Where the Sea Used to Be (27 page)

Now Helen and Matthew began swimming through the snow toward them, coming up from behind, drawing abreast, and Wallis saw more coyote legs, four and then eight and then twelve, edging in—not entirely sure of their prey, but confident they could take it. Wallis saw their long bushy tails floating behind them, heard them yip with puzzlement and excitement.

One of the coyotes pulled at Wallis's hide and dug furiously at the snow beneath him. Mel snorted with laughter, then cried “Shit!” as one of the coyotes got her hair tangled in its jaws and backed away with a mouthful of her hair.

The coyotes scattered in four directions when she shouted, and Wallis saw that one of them had pulled Helen's hide off and was running with it, dragging it like a kite that would not quite get airborne.

Mel jumped up in a spray of snow, and Matthew did too, throwing back his hide, and Old Dudley and Wallis did the same. They floundered up out of their lairs, and now the coyotes were more terrified than ever—as if, in pulling Helen's hide off, they had pulled some terrible ripcord that had given birth to the humans, and the coyotes tucked their tails and galloped away looking back over their shoulders, streaking back into the woods. It was cruel, Wallis supposed, but he had to laugh at what must have been going through their minds: wondering if that was where humans came from—if they came up through some vent in the earth.

They laughed and shook the snow from their chests and shoulders. Dudley's eyes were bright. “Damn, I liked that,” he said. “That was all right.” He knocked the snow from his arms. His face was a healthy winter-cheeked red. The pulsings of his tong marks seemed pale and very far away—as if they would never pulse again, and were only old scars. Even Helen's cough was better. She patted her chest, gave one tiny hawking-clear of her throat, but that was it.

“They came right in,” Mel said, glancing at the sun. “Sometimes you have to wait a couple of hours, or half a day, or even longer. Sometimes you have to
live
down there, take a canteen and sandwich with you down there, and wait until the ravens land and start hopping around, before the coyotes will get bold enough to come right in,” she said. “It's especially nice if it's snowing. The snow mounds up over you.”

“Remember the time Matthew and I got Danny?” Helen asked. “We'd been lying there for three hours during hunting season, and had about a foot of snow over us. Danny was out hunting and walked right over us,” Helen said. “We stood up and roared. He thought he'd stepped on a bear that had just gone into hibernation,” she said.

“Shit his britches, as I remember,” Matthew said. “He couldn't speak for a couple of hours.”

“I remember,” said Mel.

“That was a long time ago,” Helen said.

They spread the hides out and sat down on them. Mel handed out sandwiches, and they opened their beers and drank. The clouds were stained with light, a luminous purple and pink and rose red and gold to the east—a bank of them resting on the mountains—and the valley below was illumined with a slanting shaft of light, so that where the beam landed in the valley's center was gold, while all the woods around that blaze of light were already touched blue with the deepening shadows.

Gray smoke still rose straight from the chimneys below, and they knew that they could go down into any of those cabins and be invited in with warmth, and to food—to whatever food there was.

Mel's hair caught a little of that sun, the last angle of it, and there was an incandescence to it, as when a filament is ignited with electricity. She ate her sandwich thoughtfully. The oddness of that jaw, giving her an almost horsey look, except for her eyes—the steadiness and depth of them, and the greenness—an electrical greenness, almost. Wallis felt pretty sure she was considering the wolves.

Dudley's eyes still had that clearness, an unguardedness to them. He didn't look like Dudley.

They sat and watched the light fade from the valley. When blue dusk had slid down off the hills and covered the valley below with cool shadow, they rose and folded their hides into the pack and buckled on their snowshoes and started back down the mountain in the dimming light. The first stars were out by the time they reached the cabin.

 

There was no turkey, but Mel went down to the smokehouse and selected the five largest spruce grouse. She sprinkled salt, pepper, and thyme on them, draped bacon over their breasts, and placed them in the wood stove over a pan of water. The cabin had gotten cold while they had been gone. Old Dudley poured Helen a glass of brandy, and she smiled and thanked him. Wallis and Matthew went down to the creek to begin hauling more water for baths.

The creek gurgled into the metal buckets as they lowered them into the cold dark waters. The sudden, frightening suck and surge of the buckets as they quickly filled was a feeling like falling through the bottom of something: ice, perhaps.

A star melted from the sky—sparkled as it fell.

 

The cabin warmed slowly; the rafters and beams groaned, accepting the heat. Matthew and Wallis stripped to their long underwear shirts and jeans. Old Dudley and Helen sat by the fire, wearing their coats. The first round of water was heated enough for a bath, so Helen went first. She had begun to shiver and cough, even sitting next to the fire, and Matthew had gone and poured the water into the tub for her. Steam billowed out of the bathroom and down the cold hallway as he poured it; Mel gave Helen an elk hide to use for a robe. Dudley filled her brandy glass again and told her to sit in the tub and sip that and she'd never cough again. It was the longest she had been without a cigarette since she was a girl.

Matthew went into the kitchen to be with Mel as she cooked and Wallis found himself alone with Old Dudley, with Dudley's strange gaze fixed upon him.

And as if Old Dudley could see Wallis's thoughts right then, as the deer is said to see the puffs of vapor coming from the cougar's nostrils as the cougar hides in ambush, Old Dudley began to speak to Wallis as if taunting him: speaking about eyes, and about the different ways of seeing. He was talking about his falconry days again—a sure sign, Mel had said, that he was relaxed.

“Curious bastards,” he said. “They were always fucking with the neighborhood cats and dogs,” he said. “Mel's mother and Mel and I were living out in Odessa—dust bowl country. I was running jug lines for Texaco, for five bucks an hour. Every day when I left for work, this old redtail I had—” Dudley faltered for half a second, started to give them the bird's name, then smiled at the momentary impulse toward sentimentality—“would be sitting on the sidewalk in front of one of the neighbors' houses, on top of some dead heap of fur. Cats, usually, but sometimes small dogs. It would be tearing at the fur and tufts of it would be blowing straight away in that horizontal Odessa wind that was always blowing, morning, noon, and night. I remember that it would put me in a certain frame of
mind,”
he said, “driving to work each day, driving to the field, after having seen such a thing.”

Mel and Matthew had finished in the kitchen. The food was ready and kept warm on the stove; they were waiting only for Helen, but would not rush her—soon enough, her bath water would grow chilly, and she'd come out—and Mel broke into Old Dudley's story.

“Yeah, and I was the one who had to clean up those damn cats and dogs before the neighbors found them,” Mel said. “And sometimes they found out anyway, and would shriek at me. I was the one always taking your heat.”

“There were rumors, weren't there?” Dudley murmured, half to himself—rubbing his temple with one hand.

Mel scowled, knowing she was being baited.

“They said we ate them,” she told us.

“We were poor, I have to say that,” Dudley agreed. “I can see how they might surmise . . .”

“I was not a class favorite,” Mel said. “We kept having to move farther and farther out of town to distance ourselves from our neighbors and their supply of cats and dogs. Finally it was just us and the hawks and rabbits living out in the desert—big manic jackrabbits. And dust, and wind.”

“Curious bastards,” Old Dudley said again. “They've got those huge eyes, set in their tiny heads,” he said. “Now you can't quote me on this, but I've always had the notion that they've really got nothing in their brains—and that all their impulses are wired straight from their eyes to their body.”

Dudley was leaning forward, setting the bottle of brandy aside and pouring a glass of rum. The years were fading from him; he seemed not a day over fifty, there in the shadows of the fire.

“This I do know for a fact,” he said. “What I
do
know for a fact,” he explained, “is that they've got these two kinds of eyes, each one of them.” He set his drink down, rolled up his sleeves. He pointed to one of his eyes and then the other.

“I don't remember if it's the left eye for one and the right eye for another—I don't remember how it goes,” he said. “But one eye they use strictly for hunting—for searching—looking for shit. That eye is totally in command of searching for game. And then the other eye is wired only for the kill. They fly around all their lives like this—two sets of live hot wires leading into their body. They look at
everything
through those two eyes. And when those two wires cross—when they get you in their sights, so that you're suddenly in the focus—then
pow!”
—Dudley smacked his fist in his palm—“it doesn't matter who or what you are, they've got your ass, and you won't be able to get away.”

He sat back, pleased with himself, and he allowed himself a tiny sip of rum, as if afraid that too much of it too soon after his story would chase away the warmth that he was feeling.

“Why did you stop?” Wallis asked.

He cocked his head sideways. “Because they couldn't bring me enough,” he said. “They'd get tired of killing after only a few flights each day.”

Mel rose to begin putting food on the table. “Oh, bullshit, Pop,” she said. “He got rich. He stopped walking in the fields after work each evening with his hawks and instead stayed home, and up late at night, mapping his own prospects. Saved his pennies to buy the leases, then went out and sold deals while he was still working for Texaco, quit his job the day they spudded his well, and the rest, as they say, is history. He got enough, all right.”

“Did you creep then?” Wallis asked, and perhaps it was some shift of firelight—coals from a log crackled, and a piece of wood fell like a burning bridge—because Dudley looked older again. He looked down at his drink and smiled a bit, as if amused that he was telling the truth. He said, “No, I ran then—like a hound,” and finished his drink.

“How many birds did you lose?” Wallis asked.

He grimaced. “Ahh,” he said, rubbing his temples and looking around for the bottle, “a shitload. The new ones were always flying away. Sometimes I'd only have one for a few days. They were always leaving,” he said. “I couldn't hold on to one for shit. And worst was when I had a good one. I had one, an old bullet-headed goshawk, that I'd had for over a year. I took eight rabbits in an afternoon with that hawk. He was insatiable. But then he left. They all leave,” Dudley said, with some surprise, as if he had only now realized it; as if all this time he had been thinking of each leave-taking as coincidental, not connected to any pattern or law or certainty.

He cleared his reverie then—shook his head as a bull might after having been foiled by some false pass at a red flag, and now he was his age once more; and where he had come from, and all that past, was far below once more—so far as to seem to have no bearing on the here and now, on this cold night-after-Christmas. “That's all over now, anyway,” he said, and rose, looking for a new bottle.

“Supper,” Mel said. She was smiling, and Wallis suspected that with the exception of a very few, perhaps, it was possible she had everyone she cared about corralled into her cabin that night, with the great shell of winter acting as a barrier for her—almost as if she'd herded or trapped them.

“The water's got to be getting cold by now,” Matthew said. “Maybe you should go check on Helen?”

“I hate to rush her,” Mel said. “We'll wait just a minute more.”

They sat in silence and listened for the slightest noise that might give them a clue she was finishing. The swollen moon out the window looked injured—flattened by some distortion of the cold night air. It rose through the tops of the fir trees on the south ridge—chasing the winter-short sun—and they watched it for a while, smelled the food, listened to their stomachs grumble, waited on Helen, and anticipated the meal.

In the new, crooked light of the moon, they saw the large dark shape of an animal moving around in the yard.

They rose and went to the window. It was a moose drifting slowly by—not feeding, only passing through, just beyond where the weak yellow window light fell on the snow.

Something sparkled in the moonlight—something in the moose's ribs moved up and down with the moose's movements. It was long and metallic. As his eyes adjusted to the night, Wallis thought it looked like a knitting needle, but then understood that it was an aluminum arrow.

“That's an old one,” Mel said. “See how there's no blood on its side, and no steam coming from the wound? I've been seeing her for four years now. The arrow must have hit a rib and gotten bent in there sideways, maybe just inches from her heart. And now all this scar tissue's built up around it and holds the arrow into place. She's as good as new. The scar tissue's probably stronger than the muscle it cut. I see her every year,” she said. “I'm glad she's still okay.”

The moose walked off into the trees—disappeared into the branchy whispers of fir, pine, and spruce, fitting back into the woods like an arrow passing between two ribs. A mist of snow trickled from one of the branches where the moose had gone—it caught the moonlight and glittered as it fell—and then there was no sign. The woods sealed back in around her.