by Jim Harrison
When I reached my assigned position I glassed Joe walking purposefully but zigzagging, jumping, and laughing. When he reached the den he lay down and dumped the meat on his chest. After a minute or so the three pups emerged and fed off his chest, standing on his body and quarreling over the food. The mother was now sitting about thirty yards away watching the scene. After the meal Joe crawled around playing tag with the pups, and at one point a pup rode on his back while chewing on his shirt collar.
I must say that though these animals were neither tame nor trained I didn’t for some reason see the event as all that extraordinary. Coyotes owe their survival to their exceptional wariness. A naturalist acquaintance once told me that he suspected that for every coyote you see at least a dozen have seen you. So at the time it was amusing rather than impressive but then what did I really know about such matters? I had the slightest notion that the coyotes might trust Joe because he had become part of their world from which the rest of us are excluded for good reasons. And this particular species according to Native lore has quite the sense of humor. I might add that a Department of Interior game biologist I met told me that he had glassed Joe in early June walking alongside a smallish bear. This incident seemed troubling to him because the other two men who had accomplished this were professionals, like himself, in mammalian studies.
* * *
So much for this for the time being, dear Coroner. You wanted to know everything I know about Joe Lacort and I’m giving it to you in my own fashion. It’s unlikely that anyone but the two of us will see this report. Since I don’t know you how can I count on you? A burgeoning writer of sixty-seven must come to the conclusion that if no one will make use of me I’ll have to make use of myself. The essential question of how did I live this long can be easily dismissed. The question of why I don’t recall much of my life is more to the point. The placid convulsions of business tedium can last for months. Once in a Chicago restaurant an adjoining table was celebrating one of their members’ one-thousandth autopsy in the city’s pathology department which did not make them stand back from their porterhouses and strip sirloins. In Joe’s defense, if I’m in a ruminative state, I can recall certain walks I took up here back in the 1960s. I suppose because they made a great impression on my senses. If I try to remember my business activities from that period I hear in my mind’s ear the sound of shuffling papers, file cabinets opening and closing, the soft thump of one book being piled on another, police sirens from the street, the yawn or cough from my secretary and the clatter of her typewriter. I see the walls of my office, the somewhat grimy window, the comforting prints of eighteenth-century French and English landscapes. One saved the great ones like Caravaggio and Gauguin, our own Winslow Homer and Maynard Dixon for private moments at home. I didn’t want my colleagues who were nice enough, but to whom the entire earth was zoned commercial, to see my favorites. My colleagues were predatory androids.
Ann came back up a short week after she left. The news was bad but then I was already aware of the problem. Joe had turned off his telemetric device two days before out of anger with the Department of Natural Resources. In late April, before the foliage was out, Joe had built a small shelter for himself on a hummock surrounded by a large swamp, all on state land. The illegality of it made Dick nervous as a former D.N.R. employee, though he drove one smallish load of lumber to the nearest road, about four miles from the site. It had taken Joe several laborious trips to haul in the building material, from which he’d return muddy to his breast from traversing the swamp. Unfortunately a D.N.R. spotter plane had noted his shelter but it had taken until June for them to tear it down. Dick had tried to interfere to no avail saying that he doubted anyone had been on Joe’s hummock since the huge white pines had been timbered off ninety years before. But rules, of course, are rules. The law is the law. Shit is also shit. The government’s central evil is its willful failure to distinguish the quality of intent or motive. Dick had driven over to Marquette to see the director who was a new, young popinjay, a hotshot who despite Dick’s thirty years of service gave Dick only a scant five minutes before chortling that the law was the law despite Dick saying that he doubted Joe would last out the year. After all, what would they do with him when all of the back roads are impassable with snow and the temperature has reached as low as forty degrees below zero?
When Ann arrived about noon I had spent a sleepless night worrying about the problem and there was also the mistake of calling Roberto in Chicago for advice. I was especially fragile because the moon had been nearly full and a buck deer had snorted nearby the cabin, a wheezing ghastly sound like the base note of a broken harmonica. The only worse sound is when a coyote takes a fawn or a rabbit and the death cries are those of a child.
In any event Roberto sounded bleak and hungover from God only knows what perverse activities. He suggested that I was trying to control Joe as a substitute for my non-existent children. This was unacceptable, also meaningless given the real situation. Roberto also suggested that my motives were a concealed stew in that there might also be some sexual envy, a sore point. A closed-head injury is far more likely to cause impotency in the male than an increase in sexual activity. Was I jealous of Joe’s tupping every heifer in range? Of course. When the beautiful Ann and Sonia weren’t around he was capable of using the hard-earned money from collecting botanical specimens on any porcine tavern tart. One of them weighed at least three hundred pounds. When I teased Joe about this he merely said, “She excited me,” then went on to something else, his attention span shorter than an average child’s.
In other words when Ann arrived I wasn’t in the best of shape. Though it was only noon she asked for a gin on the rocks and she stood there wide-eyed when I opened the freezer compartment for ice cubes because the freezer also contained Joe’s “frozen zoo,” a couple of dozen dead birds he had picked up on his interminable walks. Edna Rathbone had refused to store them in her freezer and I saw no harm in their being in mine. Ann plucked out a blackburnian warbler with its Halloween colors of orange and black, hefted its tiny weight, and then drew it close to her eyes, shaking her head in wonder. I explained that very few people find dead birds in any number, but mostly because they’re not looking and their eyes aren’t sharp enough. I told her that an ornithologist had once explained to me that a hawk would be able to read a newspaper’s classified ads at fifty feet. At the time I thought his words quite homely. Why not a Shakespeare text, or even a bird book at fifty feet?
Ann caught me out, wondering if I was suggesting that Joe could see better because of his accident? I said I doubted it because I had checked with a neurologist friend of Roberto’s and he said it was unlikely indeed but that he may have gained greater visual concentration and attentiveness of a peculiar sort. That certainly would be enough to explain his finding so many dead birds. She laughed and described how closely Joe had studied her body, then downed her gin in two swallows, perhaps out of embarrassment. I made us a little lunch of two veal chops I had thawed for my dinner, plus a smallish portion of pasta al olio with garlic and parsley. She politely held off on her desperation over Joe’s absence until lunch was finished and then she became difficult indeed.
Obviously she had read too much on closed-head injuries what with a medical library at her disposal in East Lansing. I suspect such information is ill digested unless you are professional and can see the body’s whole picture. For instance, I can read until the cows come home about the billions of synapses in the human brain and be amazed and at the same time not comprehend fully what precisely these neurons and synapses spend their time doing. Perhaps the layman is better off mutely accepting that the brain is the least fixable portion of the body. I do recall studying lamb brains in a butcher’s shop on Rue Buci in Paris and wondering just how these little pink bundles are the reservoir of the lamb’s character and function, the totality of its lambdom as it were.
Ann had gotten up at four A.M. to make the drive from East Lansing so I sent her up to the sleeping loft
for a nap. I went outside and sat in a lawn chair on the deck overlooking the river as I have done when troubled for sixty years ever since I discovered riverine hypnosis as a child. The breeze off Lake Superior three miles distant was stiff enough to keep away free-flying noxious pests, and the river herself quickly absorbed the obnoxious pests in my brain. In Chicago Roberto has had to dose me with everything from Valium to Zoloft to Prozac but once I’m up north a few days I can abandon my chemicals in favor of river staring. I’m not saying that a river is a cure-all, only that your brain is unable to maintain its troubled patterns while in concourse with a river. I have supposed that this is the unacknowledged reason why so many people trout fish when most are so incompetent that there is little hope of catching trout on fly and fly rod.
I dozed off and suffered a ponderous nightmare about being lost in the woods, and having my limbs and trunk liquefy and be absorbed by the landscape. When the Gestapo (of all people!) found me I looked the same but I knew an essential part of my character was gone and I wept. Naturally I woke up weeping and then became quite lost thinking of my worthless dog Charley. Years ago in our divorce negotiations neither of us wanted the dog. At first we both pretended we did and both laughed quite heartily, strange behavior in a divorce, when we admitted how willing we both were to give Charley up. Charley’s survival tactic seemed to be to have no character whatsoever, but to adopt the character and gestures he was called upon to deliver. He spent his life being non-committal, perhaps because I vastly overtrained him when he was young, gathering in my usual bookish way a dozen texts on how to properly train a pup. My wife insisted I had trained Charley so exhaustively that he had ceased being a dog and only acted doggish when not in my presence. We had a very large yard in Winnetka, a dreadfully monochromatic place, and if I looked out the window secretively just after daylight I might see Charley acting the dog. If he saw or sensed me at the window he would merely sit there come rain or shine. I was in my forties at the time, the true salad days of my illusion of control over my world. It was an unthinkable surprise when my wife said she wanted a divorce which proved her quite untrainable! Since I had willingly given her the house in the divorce she decided finally to keep Charley herself so he wouldn’t have to move away from his friends, the other neighborhood dogs that stopped by for a visit. While with me Charley ignored other dogs as if I might not want him to recognize their existence. Much later on I perceived it was lucky we didn’t have children.
Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it’s really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit. In my case there has recently been a certain amount of cynical laughter, but also mourning with each year owning its tombstone. Time always appeared to be repetitious. Would that it were at this late date. Yesterday I went with Dick Rathbone to visit a mixed-blood Chippewa who is reputed to be the best tracker in this part of the Upper Peninsula. He knew Joe slightly and pronounced him to be a “spooky fucker.” This man was not at all a drugstore or Hollywood Indian and we were made as uncomfortable as possible standing there in the junky front yard of his log shack. He said he would be glad to look for Joe if he was lost but then that wasn’t the problem. Dick insisted that Joe might be in trouble without his medication and the man said, “There’s nothing to help that boy.” He also added that since Joe was angry he was better off being by himself in that if you’re angry in town you might end up in jail. He also said that no one, and especially Joe, could be found around here except by his or her permission. All you had to do to agree was look at the density of forest that enshrouded the small clearing and shack.
I had told all of this to poor Ann right after lunch and she kept repeating, “We could at least look.” Fool that I am I finally agreed, thinking it really doesn’t get dark until after ten-thirty in the evening at this northern latitude and it wouldn’t hurt us to drive around aimlessly and perhaps call out “Joe” into the greenery.
I left my beloved deck chair, went inside the cabin, and made some coffee. I’ve always liked good hotels where they bring your coffee to your bedside so I carried a cup up to the loft. She was sleeping on her tummy in her bra and panties, a lagniappe to say the least. Her figure was quite boyish except for her bottom, which was definitely not boyish. She glanced sleepily over her shoulder and whispered, “You’re such a dear.” I politely averted my eyes but then managed to hit my hip on the bedpost, slopping some steaming coffee on my hand. Naturally it hurt but in a millisecond I decided to pretend it didn’t. I think she saw all this clearly and when I put the coffee down on the bed table she swiveled into a sitting position and rubbed her eyes. I rushed off, though carefully in that my legs seemed distant and I certainly didn’t want to trip on the stairs. My mind as an indiscriminate aperture had taken dozens of photos of her in her pale blue (I think it’s called “robin’s egg blue”) bra and panties, her modest-sized rounded bottom, and when she sat up, the diminutive bird’s nest of her “mons veneris.” Being several years away from such perceptions I did not realize how vivid they could quickly become.
Of course what could a coroner care about an older man’s rather fitful lust? But then in the first place it wasn’t my idea to write this little report. Right now I’m trying to describe the change in my perceptions that allowed me to unequivocally understand what happened to Joe. I daresay no one else understands more than the part of the story that is directly contiguous to them. For instance, when Joe says in his notebook, “I have looked at my beech tree from a hundred directions,” I know both what tree he’s talking about (not the tree in his accident), and also his rather playful experiments in perception which, because of his injury, he was capable of making. In his notebook he is frequently talking to God, or better yet, god. It took me a great deal of time to understand his peculiar language partly because I did not yet truly understand my own. For instance, in nearly all of our language we are emotionally locating and making a case for ourselves every bit as much as we do in the more childish forms of prayer. Joe showed me once, fortunately an easy walk, a particular enormous beech tree on the west end of Au Sable Lake that he looks at from a hundred different directions marked by sticks and five different distances in concentric rings. To him the beech tree has a discerningly separate appearance from each of the five hundred points, so much so that it boggles him, amuses him, makes him joyful, or did anyway before he drank too much of Lake Superior. Multiply this by the thousands of places he walked and studied, perhaps in a less structured manner, and you’ll understand my initial problem of comprehension. Who is this man? He laughs like a baboon in the Lincoln Park zoo.
What a mudbath we had, literally and figuratively. We “moved out” at four in the afternoon, to use a military term. Ann packed a quart of water and some pathetic granola bars, the kind of hopeless yuppie food that even our dog Charley rejected, sulking off with his tail well under his belly. I have a fine four-wheel-drive vehicle, quite expensive but then I wished to counter unpleasant early memories of getting stuck with Dick Rathbone on our brook trout forays. We stopped at Dick’s and Edna, kindly enough, packed us two pieces of chocolate cake, then asked me to point out on Dick’s wonderful old detailed D.N.R. map just where we were headed. Edna is somewhat cynical about me in that we had a mild flirtation forty years before, and it’s well known in the local community that I’m phenomenally incompetent in the woods, no matter my nearly sixty years in the area.
Of course I should have known better but then I never do. Once in Paris I was nearly in tears from not being able to find my hotel and when I received surly instructions I was only a block away. I had stayed at this hotel for years but then streets in the Varenne area look very similar except to locals, though this is a lame excuse. Besides, while looking for Joe I’d have Ann with me, though later it occurred to me that Ann was scarcely a licensed guide.
For Edna’s benefit I made a tiny “x” on the map in a blank area which cartographers call a “sleeping beauty.” There’s nothin
g there except itself and two small crisscrossing logging roads, and a smallish creek that emerges from a large swamp that surrounds the hummock whereon Joe built his small shelter which the D.N.R. heroically tore to pieces. These are the same people who readily issue permits to Republican developers to defile the environment in every conceivable way. Edna immediately told us not to go into this area but I assured her we weren’t getting out of our vehicle, which still stopped short of pleasing her. Everyone tries to please Edna. Joe even willingly accompanied her to the Lutheran church one Sunday morning so the congregation could pray that he be healed. This is not to be confused with the new American use of the word “healing” where the most terrifying human disasters are expected to be healed before the blood is dry on the pavement.
So off we went with light hearts considering Joe’s supposed predicament. He was much more likely to be truly lost in town than in the woods. Someone saw him in a back alley checking his compass. For curious reasons having to do with intuition rather than circumstantial evidence I have suspected that Joe and old Edna have made love now and then. She’s in her early sixties but why not? She’s rather handsome in an odd Finnish way.
We were barely out of town before Ann began talking about things with a great deal of emotional content: love, death, art. I said I had to work into these areas slowly. She actually tweaked my ear before saying that maybe I was like the rest of the culture, especially the movies, where deep emotion is expressed by car crashes, gun shots, explosions, someone staring at a computer screen, meaningful glances, women on top in bed juggling around in a bow to the faux feminists. No one could actually talk about anything deeper than the cultural patina presumably because screenwriters and directors have no talent at meaningful human speech.