In the Loyal Mountains (7 page)

He used to come down twice a year with his mules to buy groceries—flour and beans, mostly. One spring he didn't show up, so Joe, Young Terjaney, and A. C. Rightman went to check on him, and sure enough he'd died during the winter.

It was windy up there, windier than you could imagine, Rightman says. They found the hermit about a mile down the trail leading away from his cabin. The body was frozen in a crouch, as if he'd known he was sick and had been trying to crawl into town for help—though crawling would have taken weeks, and we couldn't imagine what ailment he might have had that would have prevented him from walking but would still let him crawl.

“Probably a bellyache,” Rightman will say, stroking his chin, if you ask him. The mules were gone (“Grizzly,” Rightman says), but inside the cabin they found the old man's cats, living on mice and melting snow that had dripped in through cracks in the roof during warm May afternoons. All the cats ran out the cabin door except for a large, placid orange one, which Rightman took home to his wife, Marva. Cats can live to a ripe old age in the valley, and dogs can reach the age of twenty or twenty-five; it's not uncommon. Rightman and Marva never gave the cat a proper name. “Hey, hermit's cat,” he'll say, “get down off that table.” They had the cat for a long time.

For a headstone the hermit has a rough piece of granite pulled off a talus slope, just like the others. John Skabel-lund, the blacksmith, chiseled the old man's name on it—
The Hermit
—but he's buried off in a corner of the cemetery, as far away as possible from everyone else. It was a joke at first, but I can tell now that a few people feel bad about it.

“You can bury us next to him,” Janie says, speaking for her whole family.

 

The other cemetery is way over on Yellow Creek, up in the mountains. No roads lead to it. Deep woods, grizzlies, and elk surround it, and nothing else. Only women are buried there. The place is a mystery to everyone.

Not many people know how to find it. Rightman says its run by outsiders, and he must be right. He took me up there on skis one winter. Somehow it feels safer in winter.

The women's pictures—taken when they were young, and framed in glass—are inset in the marble headstones. We ask, how do you carry such heavy stones into the deep woods? The headstones are inscribed with the women's names, their dates of birth and death, and that's all. None of them smiled for their pictures.

Some of the pictures are fading—there are headstones from the 1910s and 1920s. But there are new ones too: the newest is marked just two years ago.

“It's weird,” Rightman says. He takes a long drag on his cigarette, finishing it, and flicks it toward the nearest white stone. “It's got to be easterners of some kind.” He's probably right. They all look fashionable, like women from New York or Philadelphia. None of them are from out here, we can tell.

Whenever a car drives into the valley—almost always lost—and stops at the Mercantile for gas and directions, those of us who are around will pretend to be interested in helping. But if that car's got eastern license plates, what we're really checking for is where they've got the body hidden.

“Packhorses,” Rightman says. “If they die in the winter, they freeze ‘em, then bring ‘em out here in the spring, at night, and take ‘em up there on packhorses.”

But it's muddy in the spring, and we never see hoofprints.

Rightman shrugs, draws on his cigarette. He knows he's right. “Got to be packhorses,” he says. “That's all there is to it.”

My theory is that the women were taken there during a thunderstorm, so the rain would wash away the tracks of those who buried them. I'd like to hide in a cool bower, to see them do it. I want to watch them digging in the rain, the rain beating on their backs.

 

The other night I saw a cougar run across the road in front of me, flashing across the sweep of my headlights, chasing something.

This is a beautiful valley. I wake up smiling sometimes because I have all my days left to live in this place. I hike up into the hills, to a rock back in the trees, and sit there and just look. On the road far below, a friend drives past in his truck, moving so slowly it seems that a man on foot could walk alongside and still keep up. I watch until the truck disappears around the bend. When dusk comes, purple light slides in from all directions.

The lights in my friends' cabins begin to come on then, glowing patches in the dark.

H
ALLOWEEN
brings us closer. The Halloween party at the saloon is when we—all three dozen or so of us—recollect again why we live in this cold, blue valley. Sometimes tourists come when the summer grass is high, and the valley opens up a little. People slip in and out of it; in summer it's almost a regular place. But in October the less hardy of heart leave as the snow begins to fall. It becomes our valley again, and there's a feeling like a sigh, a sigh after the great full meal of summer.

We don't bother with masks at the party because we know one another so well, if not through direct contact, then through word of mouth—what Dick said Becky said about Don, and so on. Instead, we strap horns on our heads, moose antlers, deer antlers, or even the high throwback of elk antlers. We have a big potluck supper and get drunk as hell, even those of us who do not generally drink. We put the tables and chairs outside in the gust-driven snow and put nickels in the juke box and dance until early morning to Elvis, The Doors, or Marty Robbins. Mock battles occur when the men and women bang their antlers against each other. We clomp and sway in the barn.

Around two or three in the morning we drive or ski or snowshoe home, or we ride back on horses—however we got to the party is how we'll return. It usually snows big on Halloween—a foot, a foot and a half. Whoever drove down to the saloon will give the skiers a lift by fastening a long rope to the rear bumper of his truck, and the skiers hold on to that rope, still wearing antlers, too drunk or tired to take them off. Pulled up the hill, gliding silently on the road's hard ice, we keep our heads tucked against the wind and snow. Like children dropped off at a bus stop, we let go of the rope when the truck reaches our dark cabin. It would be nice to be greeted by a glowing lantern in the window, but you don't ever go to sleep or leave with a lantern burning like that—it can burn your cabin down in the night. We return to dark houses, all of us.

The antlers feel natural after having them lashed to our heads for so long. Sometimes we bump them against the door frame going in, and knock them off.

 

There is a woman up here, Suzie, who has moved through the valley with a rhythm that is all her own. Over the years Suzie has been with all the able-bodied men of the valley. All, that is, except for Randy. He still wishes for his chance, but because he is a bowhunter—he uses a strong compound bow and wicked, heart-gleaming aluminum arrows with a whole spindle of razor blades at one end—she will have nothing to do with him.

At times I wanted to defend him, even though I strongly objected to bowhunting. Bowhunting, it seemed to me, was brutal. But Randy was just Randy, no better or worse than any of the rest of us who had dated Suzie. Wolves eviscerate their prey; its a hard life. Deads dead, right? And isn't pain the same everywhere?

Suzie has sandy red hair, high cold cheeks, and fury-blue eyes. She is short, no taller than even a short man's shoulders. Suzie's boyfriends have lasted, on average, for three months. No man has ever left her—even the sworn bachelors among us have enjoyed her company. It is always Suzie who goes away from the men first.

When she settled for me, I'm proud to say that we stayed together for five months, longer than she'd ever been with anyone—long enough for people to talk, and to kid her about it.

Our dates were simple. We'd drive up into the snowy mountains, on those mountains that had roads, as far as we could go before the snow stopped us, and gaze at the valley. Or we'd drive into town, sixty miles away on a one-lane, rutted, cliff-hanging road, for dinner and a movie. I could see how there might not have been enough heat and wild romance in it for some of the other men—there'd been talk—but for me it was warm and right while it lasted.

When she left, I did not think I would ever eat or drink again. It felt as if my heart had been torn from my chest, as if my lungs were on fire; every breath burned. I didn't understand why she had to leave. I'd known it would come someday, but still, it caught me by surprise.

 

Besides being a bowhunter, Randy is a carpenter. He does odd jobs for people in the valley, usually of the sort that requires fixing up old cabins. He keeps his own schedule, and stops work entirely in the fall so he can hunt to his heart's content. He'll roam the valley for days, exploring the wildest places. We all hunt in the fall—grouse, deer, elk, though we leave the moose and bear alone because they are not as common—but none of us is clever or stealthy enough to bowhunt. With a bow, you have to get close to the animal.

Suzie doesn't approve of hunting in any form. “That's what cattle are for,” she said one day in the saloon. “Cattle are like city people. Cattle expect, even deserve, what they've got coming. But wild animals are different. Wild animals enjoy life. They live in the woods on purpose. It's cruel to go in after them and kill them. It's cruel.”

We all hoo-rahed her and ordered more beers.

She doesn't get angry, exactly. She understands that everyone hunts here, men and women alike. She knows we love animals, but for one or two months out of the year we also love to hunt them.

Randy is so good at what he does it makes us jealous. He can crawl to within thirty yards of an animal when it is feeding, or he can sit so still that it walks right past him. Once shot, the animal runs but a short way—it bleeds to death or dies from trauma. The blood trail is easy to follow, especially in the snow. No one wants it to happen this way, but there's nothing to be done about it; bowhunting is like that. The others of us look at it as being much fairer than hunting with a rifle, because you have to get so close to the animal to get a good shot. Thirty, thirty-five yards, max. Close enough to hear water sloshing in the elk's belly, from where he's just taken a drink from the creek. Close enough to hear the intakes of breath. Close enough to be fair. But Suzie doesn't see it that way. She'll serve Randy his drinks and chat with him, be polite, but her face is blank, her smiles stiff.

Last summer Randy tried to gain Suzie's favor by building her things. Davey, the bartender—the man she was with at the time—didn't really mind. It wasn't as if there were any threat of Randy stealing her away, and besides, Davey liked the objects Randy built her. And, too, it might have added a small bit of white heat to Davey and Suzie's relationship, though I cannot say for sure.

Randy made her a porch swing out of bright larch wood and stained it with tung oil. He gave it to her at the saloon one night after spending a week on it, sanding it and getting it just right. We gathered around and admired it, running our hands over its smoothness. Suzie smiled a little—a polite smile, which was, in a way, worse than if she had looked angry—and said nothing, not even thank you, and she and Davey took it home in the back of Davey's truck.

Randy built her other things too, small things she could fit on her dresser—a little mahogany box for her earrings, of which she had several pairs—and a walking stick with a deer antler for the grip. She said she didn't want the walking stick but would take the earring box.

That summer I lay awake in my cabin some nights and thought about how Suzie was with Davey. I felt vaguely sorry for him, because I knew she would leave him too. I'd lie on my side and look out my bedroom window at the northern lights flashing. The river runs by my cabin, and the strange flashing reflected on the river in a way that made it seem that the light was coming from beneath the water as well. On nights like those, it felt as if my heart would never heal—in fact, I was certain of it. By then I didn't love Suzie anymore—at least I didn't think I did—but I wanted to love someone, and to be loved.

In the evenings, back when we'd been together, Suzie and I would sit on the porch after she got in from work. There was still plenty of daylight left, and we'd watch large herds of deer, their antlers still covered with summer velvet, wade into the cool shadows of the river to bathe, like ladies. They made delicate splashing sounds as they stepped into the current. Water fell from their muzzles when they lifted their heads from drinking. As the sun moved lower, their bodies grew increasingly indistinct, blurring into shadows. Later, Suzie and I would wrap a single blanket about ourselves and nap. When we opened our eyes we would watch for falling stars, and wait until we saw one go ripping across the sky, shot through all the other stars, and once in a great while they came close enough for us to hear the crackle and hiss as they burned.

 

In early July, Randy, whose house sits in a field up at the base of the mountains, began practicing with his bow. Standing in the field at various marked distances—ten, twenty, thirty, forty yards—he shot arrow after arrow at a bull's-eye stapled to bales of hay. It was unusual to drive past then and not see him outside, shirtless, perspiring, his cheeks flushed. He lived by himself and there was probably nothing else to do. The bowhunting season began in late August, months before the shooting season.

It made Suzie furious to see Randy practicing with his bow and arrows. She circulated a petition in the valley to ban bowhunting.

But we would have been out doing the same thing if we'd had the skill, hunting giant elk with bows for the thrill of it, luring them with calls and rattles to our hiding places in the dark woods. Provoked, the bulls would rush in, heads down, their great antlers ripping through the underbrush and knocking against the overhanging limbs of trees.