"All right," Ben had said. "Roses."
She mentioned it a final time the day before she died. "Remember," she told him, two hours before her surgery. "You're red and I'm white."
"The mortality rate in a mitral-valve replacement for someone in your state of health is approximately one in a billion," Ben said. "You're going to be just fine."
"I'm not planning on dying, Ben. But if I do, remember about the roses. And remember how much I loved you."
It was early evening, the light fallen low, when he came across his first chukars. The air had cooled with the dying of the sun, and the birds were on the move to forage on the succulent blades and seeds of bunchgrass growing along the ridge crest. As they fed, they separated and called to one another reassuringly; Ben heard their gregarious, staccato clucking before his dogs could catch their scent riding on the wind. He stopped to listen and to fix their location. He cradled the shotgun in the crook of his arm and called the dogs in close. He listened with his palm cupped around his ear, turning his head down the long route of the horizon. The chukars, he thought, were feeding to the north, though with them there was no real certainty, for their low fast call always seemed to Ben to come from everywhere at once.
He had not pushed ahead more than thirty paces when Tristan became hotly agitated. The dog raised his snout to the breeze and trotted forward twenty yards, and with this the chukars stopped calling. Rex cut hard and fast behind Tristan, down into the breaks to follow scent where no doubt the birds had laid up through the heat before abandoning their cover for the ridge crest. It was silent now. Ben moved up between the dogs and dug in his thumb against the safety tang. Tristan had gone all stalkingly tight and was edging right and left again. Ben understood that when the birds broke at last, they would hurl themselves cleverly over the break and he would have the low sun in his eyes. He held his shotgun lightly. Rex bounded up into view from below with his withers flattened and his ears back. The dogs worked aprowl before him with their noses trailing fresh ground scent and Ben stopped to collect himself, should the birds suddenly flush. He relocated forward, set his feet, and adjusted the tilt of his sunglasses. He had just swung his rucksack onto the ground when Tristan halted twenty yards out and locked up high at both ends beautifully, classically gone on point.
Ben edged tensely forward. "Stay where you are," he said to Rex, who had not stopped pounding insatiably through the cover as if to put up all the birds. The dog, against his will, held up.
Then everything was still and silent. Ben had time to think. In his teenage years it had been his habit to pass on the initial shot at chukars, since they always posted a sentry, like the cow guard in a band of feeding elk. The first bird often flushed wild at a distance from where the feeding covey would flush outside of shooting range. More than that practicality, there was something poignant in passing on a first shot and standing in silence while the bird fled. There was something haunting in it.
When the lone bird got up at last, it held low to the purple sage, and in the late October light Ben saw plainly its dark barred markings, its vermilion feet, and its chestnut tail feathers. There was the quiet stirring of a single bird's wings while swiftly the chukar dropped over the breaks and sailed out freely above the river, where suddenly it grew incidental and disappeared down the hill.
Immediately the dogs moved forward, as though the flushed bird had been a shadow. Ben worked wide to his right and ahead so that the shots he might take would be more direct and less like passing shots. In the next moment, the dogs went on point together, a few yards apart in a patch of high bunchgrass, Rex pitched leftward with one paw raised, Tristan low and stretched solidly. Ben flicked off his safety and calmed his reeling heart.
It was always at this moment that he hesitated to take the life of a bird. It had been this way since he was eight years old, shooting mourning doves alongside his father. It had been easier for him in his teenage years, though still he had felt a flicker of doubt, been haunted by the feeling that something was amiss—and, of course, after the war, after killing was a part of him, he'd stopped hunting altogether. He had stopped fishing, too. He'd been done altogether with killing. Yet he'd embraced it again after Rachel died, the killing had become a substitute life, and in the past two autumns he'd taken up again the pastimes of his childhood—shooting small birds in canyons and sagelands, deceiving geese from cold pit-blinds, killing mallards in the bends of sloughs.
Ben stood waiting for the birds to flush. A chukar got up under Rex's nose, winging low toward the river breaks, and he shot it with the open barrel bored as if for shooting skeet, and suddenly chukars were everywhere, leaving cover in a bold flush, a dozen or more leaping from the bunchgrass while Ben was frozen by the weight of his astonishment and swung through on one bird and then another, and at last gave out with the second barrel, which was choked down tightly for a distant shot, and the chukar rose higher on the wing, as if assailed by a fast-rising breeze, and sailed wounded toward the sagebrush.
Ben broke open his Winchester and laid it over his forearm. He was befuddled to have shot so well with the use of one eye only. There was a terrible injustice in it for him, as though shooting well were only luck. Or bad luck for the birds who fell at the hollow report of his father's gun.
Down the breaks below his feet, the remaining chukars settled. Ben knew they would sit for a lonesome interlude and finally in frantic desperation call with a yearning to meet again, until the covey reassembled. He wanted to hunt them while they were likely to hold, waiting for him to pass by.
He worked Tristan after the cripple. When the dog maneuvered close enough, the wounded chukar abandoned cover and dragged its left wing through the sage. Ben felt sullied by what had happened and watched helplessly while Tristan gave chase, pounced to seize the running bird, and clutched it softly between his teeth in a puff of gently floating feathers.
At the crest of the breaks Ben stood, bird in hand, and watched while Rex brought the other slain bird in and laid it neatly on the table rock. He praised his dogs, though not too profusely, as they stood panting at his side. Ben slid the first bird into his coat pocket and picked up the second to examine it, a young male with small, rounded spurs. He tucked it in beside the first.
The sun lay low against the mountains, but there was still good shooting light. He slid off his sunglasses, fingered the dressing over his eye, and worked on his steel-rimmed glasses. He drank some water—he emptied one bottle—and then he went after the singles slowly, leaving his rucksack behind on the ground, urging the dogs to stay close.
Last hunt, he told himself.
He hunted three hundred feet downhill. He missed on the first, but then there were others, and he felt satisfied. One bird he took straightaway on a second shot, staying beneath it as it barreled downhill; the next flushed from behind a stone tower and, unlike most chukars he'd seen as a boy, flew toward him along a steady contour twenty yards below his gun, so that he had to swing patiently for the longest time and kill it on the late going away.
He held this last bird in his hand. A dark band passed rakishly over its eyes, and the black bars along its flanks lay symmetrically, sleekly ruffled. The tail feathers were chestnut brown and the feathers elsewhere an olive color, in places darker or a blue-tinted gray; they lay well-ordered in delicate waves and were soft and thick against its breast. The warmth of life was still in it.
It was unfathomable to Ben that he had decided to die under circumstances so cruel. Odd not to have thought of this before—a death in the arid sageland, alone, in the aftermath of killing small birds. He could not understand the end he'd chosen except as an act of stoic machismo, and that was not enough. The shooting and the land were not enough. Hunting small birds as his final earthly act—it was inadequate, somehow, and misdirected, at odds with the life he had lived as a doctor, a husband, and a father. But so was the act of taking his own life instead of seeing it through. So was killing himself. Suicide was at odds with the life he knew, at odds with
all he understood, of himself and of the world.
Ben put the bird in his coat pocket. He climbed the breaks in the last light of day with a steady pain in his side. The day was closing around him now. Things could not hold light any longer. Weary of climbing, short of breath, he paid no attention to his hunting dogs. The darkness seeped into and over the land, and inevitably into Ben too, as he saw the world swallowed by night.
He was too tired and in too much pain for the long hike back into Vantage. He sat and waited for things to improve, but there was only the sweep of the night wind blowing and the discord of his breathing. Reluctantly, he climbed fifty feet, and fifty more, until he came to his rucksack.
Somewhere in the night a coyote called, tremblingly high like a melancholy flautist, and with such ornate, long-winded insistence, it was impossible to know if it was one animal or many out toward the Frenchman Hills. A night music native to this country of Bens birth; a grievous howling, as if the land mourned itself. Ben remembered a Wanapum man, with whom he'd boxed apples sixty years before, saying that the cry of a single coyote often sounded like the cry of many.
Now Ben breasted one of the chukars and fed the boned meat to his dogs. He tossed the remains of the bird down the hill; he watered his dogs from his aluminum cup, pouring a ration for each. He ate more of the pumpkin seeds Christine Reilly had given him and drank his own water ration. Then, digging in the rucksack for his headlamp, he came across the breath-mint tin of three marijuana cigarettes. Ben took one out and sniffed it. He pondered what he knew of Cannabis sativa. That it eased the pain of cancer was a well-established medical fact. And yet he remained adverse to it. Its associations were foreign to him. On the other hand, why not?
He got out his lighter and lit the cigarette against the grain of his principles, astonished at himself. The smell, inhaled, was pungent, raw. He felt the searing of the smoke in his lungs, and his windpipe rejected it. Exhaling, he gasped roughly. A veil soon dropped over the world. He brought the cigarette to his lips again and sucked on it until its tip glowed orange, then blew thick smoke through his nostrils in long double plumes.
Ben noted the strangeness of things. Nothing particularly troublesome, but certainly an odd difference—the desert poised, crystallized.
He drew again on the cigarette. Its acrid, green odor sweetened the chill air. He drew again deeply into his chest and held the smoke until his face turned a strangled red.
After that, he felt inured to pain but hungrier and thirstier than before. He ate more of the pumpkin seeds. He indulged in them and drank half of his water. He spread the duffel bag and the rain poncho on the ground, stuffed the remaining chukars in his rucksack, and lay down wrapped up tightly in his blanket like a nomad in the desert.
Bens dogs excavated and maneuvered in the sand, settling in at his side. He urged them closer for the warmth they could provide. It was good to have them near, companions. They were sentinels, too, beside him there in the frigid, inhospitable night.
Resting his head on the folded hunting vest, he watched the stars with his one good eye, their light blurred through his glasses. His mind raced, his thoughts were rich, his memories vivid, graphic. He felt he could touch the past.
FOUR
Bens parents had planted rows of apple trees on the east bank of the Columbia River. Their orchards were sheltered by Lombardy poplars and fell toward the river in an immaculate sweep, the rows full of irrigation ditches, sharp-bladed quack grass growing dense, and branch props leaning against forked limbs. There were thirteen acres of Golden Delicious, two of Winesaps, two of Rome Beauties, and eight of cherries and apricots. There were shanties for the pickers who came in June, a weathered shed for making boxes and for packing apples in oiled tissue, a barn loaded with hay to the rafters, a stable for the horses, a chicken house, an outhouse, an icehouse, and a small-well pump house. The Givenses' farmhouse sat on a knoll surrounded by shade elms and willows. Even inside, the world smelled of sage, and from the front window the setting sun bronzed the hills stretching westward. When the wind came up, the tops of trees swirled, so that with the windows flung open on summer evenings the crash of branches came startlingly loud. Year around was the wind in the trees, the drifting fragrance of sage.
Ben made apple boxes out of pine shook, pulled weeds in the kitchen garden, split cordwood for the fireplace, and milked cows twice a day. In the spring he helped his father and brother put out the pollinating hives. When the rains came, the sluice gates clogged with weeds, and Ben and Aidan stood in the ditches to clean them out by hand. There were also windbreak trees to plant and Jonathan pollinating trees. In April and May there were young trees to plant and finished trees to pull out. In early summer they disced between the rows to keep the mice from the orchards. In July they put spreader sticks in the yearling trees and strapped the branches back. Midsummer there was always fruit to thin and branches to prop and strap back carefully to keep them from cracking beneath the apples. In August came the picking season; in fall and winter there was pruning to do, and piles of water sprouts to burn.
Where the orchards ended, the desert began—buttes, coulees, unnamed canyons, arid expanses of infinite reach, sun-beaten, silent, and lonesome. Ben and Aidan took the dogs into this country in search of quail, chukars, and sage grouse, and occasionally got a shot at a jackrabbit. They rode on horseback when they had the chance, their shotguns slung across their backs, their canteens slapping against their saddles. Sometimes they camped in the sage at night, where they drew and spitted their birds carefully, stuffed sage sprigs inside the empty bellies, and cooked the meat on a twig fire. Then they lay back with their hands behind their heads and talked and watched the heavens.
Aidan was older than Ben by twenty months, stocky, sturdy, even-tempered. He worked with a pine sliver set between his teeth, a sheen of sweat on his collarbones, and the front of his shirt soaked in a line from breastbone to navel. Generally he wore his hat low on his forehead, so that his eyes were heavily shaded by its brim, but when somebody spoke to him he canted the brim up and listened with much animation around the eyes before answering.
Aidan was agreeable, amiable. His skin was brown, his eyes blue. He liked to swim in the river at dusk, just upstream from the ranch house, in the backwash of a small eddy. Ben and Aidan would strip on the bank, tossing their shirts and pants up high against the warm, polished shore rocks. They stretched their limbs and ran their hands along their bellies and through hair flecked with pollen dust, apple litterfall, or blossom petals. Then they splashed into the river. It rippled gently across their backs, and in the eddy they rode the current and swam against it while up the hill the orchards glowed in the last light.
In late fall the Givenses went mountain climbing. They took the train into Stevens Pass with a picnic lunch inside their knapsacks and walked open ridges in all weathers, ascending to unnamed summits. Their mother and father sat on a blanket while Ben and Aidan leaned against stones to look down on forests foreign to them in their density and reach. Ben claimed he could smell the salt of the sea, though it was off two hundred miles, carried on the mountain breeze. To the east the mountains gave way to sage, but westward loomed impenetrable forests, and they spoke of hiking into them to places no one had ever seen. They spoke of traveling for weeks in the mountains to see the uncharted high country, as though they were explorers or pioneers and not the sons of orchardists.
In Leavenworth, one year, they bought wooden skis with bent-metal toepieces and leather straps, to ski down Big Chief Mountain. Bens mother taught them first to snowplow, then the trick of a telemark turn and stopping in a christy. They took their skis on winter trips, slaloming from summits on still afternoons, and tried the amateur ski-jump trestle near Leavenworth on Ski Hill Road, strapped to eight-foot hickory skis and falling badly and often. They skied along Peshastin Creek or up along the Chum-stick River, then hiked uphill with their skis on their shoulders until they had earned a downhill run, or they took the railroad into Stevens Pass and telem
arked back down.
Once they stood on the summit of Mission Peak with the December wind in their faces but the sky cloudless and lit by the pale sun low among the peaks. Ben was working his boots into the toe irons when Aidan pointed at a mountain goat risen out of drifts not twenty yards off, poised to flee with its head turned toward them, already certain of flight. It swiveled on its hind hooves and was gone in a puff of snow behind an outcropping, and Ben, closing his binding clamp, felt poised on the cusp of the world, as close to God as he might ever get, with no place higher but heaven itself, and nothing to obscure the truths of the wind, the sky, the snow, the winter sun.
At ten he rode horseback with his father and Aidan, deer hunting for the first time. They rode into the hills just after lunch, when new snow covered the ground. They crossed the river at Coleman's Landing and followed the Colockum Stagecoach Road, his father with his 270 Weatherby Magnum in a leather saddle scabbard at his right hand and a .22 pistol at his belt. It was dry-cold, winter-still; the land lay white and paralyzed. They saw no one and no deer sign in the clean snow of the road. When the stars were thick and brilliant in the sky, they stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Wright Givens buttoned his canvas coat and cupped his hands to light a cigarette, his jaw and mouth and the end of his nose glowing in the flaring match light. "This'll do," he said to them, and they stamped the snow down, staked out the tent, and hobbled the horses for the night. They started a fire of lodgepole pine slabs, on which their father boiled water for coffee, and they ate elk jerky from a leather bag and chewed dried apples and apricots.
Wright Givens smoked, his collar turned up, the brim of his hat turned down. He said that in the morning chances would be good, since deer were always nocturnal in their habits, moving at dusk and dawn. Deer watched their back trail as they moved to bed down, and traveled with their noses into the wind, but there was no wind now to assist them in their caution and they might well be approached from above. Then Wright settled in before the fire, tapped a pine ember with his boot, and said that in the early days it was hard along this stagecoach road where they were camped tonight. Wagons were lowered toward Wenatchee by rope; trees were dragged behind wagon axles to supplement the wheel brakes. A schoolhouse was pulled on skids from farm to farm each summer to spread justly the burden of heating it and of boarding the accompanying teacher.