The next day found Inman angling down to the southwest, footslogging an old cart path through the mountains. A brisk day with all the leaves dead and on the ground. He was not even aware of what county he was in. Bloody Madison, perhaps. He came to a sign and on one side it read TOBO55M and on the other TOAV65M. All he could figure was that it would be a fair walk to whatever towns were meant.
He rounded a bend and came to a small pool, a kind of spring, the rocks around it green with sphagnum. The spring bottom was covered with rotting oak and poplar leaves and the water was amber like a weak steeping of them, a tea. Inman bent to dip his canteen. Wind blew up and he heard a strange tock and click, a sound like an attempt at music using only dry sticks as instruments. He looked off into the poolside woods toward the sound and discovered an odd sight. Inman found himself viewing a trio of hanging skeletons swaying in the breeze and tapping into each other.
The canteen glugged full. Inman stood and stoppered it and walked to the bones. They hung in a row from the lower limb of a big hemlock. Not even hung with rope, just plaited strips of bark from hickory saplings. The pelvis and leg bones of one had fallen to the ground and lay in a heap, with the toes of one foot sticking up. On one of the complete skeletons, the plaits had stretched so much that the man’s toes reached the ground. Inman swept the leaves away, thinking to find a tamped patch in the dirt where the man had danced around and packed the earth in his dying. His hair had fallen off the skull and lay among the leaves about his toe bones. Blond. All the bones so white, teeth in the slack jaws yellow. Inman ran his hand down the arm bones of the man that had half fallen away. They had a grain to them. The bones of legs and feet in a pile as kindling for a fire. He couldn’t cut himself down, Inman thought, but if he’ll be patient, it will happen.
Some days later, Inman climbed all morning not really knowing where he was. Mists moved ahead of him like deer through the trees. And then for the afternoon he walked a ridgeline trail that rolled between balsam highlands and little gladed gaps where stood beech groves and the tail ends of cove hardwoods as they reached the highest places where they could live. As he walked he began to suspect that he knew roughly where he was. It was an old passway, that much was clear. He passed a rock cairn that the Cherokee in times long past were in the habit of building along the way to signify something, though whether way marker or memorial or holy place was now unknowable. Inman picked up a fresh rock and dropped it on the pile in passing as commemoration of some old upward yearning.
Late in the day he found himself on a rocky scarp bordered by heath bald, a thick tangle of waist-high azalea and laurel and myrtle growing right to the bare rock of the ledge. The trail emptied onto it as if travelers had made a custom of stopping to admire the view. Then the way reentered the forest through a faint passage in the azalea not forty feet from where he had emerged.
The sun was falling, and Inman reckoned he would again make a bivouac without benefit of fire or water. In the space near the edge of the scarp, he scraped together what little duff there was to soften a sleeping place. He ate parched corn from his palm and stretched out in his bedding to sleep, wishing there were a bigger moon in the sky to light the prospect before him.
He was awakened at first grey dawn by the sound of walking in the heath. He sat up and set the LeMat’s on full cock and leveled it at the sound. In a minute a black sow bear poked her head through the leaves not twenty feet from where Inman sat. She stood, tan muzzle up, neck stretched long, sniffing the breeze and blinking her little eyes.
She did not like what she smelled. She shuffled forward and grunted. A single cub not much bigger than a man’s head climbed a little way up the trunk of a young Fraser fir behind her. Inman knew that with her poor sight she could smell him but not see him in the faint light. She was in fact so near that even with his man’s poor nose he could take her scent. Wet dog and something deeper.
The bear twice whoofed out air from nose and mouth and moved forward tentatively. Inman shifted about and stood, and the bear pricked up her ears. She blinked and stretched her neck again and sniffed and moved another step forward.
Inman set the pistol down on his bedding, for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot one, though he had killed and eaten many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. The decision came as a result of a series of dreams he had over the period of a week in the muddy trenches of Petersburg. In the first of the dreams he had started as a man. He was sick and drank tea from bearberry leaves as tonic, and gradually he became transformed into a black bear. During the nights the bear visions rode him, Inman roamed the green dream mountains alone and four-legged, avoiding all of his own kind and of other kinds. He rooted in the ground for pale grubs and tore at bee trees for honey and ate huckleberries by the bushful and was happy and strong. In that manner of life, he thought, there might be a lesson in how to wage peace and heal the wounds of war into white scars.
In the final dream, though, he was shot by hunters after a long chase. He was strung from a tree by a rope about his neck and skinned, and he watched the process as from above. His dripping red carcass was as he knew an actual bear’s to be after skinning: that is to say, manlike, thinner than one would expect, the structure of paws beneath the fur long like a man’s hand. With that killing, the dreams had run their course, and he awoke that last morning feeling bear was an animal of particular import to him, one he might observe and learn from, and that it would be on the order of a sin for him to kill one no matter what the expense, for there was something in bear that spoke to him of hope.
Still, he did not much favor his current position, backed up against the brow of the rocky ledge, the heath knotted up before him, and the sow nervous with a cub born out of season. In his favor was this: he knew a bear was much more likely to run than attack, that she might at most make a false charge, rushing forward fifteen feet or so, bouncing as she came on her front legs and snorting out air. The purpose would be to scare him off, not to hurt him. But he had nowhere to run. He wanted her to know where he was, so he spoke to her, saying, I’ve no aim to trouble you. I’ll walk on from here and never be back. I’m just asking for clear passage. He spoke calm and straight and he wanted his voice to carry respect.
The bear sniffed more. She shifted from foot to foot, rocked from side to side. Inman slowly rolled up his bedding and slipped on his sacks.
—I’ll be going, he said.
He moved two steps and the bear false-charged.
Inman could figure in his mind as it happened that none of the measurements would work out. Like a problem of carpentry where none of the dimensions match up. He had only three feet to back up. She had all the momentum of her bulk and only ten feet ahead of her before the lip of the cliff.
Inman took a step to the side and the bear rushed by him and plunged over the high ledge that she never saw in the gloom. He could smell her strong as she went by. Wet dog, black dirt.
He looked over and saw her break open on the rocks far below like a great red blossom in the dawn light. Black pelt scraps littering the rocks.
Shit, he thought. Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle.
The cub in the fir bawled out in its anguish. It was not even yet a weanling and would wither and die without a mother. It would wail away for days until it starved or was eaten by wolf or panther.
Inman walked to the tree and looked into the little bear’s face. It blinked its black eyes at him and opened its mouth and cried like a human baby.
To his credit, Inman could imagine reaching up and grabbing the cub by the scruff of its neck and saying, We’re kin. Then taking his knapsack off and thrusting the cub in with only its head sticking out. Then putting the pack back on and walking away, the bear looking about from this new perspective as bright-eyed as a papoose. Give it to Ada as a pet. Or if she turned him away, he might raise it to be a part-tame bear, and when full grown it might stop by
his hermit cabin on Cold Mountain now and again for company. Bring its wife and children so that in years to come Inman could have an animal family if no other. That would be one way this dead bear calamity might be rectified.
What Inman did, though, was all he could do. He picked up the LeMat’s and shot the cub in the head and watched it pause as its grip on the tree failed and it fell to ground.
So as not to waste the meat, Inman built a fire and skinned out the cub and cut it in pieces and parboiled it. He laid the black pelt out on a rock and it was no bigger than a coon’s. While the bear cooked he sat and waited at the scarp as morning came on. The mists broke and he could see mountains and rivers ranked to the earth’s far verge. Shadows slid down the slopes of the nearest line of ridges, falling into the valley as if draining into a vast pool of dark under the ground. Rags of cloud hung in the valleys below Inman’s feet, but in all that vista there was not a rooftop or plume of smoke or cleared field to mark a place where man had settled. You could look out across that folded landscape and every sense you had told only that this was all the world there was.
The wind sweeping up the mountain carried away the smell of the bear boiling and left only the odor of wet stone. Inman could see west for scores of miles. Crest and scarp and crag, stacked and grey, to the long horizon. Cataloochee, the Cherokee word was. Meaning waves of mountains in fading rows. And this day the waves could hardly be differed from the raw winter sky. Both were barred and marbled with the same shades of grey only, so the outlook stretched high and low like a great slab of streaked meat. Inman himself could not have been better dressed to conceal himself amid this world, for all he wore was grey and black and dirty white.
Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman’s heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the leap of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast prospect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.
As he studied on it, he recognized the line of every far ridge and valley to be more than remembered. They seemed long ago scribed indelible on his corneas with a sharp instrument. He looked out at this highland and knew the names of places and things. He said them aloud: Little Beartail Ridge, Wagon Road Gap, Ripshin, Hunger Creek, Clawhammer Knob, Rocky Face. Not a mountain or watercourse lacked denomination. Not bird or bush anonymous. His place.
He rocked his head from side to side, and it felt balanced anew on his neck stem. He entertained the notion that he stood unfamiliarly plumb to the horizon. For a moment it seemed thinkable that he might not always feel cored out. Surely off in that knotty country there was room for a man to vanish. He could walk and the wind would blow the yellow leaves across his footsteps and he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large.
Inman sat and admired his country until the bear pieces were cooked, and then he dredged them in flour and fried them up in the last lard from the twisted paper the woman had given him days before. He ate sitting at the cliff top. He had not eaten bear of such youth before, and though the meat was less black and greasy than that of older bear, it still tasted nevertheless like sin. He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
naught and grief
If the lobe of mountain they climbed had a name, Stobrod did not know it. He and his two companions walked humped up, their down-turned faces clenched against the cold, hat brims raked near to their noses, hands pulled up into coat sleeves. Their shadows blew out long before them so that they trod on their resemblances. The woods passed unremarked around them. Bare sticks of buckeye, silver bell, tulip tree, and basswood waved in the breeze. Many wet millennia of leaves underfoot muted their steps.
The Pangle boy trod close upon Stobrod’s heels. The third figure followed six paces back. Stobrod carried his fiddle in its sack clamped under his arm, and Pangle had his banjo thonged neck down over his shoulder. The third man had no music device but toted all the party’s meager goods in a knapsack. He had enshrouded himself in a moth-riddled butternut blanket that trailed on the ground, dragging a wake in the leaves.
Their bowels were all a-clamor from the previous night’s supper, which they’d made from a doe they’d found dead on the ground, frozen to it. In their meat hunger, they’d chosen to ignore signs of how long the thing had been there or how it might have died. They’d built a smoky little fire of wet poplar and cooked up its haunch until it was not much more than thawed out. They ate it in some quantity, and now they regretted it. They did not talk. Now and again one of them flared off into a laurel thicket and caught back up later.
No wind hissed nor bird called. The only sound fine needles falling when they passed beneath stands of hemlock. Vestiges of dawn yet fanned out ocher in the east, and thin clouds scudded fast across the brittle sun. The twined dark limbs of hardwoods stood etched against the weak light. For some time there was no color to anything earthly other than somber tones of brown and grey. Then they passed an icy rock ledge and saw growing on it some flabby yellow sect of wort or lichen, so bright it hurt the eyes. Pangle reached out and broke off a scalloped leathern flap and ate it speculatively and with great attentiveness. He neither spit it out nor pulled off more, so his judgment on the taste was hard to call. Afterward, though, he walked along bright in his perceptions, alert for other such gifts the world might give.
In time they ascended to a piece of flat ground where three passways came together: the one they had arrived by falling, two yet fainter climbing on. The greater of the forks had begun life as a buffalo trail and then an Indian path, and it remained still too tight in its passage between trees to make even a wagon road. Hunters had camped here and left a well-used fire ring and had cut trees for firewood and the woods were thin some fifty paces back from where the ways Y’d off. An immense poplar, though, stood in the forks of the rising tracks. It had not been spared cutting out of any homage to its beauty or its girth or its age. There was just not a crosscut saw in any near settlement long enough to span it. Its trunk was big around as a corncrib where it entered the ground.
Stobrod, thinking he dimly remembered the place, stopped to survey it, and when he did Pangle trod on his boot heel. Stobrod’s foot came out entire, and he stood sock-footed on frozen leaf mold. He turned and put a hard finger to the boy’s breastbone and pushed him a step away and then stooped and put his fiddle sack on the ground and reshod himself.
The men stood together blowing from the climb and looking at the two paths ahead of them. Their breaths hovered about them as if in concern, and then the vague shapes lost interest and vanished. There was a creek tumbling somewhere nearby within earshot, and it provided all the sound there was to the place.
—It’s cold, the third man said.
Stobrod looked at him and then cleared his throat and spit in commentary on the bleakness of the scene and the depthlessness of the observation.
Pangle reached a hand out of his sleeve and turned it palm up to the elements and then fisted it and drew it back in as a turtle its head.
—Ah, God, shrivel you cullions up in you belly, he said.
—What I mean, the third man said.
They had acquired the man at the outlier’s cave. He had not offered a name nor did Stobrod care to know it. He was a Georgia boy of no more than seventeen years, black-headed, brown-skinned, little fine wisps of chin whiskers, but smooth-cheeked as a maid. Some Cherokee blood, or maybe Creek. Like everybody else, he had a war tale. He and his cousin had been pitiful little conscriptees, and they had been put into the troops in sixty-three. They had fought out a year of wa
r in the same regiment, though there was not much they could contribute since their rifle muskets stood higher than their hat crowns. They’d slept every night under the same blanket, and they had deserted together. Their reasoning was that no war lasts forever, and though man was born to die, it would be foolish to do so on the eve of peace. So they left. But the walk home was long and confusing, and they had not reckoned on quite so much landscape passing under their feet. It had taken them three months to reach Cold Mountain, and they did not even know what state it was in. They’d become profoundly lost, and the cousin had died in a grim cove, feverish and wracked with coughs from some wet lung disorder.
The boy had been found by one of the cavers some days later, wandering aimless. He had been given over to Stobrod and Pangle, who were setting off to found their own community of two somewhere up near the Shining Rocks. Even though Georgia was a state Stobrod held in low regard, he had agreed to point it out to the boy when they reached a height where they had a great southern vista.
First, however, they had descended from the cave to a hiding place for food, telling the boy along the way about Ada and how she had eventually led Ruby toward benevolence. Ruby had laid down conditions for her charity, though. She and Ada were themselves working on tight margins for the winter and could give only a little, not enough for the two men to live on entirely. And she thought it risky for Stobrod and Pangle to visit. She did not want to see so much as their shadows about the farm again. The food would have to be left somewhere safe and hidden, and she had suggested a place up along the ridge that she had discovered in her rambles as a child. A round flat stone marked from rim to rim with all manner of odd scripture. And further, she did not want to be tied down to any schedule. She’d take food there when she felt like it and not take it when she didn’t. It was up to Stobrod to check.