. She tried to comprehend how it was even possible that he’d gone inside. Over her lifetime of avoiding the canyon, it had taken on an impossible quality to her, as if it physically could not be entered. Another dimension, protected by a force field all its own. She wanted to laugh. Thirty years of her and her father’s myths shattered in an instant by an idiot pit bull who ran straight inside.
And now she was going to go after him.
The moon echoed her sentiment with its reddish halo. Ruthie patted the front of her sweatshirt, hoping to find she was secretly armed. There was nothing in her pocket except a cigarette and a plastic lighter. This struck her as even funnier. She laughed out loud as she walked along the edge of the yard in the shadow of the woods. She stopped briefly to look back at the dancers and the fire and her father. His eyes met hers, though she knew he couldn’t see her in the darkness. He’d always been watching her, even when she was far away and felt alone. She realized how much more alone Pip had been, without a father. An earthy petrichor smell wafted out from the canyon and she heard a distant sound that may have bee
n a bark or the warning cry of a waking demon. A cigarette? That was her protection? She shook her head, wished briefly for Sitka, and went in.
The walls towered damply around her. Ruthie was surprised by how much light the canyon held as soon as she was outside the fire’s glow. All of its surfaces were reflective—the wet walls, the water trickling over the rocks on the bottom—and while it seemed to swallow light during the day, it now held the moon and starlight in harvest. The sounds of the party were replaced by silence. The air tasted ripe, fecund. By going into the canyon, she was also descending into the earth.
She passed the place where she’d seen the creature. She searched the shadows, as if it had been waiting for her.
The walls widened the deeper she went, an entire world opening up. She picked her way over boulders and skirted the softwood trees that lined the waterway. The sliding water seemed to reshape itself as Ruthie’s perspective shifted. Shadowy specters moved around her, flickering from her periphery. The petrichor filled her lungs so deeply that her drunkenness fell away and she felt a heightened awareness, as if she could sense movement miles ahead and walk all night. She wasn’t afraid. Her life in the valley had come to a place of acceptance. If the canyon held an entrance to the underworld, she wanted to find it. If there were spirits inside, she wanted to meet them. If five hundred years of Salish warriors waited for her in its depths, she’d surrender.
She opened her mouth but couldn’t bring herself to call out, afraid her voice would shatter the canyon’s spell. She sensed that Pharaoh was safe, ahead of her.
The night swam. A huge scree field filled with chunks of granite like cubes of ice tumbled down in the moonlight. House-sized boulders rose from the creek, with still pools in bowls carved from their surface. Water skeeters drifted across. Dead trees, charred black from an ancient fire, lifted their bare branches to the sky. Exposed roots reached down toward the heart of the earth. Ruthie walked and walked, letting her mind go still to match the night. Her life receded behind her. She’d always been here between these walls and always would be. Both she and her father. Along with the trappers and miners and generations of Salish and the People of the Flood. All held by their love of the valley, and its colossal, encompassing mystery.
The hood of Ruthie’s sweatshirt was snug around her ears like fur. She hummed her favorite song. My fellow lonesome rider. May you one day escape the darkness and experience the light.
She suddenly felt giddily happy.
Pharaoh waited for her in a cathedral-like opening surrounded by western larch—the trees that lit the hillsides yellow in the fall. It was a clearing like Eden. Untouched. He stood directly in the center awash in moonlight, a broken rabbit in his jaws. The brown fur on his chin was stained with blood.
“Oh, you,” Ruthie murmured, kneeling before him. He gently placed the animal at her feet, then stepped back, frightened and proud. Not knowing what he’d done or what it meant, but only that he’d done it. It was a feeling she understood. She was a hunter just as much as her dog, but it was the life of prey she loved above all else. The innocence of things that moved through the grass seeking only to live another day. She picked up the animal, feeling its last heartbeats, the muscles that had leapt toward the sky, and the bones that had propelled it across the earth. Its fleeting animation like the breaking of a wave.
When she looked up, a herd of elk stood shimmering in the clearing behind Pharaoh. Their translucent hides were marked by bullet holes. She saw the vacant-eyed cow and the helpless calf that had gotten caught in the fence, still trailing barbed wire from its hind leg. The bull stood apart from the others with blood caked across his neck. His antlers were raised to the sky. It was the same herd she and Badger had helped to slaughter. The valley’s long and exacting memory. Spirits in the penumbra of the visible world. The bull looked into her eyes. His rack was silhouetted against the canyon wall, the tines stretching upward impossibly in extended shadow.
The cupped hand of his antlers seemed like it could hold a small planet, and she saw within it all her losses: Sitka, her mother, her childhood, the wild landscapes of her home. Her burdens held for her until she could bear the weight.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The bull flickered. Only the cupped hand of his antlers remained distinct above him. The rest of the herd began to disappear also, rustling against one another as they did, with the rippling memory of life. The bull raised his front hoof and by the time he brought it down he was gone. Ruthie knelt in the dirt with the dead rabbit in her arms. Sorrow and gratitude ran through her. She stayed this way, Pharaoh lying beside her, until the first rays of dawn impaled the eastern sky.
36.
The party was over when Ruthie returned. She walked silently across the can-and-butt-strewn yard with Pharaoh at her side. Cool mist around her, dew at her feet. She gently pushed open the door of The Last Wolf. The room was trashed: a patch of vomit in the far corner, stools overturned, and the satellite unplugged but the TV’s blue screen glowing like a portal to another world. Kent Willis lay passed out facedown, shirtless, on one of the couches. His ass rose and fell, lifted well above the cushions by his girth. Danette was on the couch opposite him. Her muumuu was pushed up, revealing lacy black garters and stockings. A secret, sexy, wanting woman. Ruthie smiled. All of them just the same. She set the rabbit on the bar as an offering.
A dart was lodged between Wiley King’s eyes. Another protruded from the moose’s neck. Ruthie removed them and tossed them onto the floor. Then she knelt and gently shook the cans from the wolfskin rug. They clattered against the fallen stools. Willis grunted but didn’t move. Danette looked like she might be dead; a bit of drool trembled between her lips. Ruthie smoothed down the fur, rolled up the rug, and held the bundle to her chest. She backed from the shed and jogged across the yard to her truck. Pharaoh jumped in beside her.
Back in her small house, below the replastered wall where Wild Woman with Tame Horses had hung, she unrolled the rug on her bed. She undressed, lay down upon it, and fell asleep. She slept for the entire day, more deeply than she had in years.
She dreamt of her father swimming in Lake Como, below the high rock teenagers jumped off, where Len had carved his chair. Sediment danced in the water around him. Bubbles streamed past his nose. He was turning slowly, sinking. His eyes were open and he smiled up at her atop the cliff, motioning for her to join him. His thin hairless legs kicked his body downward, as if there were something he wanted in the depths. His belly sagged over his ragged briefs. His thinning hair flowed above him. He outspread his arms and used his large hands to pull himself deeper. Ruthie wondered if she should be afraid, if she should save him, or let him find whatever he was looking for. She was surprised by his agility, his fearlessness in the water, as if secretly it had been his home all along. He stroked on to the silty depths, where huge silver fish traced S-patterns through the scintillating darkness. Ruthie saw other things moving down there, larger creatures, but they were too shadowy to make out. Her father reached down into the silt. He burrowed himself within it, wriggling deeper, until the only sign of him was a faint cloud among the silver fish.
Alone, Ruthie looked up. The sky rippled far above her. A summer sky she’d seen before as a little girl, the day she threw the rock at the boy. She saw herself atop the cliff looking down, with the green, kidney-shaped rock in her hand. On the edge of her life, on its precipice. All of it spread before her. She wanted to jump but she was afraid. She wanted to swim but she was bound to the earth. She wanted to hurt no one, yet people had brought so much pain. Her cheeks were flushed red from the cold. Clouds framed the very tops of the trees.
“Jump,” she heard her father say.
Ruthie did. Plunging down through the cold air, the rock in her hand pulling her like an anchor, rushing to meet her destiny, something warm and triumphant opening in her chest.
VI
37.
The creature lurched. There was no other word for it. It lurched on two long, bo
ny legs out from willows on the edge of Jon Sitka’s pond. Ruthie Fear crouched behind the duck blind, straining to see through the dawn mist rising off the water. A damp luminescence, the last remnant of night, made everything appear distant and unreal. She held her breath. Her heart thudded. She realized she’d been waiting for this moment for twenty-five years.
The ducks hadn’t moved. They floated placidly between two bright green algae blooms, oblivious to the strange being behind them and the hunter in front. The Auto-5, old and hard-recoiling, was warm beneath Ruthie’s fingers. It was the same gun her father had used. He’d given it to her for her thirty-second birthday. Her knuckles were white on the barrel.
The creature continued across the pebbly beach. It lurched softly, making no sound. At the water it paused, leaning forward, its legs like stilts in the soft light. It was even taller than Ruthie remembered, nearly twice her height. The sides of its kidney-shaped body were covered in grayish feathers. Tufted tail feathers rose from its rear. Its black underbelly gleamed like an eel. There were two joints in each of its legs and they wavered horribly, an awkward, deviant unsteadiness. But the worst part, the part that brought a sickness to Ruthie’s stomach once again, was that it had no head.
The front of its chest continued in an unbroken plane over its collar and back along the ridge of its spine. Nothing protruded. No neck, no eyes, no mouth, no orifices at all that she could see. Yet still it was leaning forward over the pond as if it wanted to drink.
Slowly, Ruthie raised the shotgun to her shoulder.
The creature tipped to the left, like a deer cocks its head when sensing a predator. It faced Ruthie with its eyeless mask. She knew it was a new being, something never before seen, but she feared it, as she always had. Another blight on an earth that was becoming more blighted by the day. Toxic ponds, clear-cuts, extinctions, droughts, wildfires, disease. The bees dying. Her life marked by the steady progression of houses and stores across the valley floor.
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