The Hermit's Story Read online

  Except that the dogs would not get lost, while she could easily imagine herself and Gray Owl getting lost beneath the lake, walking in circles forever, unable to find even the simplest of things: the shore.

  She gathered the stove and dogs. She was tempted to try to go back in the way she had come out—it seemed so easy—but she considered the consequences of getting lost in the other direction, and instead followed her original tracks out to where Gray Owl had first dropped through the ice. It was true night now, and the blizzard was still blowing hard, plastering snow and ice around her face like a mask. The dogs did not want to go down into the hole, so she lowered them to Gray Owl and then climbed gratefully back down into the warmth herself.

  The air was a thing of its own—recognizable as air, and breathable as such, but with a taste and odor, an essence, unlike any other air they’d ever breathed. It had a different density to it, so that smaller, shallower breaths were required; there was very much the feeling that if they breathed in too much of the strange, dense air, they would drown.

  They wanted to explore the lake, and were thirsty, but it felt like a victory simply to be warm—or rather, not cold—and they were so exhausted that instead they made pallets out of the dead marsh grass that rustled around their ankles, and they slept curled up on the tiniest of hammocks, to keep from getting damp in the pockets and puddles of water that still lingered here and there.

  All eight of them slept as if in a nest, heads and arms draped across other ribs and hips; and it was, said Ann, the best and deepest sleep she’d ever had—the sleep of hounds, the sleep of childhood. How long they slept, she never knew, for she wasn’t sure, later, how much of their subsequent time they spent wandering beneath the lake, and then up on the prairie, homeward again, but when they awoke, it was still night, or night once more, and clearing, with bright stars visible through the porthole, their point of embarkation; and even from beneath the ice, in certain places where, for whatever reasons—temperature, oxygen content, wind scour—the ice was clear rather than glazed, they could see the spangling of stars, though more dimly; and strangely, rather than seeming to distance them from the stars, this phenomenon seemed to pull them closer, as if they were up in the stars, traveling the Milky Way, or as if the stars were embedded in the ice.

  It was very cold outside—up above—and there was a steady stream, a current like a river, of the night’s colder, heavier air plunging down though their porthole—as if trying to fill the empty lake with that frozen air—but there was also the hot muck of the earth’s massive respirations breathing out warmth and being trapped and protected beneath that ice, so that there were warm currents doing battle with the lone cold current.

  The result was that it was breezy down there, and the dogs’ noses twitched in their sleep as the images brought by these scents painted themselves across their sleeping brains in the language we call dreams but which, for the dogs, was reality: the scent of an owl real, not a dream; the scent of bear, cattail, willow, loon, real, even though they were sleeping, and even though those things were not visible, only over the next horizon.

  The ice was contracting, groaning and cracking and squeaking up tighter, shrinking beneath the great cold—a concussive, grinding sound, as if giants were walking across the ice above—and it was this sound that awakened them. They snuggled in warmer among the rattly dried yellowing grasses and listened to the tremendous clashings, as if they were safe beneath the sea and were watching waves of starlight sweeping across their hiding place; or as if they were in some place, some position, where they could watch mountains being born.

  After a while the moon came up and washed out the stars. The light was blue and silver and seemed, Ann said, to be like a living thing. It filled the sheet of ice just above their heads with a shimmering cobalt light, which again rippled as if the ice were moving, rather than the earth itself, with the moon tracking it—and like deer drawn by gravity getting up in the night to feed for an hour or so before settling back in, Gray Owl and Ann and the dogs rose from their nests of straw and began to travel.

  “You didn’t—you know—engage?” Susan asks, a little mischievously.

  Ann shakes her head. “It was too cold,” she says.

  “But you would have, if it hadn’t been so cold, right?” Susan asks, and Ann shrugs.

  “He was an old man—in his fifties—he seemed old to me then, and the dogs were around. But yeah, there was something about it that made me think of...those things,” she says, careful and precise as ever.

  They walked a long way, Ann continues, eager to change the subject. The air was damp down there, and whenever they’d get chilled, they’d stop and make a little fire out of a bundle of dry cattails. There were little pockets and puddles of swamp gas pooled in place, and sometimes a spark from the cattails would ignite one of those, and those little pockets of gas would light up like when you toss gas on a fire—explosions of brilliance, like flashbulbs, marsh pockets igniting like falling dominoes, or like children playing hopscotch—until a large enough flash-pocket was reached—sometimes thirty or forty yards away—that the puff of flame would blow a chimney-hole through the ice, venting the other pockets, and the fires would crackle out, the scent of grass smoke sweet in their lungs, and they could feel gusts of warmth from the little flickering fires, and currents of the colder, heavier air sliding down through the new vent-holes and pooling around their ankles. The moonlight would strafe down through those rents in the ice, and shards of moon-ice would be glittering and spinning like diamond-motes in those newly vented columns of moonlight; and they pushed on, still lost, but so alive.

  The small explosions were fun, but they frightened the dogs, so Ann and Gray Owl lit twisted bundles of cattails and used them for torches to light their way, rather than building warming fires, though occasionally they would still pass though a pocket of methane and a stray ember would fall from their torches, and the whole chain of fire and light would begin again, culminating once more with a vent-hole being blown open and shards of glittering ice tumbling down into their lair...

  What would it have looked like, seen from above—the orange blurrings of their wandering trail beneath the ice; and what would the sheet of lake-ice itself have looked like that night—throbbing with ice-bound, subterranean blue and orange light of moon and fire? But again, there was no one to view the spectacle: only the travelers themselves, and they had no perspective, no vantage from which to view or judge themselves. They were simply pushing on from one fire to the next, carrying their tiny torches.

  They knew they were getting near a shore—the southern shore, they hoped, as they followed the glazed moon’s lure above—when the dogs began to encounter shore birds that had somehow found their way beneath the ice through small fissures and rifts and were taking refuge in the cattails. Small winter birds—juncos, nuthatches, chickadees—skittered away from the smoky approach of their torches; only a few late-migrating (or winter-trapped) snipe held tight and steadfast; and the dogs began to race ahead of Gray Owl and Ann, working these familiar scents—blue and silver ghost-shadows of dog muscle weaving ahead through slants of moonlight.

  The dogs emitted the odor of adrenaline when they worked, Ann said—a scent like damp, fresh-cut green hay—and with nowhere to vent, the odor was dense and thick around them, so that Ann wondered if it too might be flammable, like the methane—if in the dogs’ passions they might literally immolate themselves.

  They followed the dogs closely with their torches. The ceiling was low—about eight feet—so that the tips of their torches’ flames seared the ice above them, leaving a drip behind them and transforming the milky, almost opaque cobalt and orange ice behind them, wherever they passed, into wandering ribbons of clear ice, translucent to the sky—a script of flame, or buried flame, ice-bound flame—and they hurried to keep up with the dogs.

  Now the dogs had the snipe surrounded, as Ann told it, and one by one the dogs went on point, each dog freezing as it pointed to the birds’
hiding places, and Gray Owl moved in to flush the birds, which launched themselves with vigor against the roof of the ice above, fluttering like bats; but the snipe were too small, not powerful enough to break through those frozen four inches of water (though they could fly four thousand miles to South America each year and then back to Canada six months later—is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?), and as Gray Owl kicked at the clumps of frost-bent cattails where the snipe were hiding and they burst into flight, only to hit their heads on the ice above them, they came tumbling back down, raining limp and unconscious back to their soft grassy nests.

  The dogs began retrieving them, carrying them gingerly, delicately—not caring for the taste of snipe, which ate only earthworms—and Ann and Gray Owl gathered the tiny birds from the dogs, placed them in their pockets, and continued on to the shore, chasing that moon, the ceiling lowering to six feet, then four, then to a crawlspace, and after they had bashed their way out and stepped back out into the frigid air, they tucked the still-unconscious snipe into little crooks in branches, up against the trunks of trees and off the ground, out of harm’s way, and passed on, south—as if late in their own migration—while the snipe rested, warm and terrified and heart-fluttering, but saved, for now, against the trunks of those trees.

  Long after Ann and Gray Owl and the pack of dogs had passed through, the birds would awaken, their bright, dark eyes luminous in the moonlight, and the first sight they would see would be the frozen marsh before them, with its chain of still-steaming vent-holes stretching back across all the way to the other shore. Perhaps these were birds that had been unable to migrate owing to injuries, or some genetic absence. Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on.

  And what would the snipe think or remember, upon reawakening and finding themselves still in that desolate position, desolate place and time, but still alive, and with hope?

  Would it seem to them that a thing like grace had passed through, as they slept—that a slender winding river of it had passed through and rewarded them for their faith and endurance?

  Believing, stubbornly, that that green land beneath them would blossom once more. Maybe not soon; but again.

  If the snipe survived, they would be among the first to see it. Perhaps they believed that the pack of dogs, and Gray Owl’s and Ann’s advancing torches, had only been one of winter’s dreams. Even with the proof—the scribings—of grace’s passage before them—the vent-holes still steaming—perhaps they believed it was a dream.

  Gray Owl, Ann, and the dogs headed south for half a day until they reached the snow-scoured road on which they’d parked. The road looked different, Ann said, buried beneath snowdrifts, and they didn’t know whether to turn east or west. The dogs chose west, and Gray Owl and Ann followed them. Two hours later they were back at their truck, and that night they were back at Gray Owl’s cabin; by the next night Ann was home again.

  She says that even now she still sometimes has dreams about being beneath the ice—about living beneath the ice—and that it seems to her as if she was down there for much longer than a day and a night; that instead she might have been gone for years.

  It was twenty years ago, when it happened. Gray Owl has since died, and all those dogs are dead now, too. She is the only one who still carries—in the flesh, at any rate—the memory of that passage.

  Ann would never discuss such a thing, but I suspect that it, that one day and night, helped give her a model for what things were like for her dogs when they were hunting and when they went on point: how the world must have appeared to them when they were in that trance, that blue zone, where the odors of things wrote their images across the dogs’ hot brainpans. A zone where sight, and the appearance of things—surfaces— disappeared, and where instead their essence—the heat molecules of scent—was revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.

  I suspect that she holds that knowledge—the memory of that one day and night—especially since she is now the sole possessor—as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem in one’s fist: not a gem given to one by some favored or beloved individual but, even more valuable, some gem found while out on a walk—perhaps by happenstance, or perhaps by some unavoidable rhythm of fate—and hence containing great magic, great strength.

  Such is the nature of the kinds of people living, scattered here and there, in this valley.

  Swans

  I GOT TO KNOW Billy and Amy, over the years, about as well as you get to know anybody up here, which is to say not too well.

  They were my nearest neighbors. They saw me fall in and out of love three times, being rejected—abandoned—all three times.

  And though that’s not the story, they were good neighbors to me then, in those hard days. Amy had been a baker in Chicago, thirty years before, and even after coming out here to be with Billy she’d never stopped baking. She was the best baker who ever lived, I think: huckleberry pies and sweet rolls and the most incredible loaves of bread. I’ve heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner. I’ve read accounts of people who’ve died and come back to life, and their stories are all so similar I believe that’s how it is.

  And that’s what this end of the valley—the south fork of it, rising against the flex of the mountains—smells like all the time, because Amy is almost always baking. The scent of her fresh loaves drifts across the green meadows and hangs along the riverbanks. Sometimes I’ll be hiking in the woods, two or three miles up into the mountains, and I’ll catch a whiff of bread, and I’ll feel certain that she’s just taken some out of the oven, miles below. I know that’s a long way for a human to catch a scent, but bears can scent food at distances of seven miles, and wolves even farther. Living up here sharpens one’s senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes stronger. I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn’t pull. I’ve seen a child chase down a runaway tractor and catch it from behind, climb up, and turn the ignition off before it went into the river. Several old women up here swim in the river all year round, even through the winter. Dogs live to be twenty, twenty-five years old.

  And above it all—especially at this south end of the valley—Amy’s bread-scents hang like the smells from heaven’s kitchen.

  All that rough stuff—the miracle strength, the amazing bodies—that’s all fine, but also, we take it for granted; it’s simply what the valley brings out, what it summons.

  But the gentle stuff—that’s what I hold in awe; that’s what I like to watch.

  Gentlest of all were Amy and Billy.

  ***

  All his life, Billy worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land in the bottoms, six days a week. He’d take the seventh day off—usually a Sunday—to rest his machinery.

  There weren’t any churches in the little valley, and if there had been, I don’t know if he and Amy would have gone.

  Instead, he would take Amy fishing on the Yaak River in their wooden canoe. I’d see them out there on the flats above the falls, fishing with cane poles and crickets for trout—ten- and fifteen-pound speckled beauties with slab bellies that live
d in the deepest holes in the stillness up above the falls, waiting to intercept any nymphs that floated slowly past. Those trout were easy to catch, would hit anything that moved. Billy and Amy wore straw hats. The canoe was green. Amy liked to fish. The hot summer days would be ringing with stillness, and then when Amy hooked one, it would seem that the whole valley could hear her shout.

  The great trout would pull their canoe around on the river, held only by that one thin tight fly-line, spinning their canoe in circles while Amy shrieked and Billy paddled with one hand to stay up with the fish, maneuvering into position so he could try to net it with his free hand—and Amy holding on to that flexing cane pole and hollering.

  They were as much a part of the valley, living there in the south fork, as the trees and the river and the very soil itself, as much a part and substance of the valley as the tremulous dusk swamp-cries of the woodcock in summer.

  And the swans.

  Five of them, silent as gods, lived on a small pond in the woods below Billy and Amy’s cabin, gliding in elegant circles and never making a sound. Amy said they never sang like other birds—that they would remain silent all their lives, until they died, at which point they would stretch out their long necks and sing beautifully, and that that was where the phrase “swan song” came from.

  And it was for the swans as much as for anyone that Amy baked her bread. She had a park bench at the pond’s edge that Billy had made for her, and every evening Amy would take a loaf of bread there and feed it, crumb by crumb, to the beautiful big birds as dusk slid in from out of the trees.