“You probably could,” Art swung his head up and down between the hollow of his shoulders. “They have a redwood up north they cut a hole in and you can drive your car right through. That’s something, driving your car through a tree, it’s a godsend to drunk drivers,” he turned his smile around to see if his sly joke hit its mark.
“Yah, I seen that tree,” Dick jabbed at his nose. “That’s world famous, the highway goes right through it. Sure gives the kids a hell of a bang, they got out and shot a whole roll of pictures of it, sign there says threequarters of a million people go through that tree a year, that’s more people than they got in the whole State of Nevada.” He blinked his eyes at the sun beginning to spill off the trees, the redwoods were thinning, giving way to the smaller pines that stood skinny and short in the shadows of the red trunks that swelled up around them. The road ahead was slashed with layers of sun breaking through the gaps of sky opened by the smaller pines between the big trees. Then the road lit up, everywhere the gold shot through the green, the sun broke free all the way down the road, the redwoods were gone, split, chopped, sawed, cut, pulled, dragged, logged out fifty years before. Growing out of the earth once shadowed by the redwoods’ great height sprouted fifteen, forty, sixty foot high, second, third, and even fourth growth of ponderosa, lodgepole, and sugarpine like weeds, and outnumbering all of these, douglasfir. From the main highway the people passing through in the summer saw nothing but mile after mile of redwoods along the road and from blind curves could catch the view of the trees rolling like emerald waves into the haze of sky, thinking there were more of these giant trees than man could cut, but the spears of green they saw in the distance weren’t a continuation of the redwoods, they were fooled, the redwoods had been sliced and yanked from the earth. “What the hell happened to all the redwoods,” Dick noticed for the first time that the trees surrounding him had shrunk down to half their size.
“Logged them all years ago,” Art smiled, and turned the car around a bend that spread out on a plateau, the earth stripped, the dirt crisscrossed and rutted from the weight of tires supporting the long trucks heavy with the dead bodyweight of cut tree trunks piled high and strapped with chains to the steel platforms of the trailers parked in hulking rows like battleships at anchor. He pulled the car right to the door of a turquoise colored aluminum trailer as long as a house, and stopped.
“Art, you old buckaroo,” a man in a green hat shaped like a puptent with VFW LOCAL 1218 sewn in bright gold letters on the side opened the door and jerked the driver out, patting his shoulders, the big hands slapping down on both sides of Art’s smile. “Are you ready to bowshoot? Tell me, are you ready to hunt you some venison?”
“I’m ready Colonel. I’m ready to shoot,” Art’s smile was about to blow off his face, his head was pumped so red with the slapping on his shoulders.
“I knew it. I knew it. I knew Art was coming up here to get hisself a buck. Any man who can sell whiskey all day and still stay sober knows where he can get his meat.” The Colonel jammed his head in the window, knocking the green hat halfway up his head, exposing the thinning gray hair still cut down to a neat half inch. “You boys unpack your gear, there’s coffee and doughnuts over by the equipment shack. Birdsong, you come with me.” He led the way into the trailer and pushed a path through the men down to one end covered by a map that marked every rock, tree and road for eight square miles.
“Well Birdsong, come to guide us to all the little Bambis?” Sheriff Davies turned the melon of his head and showed the side sliced off in his face.
“Give me that pointer for a second, Hal,” the Colonel pulled the rubbertipped stick from the Sheriff’s hand. “Now look here Birdsong, this is where we are, at head camp Mama down here on number three mesa,” he tapped the rubber on a flat blue line. “Now over here, on number seven mesa, on the other side of the mountain is Sheriff Hadley and Captain Tom at head camp Papa, how we’re going to work it is the way we always have, two groups will move from the sides of the mountain to the ridge, we’ve got a lot of territory here, about two and three-quarters miles square, more than we’ve ever had, more men too, last count was something like forty, so we’ve got to fan so we can sweep up all the loopholes, you know how they’ll backtrack on you if you’re not careful. The top of the ridge was logged clean years ago, it’s a big area, about the size of four football fields, a lot of meadow grass where they feed. They’re going to beat hell out of there soon as they know something’s up so we have to keep tight and beat them back up, lot of clear area, should be some good clean shootin’ if we hold them to that clearing. What’s important is both parties hit the meadow at the same time, if not, if one side gets there too soon, it’ll run ’em, and going downhill they’ll break through our lines and hardly nobody’ll get a clean shot. So what you’ve got to do is keep your people in line, don’t let any hotshots in front of you, if nothing else he might get an arrow through the neck. Now when a man gets a hit it’s his job to tote his game forward to the next break-road, they’ll be a rearguard coming up to knock out any deer that slip through, and a man coming down in thick brush might be mistaken and get an arrow up his ass, so it’s important the man with the game tote it forward and drop it on the road, he should tag it with a piece of colored ribbon that will have his number on it, each man will get a roll of ribbon. They’ll be jeeps going around the break roads after the advance has cleared out total and they’ll do nothing but pick up and haul game back to head camps. Another thing, if there’s any bad talk over who got a kill while you’re in the field, just flip for it, that’s the most democratic. You’ll be assigned ten men. You’ve got to keep count of them and stay out front, you know where the game is likely to hole up so you can kick ’em up or set them for a shot for those coming behind. You know what to look for, you’ve got eyes for that sort of thing. You know your way around these mountains like the way around your bathroom and I’m sure you’ll find the quickest and easiest way up to the top of this one without somebody bustin’ a leg. Some of these bow-hunters we got this year have never hunted high-country before, and never shot at anything but paper targets on a bale of hay and don’t know their dick from a snake. So you guide good, keep ’em moving even and don’t let them scatter, most important thing is to bring your line onto the meadow exactly at three. Dorn, the Superintendent for the Mill says his men have been working the low country all around the ridge since snow broke and have been running the game up there like rats to an island, and he estimates they’ve run a hell of a lot of game up there into the sun and grass. He’s seen tracks five deep running across the road; maybe as much as eighteen, twenty-five bucks, and so many does he wouldn’t even want to make a guess. You got any questions about what I told you boy? Good. You’ll get paid when we come back to feed. Now let’s get out in the field and haul ass.”
Behind him the march broke out on two sides. The line whipped through the trees like a rope, the red baseball caps of the men bobbing like floats of a fishing net, the heavy rubber camouflage parkas dropping down below their knees; the leather quivers full with arrows strapped on the rubber backs made an unnatural sound as they scraped the slick green material. The mountain fell straight down before the advance, the land cruel and twisted from earlier advances of men and machines, littered with cuts of thick trunks sprawled across earth, chunks of their bodies scattered for hundreds of yards, isolated in pools of sawdust, far from their torn roots shooting blindly to a sliced stump. Birdsong held his hand up. The line of marchers stopped, the arrows pulled tight, pointing up the mountain. Before him the narrow width of a deer trail broke through the manzanita and opened onto a grassy shelf swirled soft from the bodies of sleeping animals. He picked up one of the black droppings sprayed through the grass and rolled it between his fingers like a raisin, popping the hard shell until his fingers pressed the warm core; they were running not more than ten minutes ahead. He turned back to the line, the red caps glinting in the sun like flames, the red caps that would keep the men from mistaki
ng one another for deer, the parkas fading their bodies into the mountain left only the red heads floating, separate, attached to nothing, bobbing alone. He lowered his hand and the march began again, steady through the sun until the cut of fireroad was reached and they waited for the rest of the marching ring that spun around the mountain to come even with them. As far as the eye could see, off to the sides and down below, the isolated flashes of red burned brilliant in the brush, lacing their way forward until even with the road, and on it all the way around, spaced two hundred yards apart, the red flames burned in the sun as cold sweat breathed under the tight rubber of the parkas. The mountain continued to give way before them, drawing itself up narrow and steep, tumbling slides of rock down behind the invading boots. “DEER!” Birdsong lifted his head from the tracks he was following and saw the doe, standing next to a fallen log, her mouth dripping as the wide eyes took in the bright flare of advancing caps. She took a step forward and the arrow caught her in the heart, burying itself up to the feathers, her eyes snapped open and she took three quick steps toward the red flames before her and went down on her front knees as if in prayer, and collapsed. “Holy shit ace! What a shot!” One of the men broke from the line, his body panting past Birdsong. He reached the doe and wrapped the flash of yellow ribbon around a hind leg. “Ninety pounds it’ll dress out to!” He hefted the body on his shoulders and started up the mountain, almost running beneath the load he carried easy on his back. “DEER!” Birdsong heard the shout and the sound of arrows whistling as their feathers sliced through the air. There was another doe off to the side of him, three arrows hit her side and brought her down, “DEER!” All around the mountain the cry filled the air and yellow ribbon was being lashed around the thumping legs. The march halted at the next road, the men dropping the dead weight from their shoulders, letting the still wet hides settle into the dust.
“Ain’t it something,” Art came trotting down the road, his smile oiled with sweat and caked with dust. “Ain’t it something Joe. I ain’t hit yet but I got off some good shots. They’re in here like weeds. What a shoot. Ain’t it something.”
Birdsong turned away from the wet globe of the face bouncing around beneath the red cap. The marchers were ready. “Let’s go!”
He could see the top of the ridge now, the blue sky flattened out over it, all around him was the heavy breath of men, sweating their waste beneath the rubber of the parkas, beating through the brush, their arrows pulled tight, leveled toward the ridge, aimed at the blue sky. “DEER!” The sound of hooves beating on rock split the silence in front of the marchers, brown bodies exploded from bushes, around squat banks of manzanita, in front of the height of cut logs. “DEER!” They were running everywhere, the arrows catching their bodies and tossing them to the ground. The fawns moving their young legs with the complete muscle of their short days, trying to match the stride of the does in front, stumbling on the loose rock, sliding down into manzanita and climbing up again on the shaking of their young legs to catch an arrow in the thigh, or breaking free and running in the path of their mother, until they sprawled over her dead body as she dropped before them with the feather lanced sticks sunk in her hide.
“Goddam! My buck’s running with all those does and fawns!” A big man charged from around a tree in front of Birdsong, his red cap off, the rubber of the parka slapping against his body.
“Get the hell out of there! Dick! Get the hell out of there!”
The big man kept going, cutting through the juts of rock, tripping over logs and the small thrashing bodies of fawns. “There he is! That’s my buck!” He raised his bow as an arrow passed through the rubber of his parka and out the other side of his shoulder, spinning him around, his blue eyes shot wide with the shaft that pierced through his flesh, staring straight down at Birdsong, “Shit!” The word flew out of his mouth and collapsed his body at the top of the ridge.
“He ain’t hurt bad,” the man who was cutting the parka off Dick with his knife looked up at Birdsong. “The wound’s clean, ain’t bleedin’ much. Shock is all. Shock knocked him out. I know how to handle it. I seen much worse than this in Korea. Jesus Mary and the Apostles look at that,” he had the rubber of Dick’s parka cut off his body, but his eyes weren’t looking at the wound, but across the flat top of the ridge; coming out onto it from all sides was the blaze of red caps, running across the open space were the bucks, herded together, charging the length of the meadow, trying to break the advancing lines, the brown hulk of their bodies moving swiftly as the arrows thudded into their flesh, dropping them quivering to the grass.
He waited until the jeeps came to pick up the bodies; walking through the field, the tall grass crushed from the last flight of the bucks, the arrows that missed their marks snapping beneath his boots. He got into one of the last jeeps descending from the ridge, the sky flat and blue over his head as he watched it, rubbing the back of his neck until the jeep pulled to a stop in front of the trailer as long as a house. From the lower branches of the trees brown bodies were slung by ropes, their bellies split, the blood running onto the heap of guts beneath them. The air was filled with blood and smoke from the pits dug into the ground and whole animals laid out over the coals, sending up the smell of cooking flesh. He climbed down from the jeep and felt his leg go slack, refusing to support him, and he realized that since the beginning of the morning he had been limping. He leaned against a pickup and braced his weight, rubbing his neck again, looking up at the flat blue sky.
“Great sport,” the Colonel jumped down from the door of the trailer and slapped him on the shoulder. “Great sport. Great shoot. The best ever. You were good. Did all right. That fella who caught the arrow’s not in too bad of shape at all. The company doctor took care of him right off. He was walking around before they took him down to Portola. He was in your group too. That’s not so good,” he dug a hand into the pocket of his pants, looking straight before him as he pulled the bill folded like a letter and pressed it in Birdsong’s hand. “It’s twenty. Same as always. Hey,” he jerked the green hat from his head with the VFW 1218 sewn in bright gold on the side and slapped it against his leg. “How do you like my new truck?” He knocked his knuckles against the high fender and rubbed his palm over the letters stamped in the steel of the tailgate. “How do you like my new FORD.”
3
HIS HEAD was up. The Sun was up. The Birds were out. The yellowmen were everywhere. From the deep squint of his eyes the Indian watched their gold sweatbacks bang steel into solid ground. Behind him the Iron Road was nailed down to the mountain cliff of the Sierra. In front of him was the burntland, waiting for the yellowmen to bang their way across the swollen faces of brown hills. Beneath his boots the Earth would not stop trembling with the rhythm of steel driving into its skin. The higher the Sun pulled itself up the more relentless the rhythm of the yellowmen became. The full hammer weight of their sledges swung and poised above their heads, cascading down in a perfect rain of strength, pounding the Iron Road for all time into the Earth’s crust. Beneath the thickness of his checkered jacket he sweated and watched, moving back along the ironrails that had just been laid. The rhythmic driving of slamming steel filled the air like the breath of two hundred yellowmen chained into a relentless iron beast; the sound of slapping steel roared from their lungs as the Iron Road grew. The Indian followed back along the ironrails toward the wall of mountains until the yellowmen appeared far behind him on the horizon, the single movement of their massed bodies balanced over the hotland like a human blade searching the soft spot to plunge through into the Earth’s heart, cutting the vital muscle throbbing blood through their own heads, releasing them from the pounding rhythm of their bodies. The sight of the yellowmen swelled everyday in his head like a cloud. The cloud pushed all other thoughts from him. There became only the single yellow beast sucking the air with iron lungs, feeding off the fierce heat thrown down by the Sun, piercing through the days with a straight Iron Road. The fire-eating Engine crashing down the ironrails threw black smoke
into the blur of Sky as it followed the track laid by yellowmen. The yellowmen led the way into the desert, pounding a new time in the heat, all movement swung with sledges lifted over small yellow shoulders. The yellowmen had no Spirit, they gave birth to the fire-eating Engines. Never did they look back to the mountains or to the flatland slapped out to their sides. Their eyes saw only straight ahead and down, where they nailed the hide of the Earth. They were not to be trusted. Between their legs were yellow Snakes. If a woman had the Snake in her it would poison her. The blood would run from her until she died. The yellowmen together had many pieces of metal coin. They would give two bags of gold coins for the meat of the Cat in the mountains. The meat gave poison to their Snakes. He himself during the white days had followed a big Cat in the snow, coming close behind the Dogs howling through ravines. There was a night with no stars, just a Moon and the snarling sound of Dogs clawing at the trunk of a tree. At the top of the tree sat the Cat, golden and deep within the fur branches until the blast of the rifle ripped open his side and dropped his bleeding weight in the snow, the silence of his open eyes reflecting the Moon. It took him three days to pack the Cat out of the ravines to the Chinese camp outside Truckee. When the yellowmen handed over the two sacks of metal coin the Cat lay at his feet with the blood of its body frozen through the golden fur like red stone. Red Cat the yellowmen called him. Captain Red Cat. He buried one of the sacks of metal beneath snow in the hollowed root of a tree and took the other into Truckee where he spent half of it on six glasses of whiskey and five hands of Blackjack before going down to the big house where the candles burned and the women with skin that smelled like flowers waited. He bought the one with the red hair between her legs. He gave her the half sack of metal in the dark room before he put his hands all over her body and kissed her under the arms until she laughed so hard he threw her down on the floor next to the bed, feeling the silent spread of her flesh going out beneath him while his hands covered the swell of her breasts. In the morning he woke up on the floor, he could hear the woman snoring from beneath the blanket on the bed. His eyes burned in his aching head from the glare of Sun that came through the window and hit the opposite wall. He left the house and walked down through the place where the huge boxcars with ironwheels stood on the silver track in a line against the Sun. He picked his way through the dump, kicking at the fresh heaps for food. It was early for his people to have come and searched through the previous night’s waste. Beneath a yellowed layer of scattered lettuce and the black sog of coffeegrinds he kicked up the hide of the Cat The yellowmen had quickly stripped out the meat for their poison and tossed the ragged fur away. On a pile of chicken bones rotting back into the Earth rested the severed head, its eyes glazed white and blank in the Sun. He raised the hide and shook it free of garbage. He went down through the trees past his canvas shack and dipped the hide in the river, the blood washing free as he knelt at the bank, watching the red stains melt and disappear in the cold blue. He laid the hide face down on a rock and raked the skin clean of fat and dark tangled clots of meat He tacked it high in the Sun on the bark of a pinetree. When the Sun had seared the skin brown he took it down and worked it soft in his hands with the juice of a root before he took it back up the hill to Truckee and bet it against one of the Mexicans who laid down two ten-dollar pieces of metal. The Mexican cut the deck and shuffled the cards, then slammed them on the table and told the Indian to draw. The card the Indian pulled from the closed deck was the King’s son. He thought the skin was still his and he could put the gold metal in his pocket, but the Mexican drew the very King himself, flipping the painted card on the gold fur of the skin draped over the table. The Mexican laughed and shouted across the room to the man behind the bar, “A whiskey for the Captain! Two shots of whiskey for Capitan Rex, a born gambler!” Captain Rex gulped the glasses set before him and the ancient song of Birds fluttered in his blood. He threw his head back to let the wings beat from his lips and his eyes caught on the crescent cut of the glass pieces swaying from the chandelier, their clear images reflecting off one another like a thousand Moons. He sang at the Moons like every nightbird in the forest had been captured and set free in the square of the room. Only the light shining through the cut glass bore witness to his dark song. When the song died on his lips the Birds settled down in his chest, their ancient sound still clinging to the bare walls until it echoed itself into silence. The Mexican brought his fist down on the table, clanking the two empty glasses as his laughter roared into the face of the Indian, he wiped the tears from his eyes as he shouted, “Feed this Injun Capitan a firewater! He sings like the hummingbird, crows like the owl, croons like the woodpecker and shits like the hawk! The christdamn things these hombres won’t do!” The Indian stayed in the saloon until the Sun dropped out of the Sky. His lungs raw from bellowing the songs of Birds that scattered from his lips after each whiskey bought for him washed into his body with a sudden knot of heat. He stumbled outside through the door and reeled only for an instant before his boot hooked on the stub of a nail in the boardwalk and tripped him face down in the mud slush of the street. He staggered his way down the road below the town past the silent bulk of the boxcars and over the hills of human waste growing out of the dump. Pieces of snow began to fall from the Sky like dumb gentle white flowers. The rolls and peaks of the dump glistened in the blurred swirl before him. The dark shapes of the women floated like shadows between the scattered cans and broken glass glowing from the touch of iced air. The bandannas wrapped around the women’s heads and across their mouths left only the brown slash of their eyes exposed as they bent and dipped into the piles of rubbish with numbed fingers hooking up useful prizes quickly hidden from sight in the weighted gunnysacks slung over their shoulders. The women looked across to the stumbling man, their outlines obscured in the quickening gentle fall from the Sky. They watched him as one as he moved hot and clumsy through their territory, his clothing dark with mud, the wild toss of his black hair turning white from trapped bits of snow. He could see the one who was his mother. She stood inseparable from the others, one of the flock. No sign passed from her to the man who was now almost gone from sight, weaving down through the pines toward the sound of the river racing itself through sharp rocks.
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