Where the Sea Used to Be (57 page)

She said a prayer for Matthew, and a prayer for the wolf, and turned and went back down the mountain. She came out onto the road below town at dusk, where she saw a figure walking ahead of her. She ran to catch up. It was Wallis, walking home from the river with a stringer of fish. She admired the fish, kissed him. They walked hand in hand home.

 

The Dynasty of Fishes

Devonian and Carboniferous Times

When the morning of the Devonian Age dawned, a new form was seen moving in the populous sea. It was a vertebrate form. Without a bony skeleton, its cartilaginous framework and general plan embodied a new conception. Among vertebrates its organization was decidedly low. It was not a fish in any ordinary acceptance of the term, though we shall
have to call it a fish. There were other vertebrate forms more clearly fishlike, but all widely separated from modern fishes. One could easily distinguish three types of these archaic vertebrates. They are known among us as
E-las'-mo-branchs, Plae-o-derms
and
Gan'-oids.
The Elasmobranchs are a group which still survives. They are all sharklike.
Cestraeion,
the Port Jackson shark, has spines in front of both the dorsal fins; the nostrils unite in the cavity of the mouth, and the upper lip is divided into seven lobes. The teeth along the middle of the mouth are small. External to these are large flat teeth twice as broad as long, arranged in oblique series so as to form a sort of tessellated crushing surface.

Among the very earliest American fishes were some of these spine-bearing sharks. The spines are flattened, two-edged like a bayonet, and curved as if one had belonged to the right side and the other to the left. Some of them were more than a foot in length. Being two-edged and very sharp, they must have been very powerful weapons. These cestra-cionts were numerous during the Comiferous period. Their smooth brown spines are very often found in the Comiferous limestone of New York, Canada, Ohio, and Michigan. If you wish the name, here it is:
Machaeracanthus,
or “dagger-spine.”

Another of the most common and most striking fishes of the same age appears to have been a relative of the modern sturgeons—a family of plated ganoids. Our American geologists have almost buried it under a pile of nomenclature, which they have finished in the following shape:
Mae-ro-pet-al-ich'-thys,
or
“
big-plated fish.” These fishes were of large size. The cranium was composed of large polygonal plates, united by double sutures which are nearly concealed by the tubercled enameled surface; the tubercles are stellate; the surface is ornamented by double rows of porea and single thread lines, forming a pattern which does not correspond with the plates below. These large, geometrically formed plates often attract the attention of quarrymen, since they are sometimes fifteen inches in length.

These relations enable us to contemplate with new interest some of the despised fishes which live in our time. Our sturgeons, garpikes, and sharks are the sparse representatives of those ancient families which once sustained alone the dignity of the vertebrate type. In their forms was first enshrined the conception of the vertebrate plan of structure that was destined to remain on the earth under its various modifications, until man, the thinking and ruling vertebrate, should arrive. In modern
times, our familiar bony-scaled garpike haunts the freshened waters of river and lake—the poor degenerate descendant of ancestors which once dominated over the world. Venerable relic of a mighty empire! Were the lineal descendant of Menes or Nebuchadnezzar II to stand before me, the antiquity of his lineage would inspire my interest and veneration, but it would be as yesterday compared with the lineage of this poor garpike.

Why have these creatures been preserved in existence so long? The march of organic improvement has advanced for thousands of centuries, and left them far in the rear. These forms are misplaced in the modern world. They constitute an anachronism, which is either an absurdity, or a phenomenon too full of meaning for ordinary comprehension.

The garpike destroys our game fish and our market fish
—
as he ravaged neighboring kingdoms while he ruled an empire of his own. He tangles and tears the nets of the fishermen, who visit their execration upon him. His flesh is unpalatable for food. The mud-loving sturgeon, less destructive in his nature, brings no utility into the modern world. The fierce shark, equally unfit for fuel, is the freebooter of the ocean. Other fishes furnish aliment to man. They come from unknown realms to meet man and serve his ends. But these archaic types linger from a time when human wants had as yet no existence, when human food was not demanded. They were never intended for food, since they made food of every other creature. These useless and destructive beings are out of joint with the world and with history. Why are they here?

Why? They come to import ideas into the modern world. They bring down to us living illustrations of faunas passed away. The plates of Cephalaspis and the spines of Machaeracanthus quarried from the rock might pique our curiosity and distress us by their mystery, but they would not instruct. It was intended that the intelligence of the being which always stood as the finality of organic improvement should grasp the conception of the world and reproduce the grand history of departed cycles. Why? It was an act of beneficence which saved these relics of ancient dynasty from total destruction. There was purpose, not accident, in the failure of their complete extinction, and the assignment of the world exclusively to more modern creatures. These freaks are precious examples preserved in a museum. These are caskets filled with documents from an olden time. The garpike and the sturgeon and the shark are missionaries from the past to the present. Hear them. They are
preaching to man's intelligence. They are unfolding the plans of Infinite Wisdom. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
”

Nothing exists but for the benefit of Man. Beauty is for us alone.

 

One day the geese got up from the river and left. There was an excitement in their leaving, all through the day; but that night there was a loneliness, and people gathered at the bar to shore one another up, and to make brave jokes about the coming winter. It was the finest time of year—the days suspended in hazy gold light, the daytime temperatures mild, the nights starry and crisp—the leaves turning color, the scent of wood smoke pleasing in the air, and the cabinets in all homes filling with bounty—but for those who had lived through it in the past—this sweetest time of year—it was burnished with the knowledge, the forethought, of its brevity, and of the coming price to be paid yet again. The departure of the geese was the first indicator of that marker coming due.

Artie came up to Wallis that night and set a beer before him, on the house, and said, “Thanks for not drilling the well.” It was the only thanks he'd received from anyone following his decision to bail out of that old life, but he understood that no thanks were needed—that it was simply the only thing, the right thing. Still, he was glad for it, and he smiled at Artie, lifted the mug to him in a silent toast.

“How's Helen?” Artie asked. Mel was across the street, seeing if she needed anything.

“Not good,” Wallis said.

“I can't believe she's leaving,” Artie said.

Mel and Helen came in the door—Helen rallying, a good night, leaning on Mel's arm, and immediately, all bittersweetness left the room, all sense of abandonment, as they realized Helen had outlasted the geese one more year.

“Has Joshua been in?” she wanted to know. No one had seen him for some time—a sign that he was hard at work. Helen went over to Amy and lifted up her maternity dress and put her hand on Amy's belly. “I sure would like to see that baby,” she said.

The baby stirred, seemed to jump, then kicked. “I think you're going to,” Amy said, looking straight into Helen's eyes. What she saw there was fright—a flightiness, a worry—her old blue eyes like small gems seen underwater in sunlight. Any hour. Any second. “I'm sure you'll see it,” Amy said, taking Helen's hand in hers.

Mel wanted to tell Helen her own news, yet hoped also she would not have to.

Later that evening, Mel carried Helen back across the street. Wallis went with them. Helen fell asleep in Mel's arms, but woke once more inside her own home, and insisted on fussing about in the kitchen and preparing a dinner for the bear, who had not been back for three nights in a row. She scrambled some eggs and mixed pancake batter; when the pancakes were made, she spread huckleberry jam on them and set them on two plates. Mel and Wallis thought she had prepared the meal for them, but then she told them they would have to leave now, or the bear would not come.

They didn't know what to say—feeling the edges of a sorrow that was nearly infinite, believing that Helen's mind was being taken from them before the earth took her body.

They watched her carry the plates of steaming food out into the cold night; watched her sit down at the picnic table and light two candles; watched her wrap the elk hide around her and hunch forward, nodding off, settling in to wait.

“We can't leave her out there on a night this cold,” Mel said. “It would finish her off.”

“She's got to go sometime,” Wallis said.

“We can't,” Mel said. “Not before the baby. And not before Matthew . . .”

The candles wavered wilder in the breeze; one tipped over and snuffed out. They thought she was asleep, and were about to go back out and get her, but she lifted her head, picked up the fallen candle, and relit it, then sat there, waiting, while the flames fluttered.

The bear—a big one, black as the starry night itself—appeared so gradually, so slowly—blackness appearing from out of blackness—that at first they did not understand what they were seeing: the bear moving so carefully, so stealthily, as to seem like a man in the costume of a bear. Helen had drifted back into sleep for a moment, but she awakened when she felt the bear settle his heft so gently onto the seat across from her.

The bear watched Helen intently for long moments, perfectly motionless, so that now it seemed like a stuffed bear—Mel and Wallis could see that beneath the elk hide Helen was shivering, and whether with fear or cold, they could not tell—and then slowly, the bear lowered his head to the plate and began to eat.

With her hands trembling, Helen took up her fork and picked at her own food.

The bear finished his—a few crumbles of egg fell from his mouth, and cautiously, he licked them from the table—and Helen blew out the candles and pushed her plate with the remaining food across the table for the bear to eat too, which he did.

When it had finished, it looked at her a moment longer—woman and bear illumined in blue starlight; the bear's damp eyes and nose gleaming, and its claws shining at the table like silverware—and Mel whispered “We should go,” as the bear turned and climbed down from the table and went back off into the darkness.

Mel and Wallis were out the front door and walking down the dusty road by the time Helen gathered the candles and empty plates and went back inside.

They all three slept hard that night, dreamless.

 

W
ALLIS WAS OUT IN THE GARDEN ONE DAY, WHILE MEL
had gone to town to check in on Helen, when he felt the ground trembling. He looked up to see a horse gallop through the yard, followed closely by a silver wolf.

For a second, as the horse raced by, Wallis focused solely on the percussive sound of steel-shod hoofs clipping and clattering occasional stones. Such was the horse's speed that the hoofs made sparks against the stones, and so dry was the tall autumn grass that many of these sparks found flame, flaring into smoking bright wisps of orange that raced outward; and after each spark-fire burned out it left behind a smoldering black scorch ring in the same shape as a horse's hoofprint, only larger—as if something giant had just passed through, and the horse and wolf were following that.

The wolf struck the horse hard with his teeth in the horse's haunches and sheared off a slab of muscle. The horse snorted and bucked but made no other sound, and kept running as if nothing had happened. The wolf rolled, dropped, and was up and running again: racing low through the hoof-struck patches of burning grass. Blood gushed bright from where the horse's haunch had been. The horse was almost to the trees—almost into the woods. Wallis could see that was where the wolf wanted the horse to go, to tangle it amongst fallen logs; but the horse in its panic could not know that.

The wolf closed the distance and moved in for another strike—this time leaping high, whether for the thick neck or the face, Wallis couldn't tell—and just as the wolf lunged, the horse ducked his head and skidded to a stop, then reared up and kicked the wolf as the wolf went sailing in front of it. There was the sound of steel hoof against bone, and the brittle sound of bone snapping.

The wolf yelped, and then the horse was rising and striking again, trampling the wolf as it tried to crawl away. Blood gushed from the horse's haunch each time it reared.

Before Wallis could get there and try to calm the horse, the horse went suddenly weak. It stopped its trampling, stared at the ground as if it had forgotten where it was or what it was doing, and then collapsed, the back half going down first, sinking, and then the front half followed.

The horse's ribs were heaving, but otherwise it looked calm. Wallis went past it and into the timber, searching for the remains of the wolf. Everywhere at the woods' edge the grass was trampled, but he could not find the wolf. He found fur, but no blood.