The Hermit's Story (22 page)

But in the long run, I want to know about the mystery of it, not the fucking pH of it. Now I want to know about the roadless areas.

***

She used to do autopsies on winter-killed deer that people would bring in to the university. For some deer the causes of death were obvious: the brittle bones of selenium deficiency, or the puncture marks in the neck from coyotes' teeth. But for others, so many others, there appeared to be no reason for dying. They had just stopped living. It was as if there were something out there that could not be measured: a thing they needed but had run out of.

I remember the year when Martha said she didn't love me anymore. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and she could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She's an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the beautiful landscape around us, reminds us to love one another. But that year when Martha flat-out told me she didn't love me anymore—that was a tough one.

You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates—it gets either stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It's one of the dangers.

It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her—them—go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me anymore.

But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.

A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.

***

Martha and I went on a field trip once, up the North Fork of the Whiteflesh River in northern Montana: right where the country crosses over into Canada. It was for a wolf study project that Martha's class was doing. We were supposed to follow a thirteen-mile transect due north and count how many moose, how many deer, how many elk. We were supposed to howl every 400 meters and count the wolves that responded.

It was on Thanksgiving Day. It had snowed hard the day before, two feet, and then dropped to twenty below.

We had to cross the river naked: holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.

It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light, as if we were in some new stage of heaven. All day long there was a light on our faces almost like firelight. The snow was frozen hard in places, so that we could walk across it like concrete for two or three steps, but then we'd hit a soft or weak spot that our feet would punch through, and we'd collapse up to our waists. It was exhausting work. But we were so in love:
so in love.

We came across a small pond back in the woods that was completely frozen. Wolf tracks led us to the pond and to the dead deer that was out on the pond: nothing left to it but a few bones. Even the ravens had finished with this carcass.

“That's how they do it,” Martha explained. “The wolves try to get the deer out onto the ice where the deer will slip and go down, or will even punch a leg through and get stuck.

“Then the wolves move in.” She made a whistling sound, drew her finger across her throat. “And then it's over.”

We examined the bare bones and the tracks of the wolves; the brushed-out areas of snow where the ravens' wingtips had swept across the snow. The pittery-pat markings of the coyotes that had come in to lick and crunch the bones after the wolves were through.

We continued north, then, into the beautiful day. There was some undefinable essence out there that day, which seemed to shout, simply, in the name of every mountain and every river, every deer and every wolf, that Martha and I belonged together, under that odd lingering salmon sky. I have never forgotten that day, that feeling, and I still hold on to it.

***

Because you love wolves or other predators, you have to study their food source, which is deer. It's like learning to play the piano before you learn to play any other kind of music. You must understand deer long before you can understand wolves or anything else. I understand this, though still it strikes me as odd, mysterious.

It seems like trying to say “I love you” without using the word “love.” It's like trying to say, “It doesn't matter how much you change, or I change, we will always be in this country together, and whatever changes come, whatever mysteries, will be as wonderful and scary as they have always been.”

It's like trying to say, “Let's not let each other become small or weak or diminished.” It's like saying, “There will always be some amount of ice beneath us.”

It's like saying, “We must go on, I love you, there is no choice.”

 

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R
ICK
B
ASS
's fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir
Why I Came West
was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.