The Dog Stars (12 page)

I blew the air out of my cheeks. Thought: The mountains will be good. Good to get up there. Breathe some fresh air. Thought: Strange. One other person but the families in a hundred square miles and I still need fresh air.

VI

Now we walk fast in the dark. Me and Jasper, the sled scraping behind. Cold. Good and cold. High stars nettle the black, no moon, crossing under the Milky Way like crossing a deep river. Never will get to the other side. We never do.

The argument with Bangley still rankles. Now just our breaths. Winter fat. Can feel it in my legs. Good to move, move fast.

I pull the sled on a lead with my right hand then switch. Pack is in the sled, rifle too. This time, Thanks Bangley, wearing a subcompact handgun, a plastic Glock weighs almost nothing. A sense of more survivors around, increasing traffic, don’t know why.

Pass the tower on our right. Pass the Spot without a shudder. Thoughts come with the rhythm of the fast steps. Can get used to killing the way you can get used to a goat on the doorstep. Uncle Pete. With his bottle and cigarillos and stories. His living on a yacht with Louise. Their living in a trawler in Alaska. As if somehow being afloat could make a life more compelling. Never liked whiskey, he told me. But I drink it because it has a storied history.

The dead goats multiply. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

We walk. We are half an hour from the first slopes, the first trees. The night is without weight: the dark weightless now in its immanent passing like a deer about to bolt. The morning light a thought that is just occurring. Still and quiet, high stars, no wind.

I think about the Plains tribes, the ones that lived here, that moved through. The Utes the Arapaho the Cheyenne. The Comanches came this far, the Sioux moving and hunting and raiding, the Kiowa, the occasional Apache. When I was a boy I read about the wars and raids between them and wondered why anyone would fight in a country this big. Why the landscape ever became a territory that needed division. Well. Bangley and I are two and sometimes our resource base seems cramped. Not because we don’t have enough food, enough raw materials, enough quilts. It is ideological. Ideology that tears apart nations. Tore, past tense. What nations now? Whoever is left still fighting, scrapping over the leftovers. Maybe banding together like me and Bangley.

Still we are divided, there are cracks in the union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do. What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating your own death.

Me versus him. Follow Bangley’s belief to its end and you get a ringing solitude. Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The cold stars. Like these that are fading, silent as we walk. Believe in the possibility of connectedness and you get something else. A tattered union suit flying on a flagpole. Help asked and given. A smile across a dirt yard, a wave. Now the dawn not so lonely.

We are philosophers, huh, Jasper?

He’s just happy to be moving. Together. He knows where we’re going.

Follow the creek trail upwards. A trail long before we trod it, before the Arapaho, the aforementioned Cheyenne. Deer and elk, bighorn before. The coyotes who hunted them. Cougars. The wolves. The wolves again. Maybe mountain buffalo. Grizzlies occasionally, but mostly they are shy of trails, even game trails.

We move in and out of cottonwoods which make a deeper darkness. Thickets of willows. Up the grassy slopes going pale, into a short rock canyon echoing the spilling water. Then a ponderosa forest, smelled before seen, the scent carried downstream: redolent of vanilla, like a sweetshop. These still living. The sled scrapes over the trammeled roots, exposed rock. Clusters of deer scat long desiccated. I stop, let go the bridle, and hug a big tree, standing in a frieze of sweet sage that is also paler than the night, patches beneath the trees, fragrant also and tangy. Hug the thick rough bark, nose stuck in a resined crack, inhale vanilla strong as any small brown bottle, the tree pungent and sweet as butterscotch. A time when we entered shops that smelled like this. Staffed with high school kids in aprons struggling to scoop the hard ice cream. Seemed cruelly hard back then. Why keep it so cold? Thin girls blowing hair back and approaching each cone like a grudge match. Rum raisin my favorite. Melissa’s pistachio. Or anything with chunks of toffee. But adored a butterscotch sundae. The saliva running in my mouth at the base of the tree. Would kill for it now maybe, not even a figure of speech.

Jasper is patient. He sits, then lies down. In other years he would have ranged ahead and swung out on our flanks, wide, crossing and recrossing the trail, following his nose, picking up game, irrepressible, but now he is happy to rest. Me too. We are in no hurry. There is plenty of stored food at the airport and Bangley can get along without me for a few days, though I hope not too well. Always the fear when we take to the mountains that he will learn to like it like this better. Alone. Though he is smart enough, a good enough tactician to know that long term his odds go down. Plus, he is not a farmer. Jasper has been through this before too many times and is polite enough not to be visibly embarrassed. The hugging a tree, the mutterings. Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. But the tree smells almost sweeter than anything in our world now and it smells like the past.

Apples used to be one of the sweetest things. In North America. Why they were such a treat, why the student currying favor left one on the teacher’s desk. Honey and apples. Molasses. Maple sugar in the north woods. A candy cane at Christmas. Visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Sometimes in the fall on the way back from a patrol we land at an orchard north of Longmont. Acres and acres of apples, varieties I don’t know the names of, most of the trees long dead for lack of water, those living along the still flowing old ditches gone scraggly, bristling with new shoots, reverting to some kind of wildness, the apples stunted and pecked, ravaged by caterpillars, but sweet. Sweeter than before. Whatever is left of whatever they distill is more concentrated in their complete and dangerous freedom.

I inhale deeply, arms stretched round, palms to the rough skin which is warmer somehow than the air, fingers holding the flaked
corduroy of the bark with almost the same affinity, the same sense of arrival as they would hold to the swells of a woman.

These small what? Gratifications. And smell is always the smell itself and memory, too, don’t know why.

We climb along the creek as the grainy gray seeps between the tall skeletal trees, the beetle kill ponderosa and lodgepole, the branches without needles, empty handed in death.

I still don’t like it here. The dead forest. Which began to die in great swaths twenty years before. We climb. Step down to the stony bank, the cobbles rounded like eggs. To rest, drink, then climb again. Up into the spruce and fir which are still fragrant and thick with rich darkness yet.

Jasper. C’mon. You’re lagging boy. Not feeling so good?

Run fingers through his thick short fur, up the bumpy ridge of his back, to the loose skin of his neck, and dig. Dig. He loves that. Turns his head away to stretch the skin. Have to bring aspirin next time. We have pounds of aspirin. Bangley says we should take it every day so we don’t get Alzheimer’s.

So we don’t forget why the fuck we’re here! he shouts, as close to glee as he gets.

So
you
don’t forget. Seems to be more important to you than to me, Hig. To remember shit. Eat some goddamn aspirin.

Bangley perceptive in his own way, a judge of character.

We rest. I sit on a bench rock above a pool and Jasper lies over my feet. Does that when he’s not feeling well. Morning now, the gray
suffused with color. Barely. We rest until the sun filters straight through the trees with, I swear, a slight jangle as of loose banjo strings. The creek responding, a burble and lip.

Last fall I saw elk tracks. One set that wended down from the dark spruce, printed themselves in the silt where the creek ran in summer, and were lost again on the smooth dusty stones of the gravel bar. One. A large cow. A ghost. They, all of them, supposed to be gone.

A shriek. Kingfisher. Sometimes a kingfisher keeps us company. Lilts upstream ahead of us. The dipping flight reminds me of telephone wires weighted with ice, the same arc again and again and again. He perches on a dead limb over the creek, screams, flies again. Telling us, it seems, to keep up. For miles. Maybe lonely, shorn of company. Sometimes a dipper bobbing the stones at water’s edge. Maybe once a year we see an osprey.

We like the birds, huh Jasp?

He opens his eyes a sec, doesn’t lift his head off my boot. If I say another thing, I know him well enough: he’ll lift his head to look at me to check if there is some subject that truly concerns him, that maybe I am asking for some consideration and he will hold the gaze on my face until he figures out what it is, or if it is nothing, so I don’t say another word. Let him rest.

We rouse ourselves and climb. The ascent steep here, twisting up into the first bulwark of the hills.

We cross the old state highway at midday. Don’t even touch the broken macadam, walk the big corrugated culvert beneath it, dry
now since a flood washed the revenant and sent the creek around. Hollow in there. I think of Jonah and the belly of the whale. Used to shout and sing inside it to hear my compounding echo but don’t anymore.

Jasper didn’t like it.

We cross the highway and continue up the creek. I wait for Jasper to catch up. He looks stiff in the hips, his breath short, panting. First long walk this year, he is probably out of shape like I am, carrying a little winter fat.

Two wolves. Two sets of tracks in and out of the fine mud at the very edge of the water, moving fast. Catches Jasper’s attention. For a minute. Hackles rise but he quickly loses interest. Seems preoccupied with keeping up as if the walking is taking all his attention.

At what might be two, I decide to give us both a break. We are in no hurry. We are still some miles below where I saw the tracks but that means nothing.

Could be anywhere up here, huh, Jasper?

I pull the rod case out of the sled so he knows he is officially off duty.