Going to the Sun

by Jean Craighead George

  “You always were a clown, Marcus. What’s this ‘can’t hunt goats’?”

  “Dad, please listen to me. Goats reproduce very slowly. Only one kid survived on the Jaw this season. Only one kid, do you understand?”

  “So? Only one survived because only one was shot last year, the one, uh, Will got. We’ll take three and next year there’ll be three more. These animals must be hunted to keep them healthy and vigorous. That’s why there’s only one kid up there.”

  “Dad, four goats have already died. The law of compensation doesn’t apply to mountain goats. You can’t shoot them.” Nervously he pulled out the charts, maps and notes. Melissa’s Bite Chart fell on the floor. Her feminine handwriting stood out tellingly. Marcus picked the chart up, stuffed it in his pocket and glanced up to see if his father had noticed. Apparently he had not. He was replacing the gun.

  “There are only eleven goats on the Jaw, Dad.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he roared. “You must’ve had your head in the sand. I estimate there are at least a hundred sixty.” Marcus took out the map.

  “I counted them, Dad. There were fifteen; four died; now there are eleven. I have them all marked. I know there are no more. Only three kids were born this year. Two died. Do you understand? It has nothing to do with hunting. Kids and yearlings need nannies for a long time. And they need them because they’re teachers. They learn about the cliffs, the grasses, the avalanche trails from the nannies. Without a teacher they die. They don’t compensate, Dad.”

  “Marcus.” His father’s voice was low, controlled. “You’re wrong. You’re wrong. This has been studied and proven by scientists. You’re just a kid.” He folded his arms. “Animals must be hunted or they die of starvation and disease.”

  “Not goats, Dad,” Marcus said firmly. “They have no enemies, never did. The wolves and lions were never their enemies. Goats live too high. But the mountain peaks, avalanches, and their society are. These forces keep them in balance.” He spread his notes on the table. “And their society is wise. Old billies constantly butt to test the herd. The unfit fall or run off to die. And, Dad,” he said, pointing to a circle on the map, “I have data to show that if a kid loses its nanny, it will be butted out of the society and die. Kill a nanny and you kill two goats, not one. And not even you can tell the difference at a distance.”

  His father’s nostrils flared in anger. Marcus went on.

  “The herd dropped from fifteen to eleven while I was studying them. And there were no hunters.”

  “Marcus!” his father roared. “I’m not going to listen to this junk.” He wheeled around and his eyes narrowed. “Maybe the rumors I hear are correct. Maybe that little Morgan girl did find you and make mush of you.” He stepped close to Marcus.

  “Rumor has it you two are together. Are you?” His voice rose in rage. “Did she tell you this bunk?”

  “Dad, you can’t hunt the goats. I have the evidence. I have the proof. These creatures of the high peaks are their own balance.” He faced his father squarely. “They do not need man to hunt them and keep them healthy. They keep themselves healthy by their social system. Avalanches and cliffs cull out the uncoordinated and unschooled.”

  “Marcus.” His father shook his fist. “Get out of my house. Leave. I hired you to do a job and...” He picked up the notes and the maps of the Jaw. “...you’ve come back a snivelling butterfly.” He shook the papers in his face. “Thanks for these. At least you marked down the trails and ranges.” Marcus reached for his papers. He needed them if he and Melissa were going to give lectures about the goats. His father snapped them away.

  “Get out, get out,” he shouted. “I refuse to argue with you any longer.”

  Marcus glanced around the house. His mother was not home. She must be visiting neighbors. He picked up his pack.

  “Dad, give me that map and my notes. I need them. I’m going to travel and lecture. I’m going to help save the mountain goats from hunters. Please give me my work.”

  Ed Kulick held on to the papers. “Get out,” he said. “And if it’s true you are with that girl, that disgraceful daughter of a thief and robber, I’ll disown you.”

  “I’m married to her,” Marcus said proudly.

  His father’s face whitened, then flushed. His eyes gleamed. Marcus picked up his pack, turned and sorrowfully walked through the door. He shut it behind him and glanced briefly out on the river. “Good-bye,” he whispered.

  Marcus ran the mile to town. That night he slept in a barn near the Mission.

  In the morning he jogged to the crossroads. He saw Billy Fred in the station, gassing up a truck at the pump. Marcus wanted to cross the street and shout that he was Melissa’s husband, but time was running out for the goats.

  He darted to the hotel as the sun came up behind the Mission and lit the tall stone belfry. The night clerk snoozed at his desk under the clock. Marcus quietly sidled up to the register and saw that three men from New York were in the third-floor suite. He ran swiftly up the narrow steps, knocked on the door and waited. Eventually a plump man of about forty opened the door. His hair fell in thin tufts across a bald pate and his eyes were puffy with sleep.

  “I’m Kulick,” Marcus said, using his last name for influence. “Please let me in.”

  The bewildered man opened the door to him.

  “I’m Porter, Fred Porter,” he said and gestured for Marcus to sit down. “What’s up? We’re not leaving till this afternoon, are we?”

  “I know you’re here to kill goats,” Marcus began, “but please listen to me. The goats you will be driven to—in a four-wheel drive...” He paused to let this sink in. “...can’t be hunted. There’re not enough of them. They will die off if you take even one. And they will never come back to that mountain. I know, I’ve been making a survey of them for months.”

  The man offered Marcus a cup of coffee and seated himself in a wooden rocker. Frost on the window cast a cold light in the plain room.

  “John,” he called, “come here. Where’s Larry? Better listen to this. This kid’s been studying the goats we’re going after.”

  Marcus was relieved. Possibly they did care. He had no notes or maps, but he did have Melissa’s Bite Chart. He took it out of his pocket, spread it on a table and began to tell the story of the goats of the Jaw. The man John came to the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Kulick and his wife,” Fred explained to John, “have named and numbered all the goats. They got more than a twenty percent loss in the herd just in summer. I’m a hunter but I’m not about to kill off the mountain goat. I’d just as soon get an elk. What do you think?”

  John picked up Melissa’s chart and sat down with it as Marcus told the story of Remus.

  “Four killed and three born this year? That is something,” John said. “I don’t want a goat badly enough to threaten a herd.” He glanced over at his companion. “Okay, Fred, I’ll go after something else. Larry,” he called, “come here.”

  Larry was an older man, pale and nervous. He seemed less sure of himself than the other two. A goat head on his wall, Marcus sensed, would mean a lot to him, but he listened as Marcus repeated his story.

  “I’ll ask Ed Kulick,” Larry said briskly. “He’s studied these critters. I’ll take his word.” He picked up the telephone.

  “He will tell you to shoot,” said Marcus. “We argued last night. He believes in hunting and in hunting goats.” Marcus could hear the phone ring in his father’s house. After a pause he answered and Larry told him the problem.

  “Yes, you can shoot,” Ed Kulick barked. “That kid’s gone soft.” His father’s voice crackled so loudly on the wire everyone heard him. “I’m still planning to pick you up at noon. We’ll camp on the Jaw and be ready for Old Gore at dawn.” The phone clicked off. Larry, John and Fred silently stared at Marcus.

  “I’m inclined to believe the kid,” John finally said. Fred nodded in agreement. “Larry, you do what you want, but I’m not spending two thousand dollars to wipe out th
e goats. There are only eleven up there. I know enough to know that’s not good.” He tightened his robe belt. “This Bite Chart is impressive.” To Marcus he said, “Looks like you’ve proved that goats don’t overgraze.”

  “My wife did that,” Marcus said proudly. “Melissa got down on her stomach with the goats and observed their eating habits. They select their food very carefully, snipping, pruning, letting flowers go to seed and propagate. The goat ledges are always lush and beautiful.”

  Fred Porter pushed back his thinning hair and asked Marcus what else he had found out about the mountain goats.

  “That they have a nation or a territory, and it’s only three miles square on the Jaw. They don’t wander like the deer and elk, and they don’t come back to an area once they’re shot out.”

  John was listening attentively too.

  “You kids have lived with these goats all summer?” he asked.

  Marcus felt inspired now; he had listeners. He described the death of Remus, the teacher-nannies, the butting billies, and he spoke of Melissa and her love of animals.

  “Some day,” he said, “there may be a genetic sport among the goats. It will be a smart animal that needs a nanny for only one summer of teaching. When this animal turns up, it will be Melissa who can raise it. She will teach it how to live on the mountain and with man. We’ll raise herds of wild goats that learn quickly and we’ll restock the peaks where they have been hunted out.”

  Marcus’s eyes glistened with hope and belief in the needs to be done. The sun burst through the curtains. Daylight had come. It was time to return to Melissa.

  He thanked the hunters for hearing him out.

  Marcus ran to the highway and caught a ride back to the lumber road on the north side of the Jaw. By eleven o’clock he was half way up the mountain.

  “Melissa! Melissa!” he called. The bulldozed lumber road was not like the smooth, needle-covered foot trail on the other side of the Jaw, but was puddled and rough. The stones rolled under Marcus’s feet and threw him off balance. Fighting the bad footing, he ran on.

  “I’m coming to get you, Melissa!” he cried. “We are leaving this mountain forever.”

  11

  THE KID

  Melissa was not at the tent. Marcus sprinted to the far end of the ledge and studied the path around Sky Lake, now purple in the steely rocks. No one was on the trail. Marcus felt cold. What was happening in the Chalet? Where was Melissa? He tried to convince himself that she had decided to visit Aunt Jerome one more night and would get up at dawn to hike in. Restlessly he paced the ledge, glancing again and again at the distant pass.

  By three o’clock, clouds had gathered over Tent Glacier and the black stone bowl became an instrument for the wind. Gales blowing into crevices trumpeted mammoth sounds to the sky. Ledges became whistles. Rocks were drums. Marcus shivered. He picked up a few pieces of wood and went into the tent. He lit a small fire and pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders. He tried not to think about Melissa. Painfully he turned his thoughts to the fury and darkness outside. He hoped it meant snow. Snow would camouflage the goats and deceive the eyes of the hunters.

  Many hours later Marcus heard the goats bedding down in the twisted firs. The wind concert had ceased. A silence as enormous as the universe descended upon the mountain top. Hunched over his fire he listened for the whispering breath of snow on the tent and the footsteps of Melissa.

  A minute after midnight he put on his parka and walked outside. The sky was clear and the moon shone brightly, dimming the stars. The hunting season had begun.

  Marcus heard a bleat. He jumped the windbreak and found Molly and Jason feeding in the blue-white moonlight, as they had done on the summer nights of the full moon. They lifted their heads to Marcus. Jason bucked like a big billy and cavorted to meet him. Marcus wondered if he, like himself, missed the joy of Melissa’s presence. He must. He baaed and cried.

  Suddenly Marcus realized Jason was in danger. “Shoo,” he cried. “Go hide. With all that winter fur on you, you look as big as your mother. Some dumb hunter will shoot you.” Jason stared at Marcus. Marcus lunged at him and, head down like a billy, he drove him into the windbreak. Then he turned on Molly. He ran her to the shelter.

  Below Tent Glacier, Medusa, Paul, Cassiopeia, Helen and Romulus were cropping the grass in the moonlight too.

  “Beat it,” Marcus shouted. “When the sun comes up, you’ll stick out like beacons against the black rocks.”

  A year ago he had dreamed of such a hunting dawn—clear air, white goats, black mountain. Now he glanced at the sky and tried to conjure up a storm that would turn the mountain white and cover the goats in the snow. He recalled Melissa’s threat to leave him if he shot Old Gore, then chuckled over the change in himself and chased the goats into shelters.

  The sky lightened and the stars went out. In the dimness Marcus saw Roman Nose moving toward the green ledges near the waterfall. Molly and Jason were below him. His father’s hunting camp was just around the peak, probably, at the end of the logging road. A half hour’s walk and the men would see the three goats on the rocks. And because of the road and the clear-cutting they would be above them. No goat ever looked up for enemies. They looked down because they lived higher than all the predators. And so they would be shot from above without knowing they should run.

  Marcus took a roundabout route and got between his goats and the trail up the Jaw; then he charged. He ran straight toward Roman Nose and Molly. They lifted their heads and wagged their tails in greeting. He stopped and picked up stones. “Go, shoo, baa,” he shouted. Roman Nose stared at him curiously; then, ears back in fear, turned around and trotted toward Tent Glacier. Orion came out of the rocks. Marcus heaved a stone at him. Orion ran, stopped, and ran again.

  Marcus charged Perseus. Finally all the goats were on the run, their ears twisting in confusion. Occasionally Molly stopped and glanced back. Her large plaintive eyes looked as if she felt deceived, but he did not care. He screamed, threw rocks, ran down the saddle toward Melissa’s Meadow and up to the Tent Glacier. There he drove Molly, Jason and Orion onto the ice with the rest of the herd. They vanished on the white and he sighed. He could barely see them although they were but a few hundred yards away. Only Old Gore was missing, but he, Marcus knew, had not become old without wisdom. He must be somewhere in the rocks, watching from a safe hideout.

  At breakneck speed Marcus returned to the tent, picked up his day pack and started down the trail to meet Melissa. From time to time he leaped onto a rock and scanned the path around the lake. She was not in sight.

  At one switchback he was faced toward Tent Glacier.

  Here he stopped. The goats were all running toward the Jaw, Old Gore in the lead. Helen and Romulus were galloping along the top of the bowl. He counted, nine, ten—all eleven goats were on the move. They were white targets. A good marksman could now hit them from as far away as the chimney of the Jaw, and they were fast making themselves targets for an amateur as they ran on toward the peak. If the hunters had gotten up at daybreak, eaten and started off, they would be almost around the Jaw by now. The goats would be dead in mere minutes.

  Marcus climbed a boulder to see why they were running full speed toward the Jaw, ears back in fright. At the base of Tent Glacier a figure glided like a shadow over the rocks.

  “Mountain lion,” he gasped as the silvery-brown beast stalked along a ledge, leaped to a boulder and bounded after the goats. Rocketing up pinnacles, loping along shoestring sills, the goats easily outran the cat, but ran on to new danger.

  “What’s a mountain lion doing above timber?” Marcus cried, angry that this misplaced beast had destroyed his effort to save the goats. Lions never came up into goat country unless they were starving to death, and even so they rarely caught them. The goats, from their lookout rocks and pinnacles, could see the cats on the treeless tundra before they arrived, and put miles between them. The lions did not like this open country. They dwelled down in the forest where they could hide
, stalk and pounce.

  “The road,” Marcus said. “The forest is gone and low meadows where the lion’s food—elk and deer—dwell have been slashed to the ground. All that remains of lion land is raw earth and stone rubble. It will take five hundred years to mend the forest and return the elk and deer.”

  Marcus was correct; only gophers and snakes remained, and the lion was forced to hunt goats.

  As Marcus watched his herd run toward the hunters, he knew that even the elk and deer should not be hunted on the Jaw. They, too, were in jeopardy. A domino had fallen when the lumber company had clear-cut the mountain, and now the trees, elk, deer, goats, ptarmigans, conies, badgers, mountain sheep—the whole community of animals—was vanishing with the plants.

  A rifle cracked. It zinged and echoed around the walls of the bowl. The rocks fractured the sound into minor cracklets that pinged and whistled and finally died in a shriek. Then the bowl became utterly silent. The shot had come from somewhere near the chimney. Marcus searched the rocks to see which goat had fallen. None were in sight. He scanned the ledges and snowfields, the falls, trail, and the walls. There were no goats anywhere. With the first shot of the season the goats had remembered the sound of the hunter. They had pulled back into the protecting niches of the Jaw, into its fissures and ice-chiseled hideouts, into the secret spots nannies had shown to kids and yearlings for ten thousand years. Perhaps the hunter had missed.

  From the chimney came the sound of whooping. Marcus looked back. Two men were moving toward the rocks. He trained his field glasses on them and saw his father and the man named Larry. They were grinning. Their faces said one thing: they had gotten a goat.

  Marcus cried out and ran toward them. He had to know which one was dead. Molly? Old Gore? Should either of these be the victim, the social life of the goats was in jeopardy—without a provider or a teacher. He ran and clambered and ran again.

  At the bottom of the falls he stopped. Jason was coming down the stone steps, bleating and crying. The young goat’s eyes were wide and fear-filled and he gawked as if in shock.