Then she was out in the yard in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, seven forty-eight by the clock she insisted on over Sess’s objections, and the morning warming toward the low forties. She watched him make a turn at the edge of the woods, then tear up along the bank of the river, turn again and come straight for her with the dogs digging at their harnesses and a whole world of dust and threshed weed gone up into the air. He did manage to stop them more or less in the yard, throwing the brake (a sort of anchor that flailed and leapt and finally dug a furrow a hundred feet long), and wearing out the heels of his boots while he roared commands and the two wheel dogs went for each other’s throats in one of those ill-tempered canine disputes that seemed to erupt every five minutes throughout the day. He let go the handles and got in between the dogs, kicking and cursing, until they finally got over whatever it was and sat panting in their traces. Sess was powdered with dust and weed, his shirt was torn and both his forearms were drooling blood where the dogs had bitten him. “Hey, baby,” he smiled, “want to go for a ride? I’ll take you round the world—you know what that means?”
“Don’t get dirty on me, Sess.”
Then he was holding on to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “You know I wouldn’t do that,” he said, breathing into her ear.
The dogs turned to look at them, ten wolfish eyes fixated on Sess’s back, Lucius, in the lead, looking as if he could go out and run a hundred miles without even breathing hard. Sess had them hooked up to his training rig, a heavy narrow box of dense wet wood with three-inch aspen poles for runners and two pairs of wheels he must have scavenged from defunct wheelbarrows—or maybe children’s tricycles—at the four corners. The wheels were useless. The rig weighed a ton. He just wanted to work the dogs, he told her, train them to work as a team, and to pull weight.
“I’ve been thinking I might take them up the trapline today,” he said, “just a little ways, to give them the sight and smell of it and to maybe cut back some of the brush and branches and whatnot. I’ll be back tonight. Late, though. Real late.”
She was amazed. “With that? The whole thing’ll fall apart before you go two miles.”
He didn’t try to deny it. “The wheels’ll have to come off, I guess—when we get into the muskeg, anyway. I’m just going to let them skid the thing till they poop out. And by the way, really boil the hell out of that piece of bear for the stew—they’re worse for trichina than pigs even.”
She knew that, knew it from twenty years ago, but she didn’t say anything. The bear was quartered and hanging from the poles at the bottom of the cache, they’d had the liver fried with onions for last night’s dinner, and the big yellow-white chunks of its summer-laid fat were already rendered and put up in coffee cans to cool and harden.
“And you might,” he added, and it was the last thing he said to her, “you might want to keep after that hide, scrape it good and then stretch it and hang it out where it can dry.”
Later, after she’d made herself a sandwich with the leftover bread and drunk enough coffee to get her nerve ends firing, she dragged the bear’s hide out to the picnic table and sat in the sun working the flesh off it with the ulu Sess had given her for a birthday present. The ulu was an Inuit tool, a bone handle attached to a crescent-shaped blade, and it was ideal for scraping hides, a task she guessed she would be performing pretty regularly as the winter months came on and her husband brought her the stiffened corpses of whatever he’d managed to kill out there in the secret recesses of the country. And how did she feel about that—how did she feel about this, about this stinking, flea-and-tick-ridden hide under the knife right here and now in a hurricane of flies and the blood and grease worked up under her nails and into every least crease and line of her hands so that she’d never get the smell out? She felt content. Or no: she felt irritated. This was the first time he’d left her since they’d been married, the first of a hundred times to come and a hundred times beyond that, and all he expected of her was to sit and wait for him and be damned sure the stew was simmering and the hide was scraped clean. She slapped a mosquito on her upper arm and the imprint of her hand was painted there in bear’s blood. She flicked flies out of her face. Was this really what she wanted?
The ulu scraped, the flies rose and settled. There wasn’t a sound in the world. She worked the hide out of inertia, for lack of anything better to do, worked it in a trance, and only when the canoe appeared on the horizon did she snap out of it. She watched it coming from half a mile away, because she could only study the stippled red meat and white sinew of the hide for so long before staring off into the immensity and just dreaming, and here was this slab of aluminum riding the current in a bolt of light, two people—two women—digging at the paddles. She stood, wiped her hands on a scrap of filthy rag, tried to do something with her hair. It was Star—she could see that now—Star and Merry, dressed alike in serapes and big-brimmed rawhide hats, maneuvering the battered silver canoe as if they’d been doing it all their lives. She watched them angle toward shore and then she waved and went down to meet them.
Star sang out her name as the canoe crunched gravel and Merry sprang out to secure it. “We thought we’d come over and make your day—how does that sound?” Star called, clambering out of the canoe and hefting a half gallon of red wine like a trophy. “Girls’ day out!”
Sess was gone. The bear hide was a stinking collapsed filthy welter of raw meat and insects and the cabin reeked like a slaughterhouse. Winter was waiting in the wings—it was fifty-five degrees in the sun—and already she’d begun to feel sorry for herself, begun to feel resentful and left out, and here were her friends come to rescue her. She took the jug from Star’s hand, screwed off the cap and held it to her lips and let the taste of it sweeten her mouth and scour her veins. Up the hill they went, arm-in-arm-in-arm. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” Pamela said.
When they got to the picnic table, Merry pulled up short. “God, what is that?” she said. “Is that a bear? A grizzly bear?” Merry was the spacey one, more than a little Gracie Allen in her—Say goodnight, Gracie—as lost and out of place in the country as anybody Pamela could conceive of. Every coot, sourdough and weekend nimrod in the Three Pup had fed her the usual horror stories about grizzlies—the way they smelled out sexual lubricants and menstruation, their power and fearlessness and the trail of dismembered corpses they left in their wake—and she backed away from the table as if the hide could come back to life and wrap her in its killing arms.
“It’s a black bear. A sow. Sess shot it in the garden last night.”
“Wow. Far out. So what are you going to do, make a bear rug?”
“Of course, what do you think?” Star said, and she tipped back the jug of wine now herself, and both Pamela and Merry watched her drink, the excess running down her arm in blood-red braids. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and held the jug out to Pamela. “Maybe we should get some cups and try to be a little more ladylike,” she said, and they all three burst into laughter.
“A bear rug,” Merry said, after the laughter had trailed off. “That’s cool, I guess, I mean, especially up here—but what about the rest of it, the whole animal that was living out there in the woods yesterday and doing nobody any harm. What about that?”
“They eat it,” Star said.
“Don’t,” Merry said, and her eyes jumped from Star to Pamela and back again.
“Right, Pamela?”
She just nodded, because she was trying to maneuver the big jug of wine up to her lips again, and to hell with it, to hell with everything, really, that was the way she was feeling.
The flies had settled thick on the raw meat of the hide, but they’d be dead soon too, winter-killed any day now, and the mosquitoes that went for blood every minute of every day and night, they’d be gone along with them. Merry rocked back on her heels, reached up to pull down the brim of her hat and remove the oversized pink discs of her sunglasses, the better to focus her blunted brown eyes on Pamela. “
You mean it’s true? You actually—I mean, people—actually eat bear? Bear as in Winnie-the-Pooh? Yogi Bear? Smokey Bear? Only you can prevent forest fires?” She giggled. “You’re goofing on me. Come on, tell me you’re goofing.”
She could feel the wine singing in her veins. She didn’t want this, didn’t need it—she just wanted to let go. She shrugged. “Listen,” she said, “let me get some cups,” but she didn’t move. The two girls stood transfixed, looking at her. “All right, yes,” she sighed. “We eat bear and anything else we can get our hands on up here, moose, rabbit, duck, fish, lynx—better than veal, Sess tells me—even porcupine and muskrat, and I can testify to that, because you wouldn’t think it but muskrat can be as sweet and tender as any meat you can name—”
Merry was giving her a look of undistilled horror. “But to kill another creature, another living soul, a soul progressing through all the karmic stages to nirvana”—she paused to slap a mosquito on the back of her wrist with a neat slash of her hand—“that’s something I just couldn’t do.”
“You just did.”
“What? Oh, that. All right, I agree with you, I shouldn’t have, and I wish I didn’t have to—I can’t wait till it’s winter and the earth mother lays them all to rest, really—but a bug is one thing—and I know, I know, the Jains wouldn’t think so—and like a bear is something else. They’re almost human, aren’t they?”
Pamela had to think about that for a minute, standing there in the yard with the flies thrumming, the meat hanging in the shade and the thick yellow-white fat hardening in the cans on the shelves. She had to think about the traps and the foxes and brush wolves that chewed through their own flesh and bone and tendons to escape the steel teeth and about the cub Sess had orphaned, the cub that was too young to dig a den and destined to die of inanition and cold when the long night came down. “Yes,” she said finally, “yes, they are.”
And then it was all right. She bundled up the half-flensed hide and flung it over the salmon rack like a beach towel gone stiff with crud, scooted the flies from the table and brought out three cups and a bottle of Sess’s rum. “Iron Steve,” she said, setting the bottle down and easing in beside Star. “He was here last night for dinner, and guess who he talked about nonstop?” And there was a topic. The wine sank in the bottle, shots went round, and the hounds of gossip went barking up every tree.
It was late afternoon by the time Merry and Star stumbled down to the river, bouncing off trees like pinballs caroming from one cushion to another in a pinball game as big as the world, and Pamela said, “It’s a good thing you don’t have to drive anywhere,” and they all laughed about that, all three of them, until their heads began to ache and they felt they’d laughed enough, at least for one day. She watched them shove off, the canoe uncertain in the current until they balanced out their weight and the paddles caught them and the bow swung upstream. “Be careful!” she called, and she wouldn’t let herself think about the canoe overturning and the cold swift rush of that water. She waved, and Star, backpaddling to keep the nose straight, lifted a hurried hand from her grip on the paddle, and then they moved off and got smaller and kept dwindling till the country ate them up.
Then there was the silence again. She stood there on the bank for a long while, staring at nothing, at the trees that were all alike, at the water that jumped and settled and sought the same channels over and over, and she felt something she’d never felt before. An immanence. A force that took her mind away and drew her down to nothing. She wasn’t Pamela Harder standing on the banks of the Thirtymile. She wasn’t a newlywed newly deserted. She wasn’t anything. The sky rose up out of the hills and shot over her head with a whoosh that was like the closing of an air lock and then the clouds came up and blotted the sun and still she stood there. She’d never used drugs in her life, had believed everything she’d heard and read about the evils of addiction, about people taking LSD and staring into the sun until their retinas burned out, mutilating themselves, jumping off buildings because they thought they could fly, but when Star had laid out the two thin white sticks of rolled-up marijuana on the picnic table, she said to herself, Why not? If Star could do it, if Merry could, then why not? There is no knowledge worth the name that doesn’t come from experience.
She might have stayed there forever, stock-still and feeling the way the loose ends of things came together in one mighty bundle, might have turned to stone like in the folk tales, but a pair of gulls, yellow beak, steady eye, brought her out of it. They swooped in low to investigate her, to smell the death on her and see it ground into the lines of her hands and worked up under her fingernails, then reeled off screeching in alarm. She looked down at her hands hanging out of the frayed sleeves of her sweatshirt. They were cold. Simply that: cold. A wind rustled the leaves and she shivered and looked over her shoulder to where the cabin sat the hillside. It seemed to take her forever to make her way up the slope, stepping through invisible hoops and trapezoids that kept appearing and vanishing, moving in slow motion past the table with its litter of bread crusts and cups and the empty wine bottle and the ashtray with the inch-long stub of a marijuana cigarette laid across it like a sentence of doom, but then she was at the door of the cabin and the sky snapped back again and the clouds began to rumble.
Inside, everything was familiar, and it was all right. There was a routine here, a routine to follow, and it had nothing to do with scraping hides or hippie drugs or the sky coming unhinged. She stoked the fire. Lit a cigarette. Added water to the cooked-down meat and chopped vegetables at the cutting board. Outside, the thunder detonated over the hills, lightning lit the room and the rain came with a hiss, sweeping out of the woods and stabbing at the dirt of the yard in swift violent pinpricks of motion. Star had lit the marijuana as casually as she might have lit a cigarette and passed it to Merry, who drew in the thin pale smoke that smelled of incense, of myrrh, and what was it?—frankincense—and then Merry passed it to her. She put it to her lips, inhaled, and it was no different from a Marlboro, except there was no taste to it. “You want to know something?” Star said. “You don’t know what making love is till you’ve done it with this. Really. It’s like every neuron is firing at once, and your skin, your skin just burns for the touch of a man.”
At some point she went out in the rain and brought in the rum and the cups and the ashtray with the wet stick of marijuana in it, and at some point she laid the marijuana on the stove to dry and dipped herself a bowl of bear stew. She was hungry, hungrier than she’d ever been before. She had a second bowl. A third. She wiped up the gravy with bread, poured herself a cup of coffee. The rain held steady and she put wood on the fire and let the faintest hint of worry over Sess run in and out of her head—he could take care of himself; this was nothing, nothing but rain. Later, she stared at a magazine for what seemed hours, and still later, she went to the stove, picked up the dried-out stub of the marijuana cigarette and smoked it down to nothing, to two thin strips of saliva-yellowed paper which she tossed into the fire by way of hiding the evidence. It was dark when Sess came in, and though he stank of dog and the wet of the woods, though the cabin reeked of boiled bear and bear fat and the first death of a multitude to come, she stripped his clothes off him, piece by piece, and pulled him down and let herself melt beneath the living weight of him.
26
He would never admit it, least of all to himself, but Sess Harder’s hands were cold, and if his hands were cold, Pamela’s must have been freezing. They were both wearing thermals, sweaters and the matching flannel shirts with the red and black checkerboard pattern Pamela’s sister had given them as a wedding present, but their gloves were tucked away in their breast pockets, high and dry. He didn’t know what time it was—never did—but he figured it couldn’t have been much later than nine A.M., the temperature stuck in the high teens despite the early influence of the sun, and with every dip of the paddle the river took a nip out of his hand. He’d stroke twenty times, then switch sides, but now the rising hand, still wet, was e
xposed to the wind raking upriver from the southwest, and that went numb on him. Patches of ice floated the water like gray scabs and both shores were crusted with it. Each breath came in a cloud. Up front, Pamela leaned into her paddle, switched sides with a quick flick of her wrists, and never uttered a word of complaint.
Mid-October, the alder, willow and birch gone into a blaze of dead red and streaky yellow, a hard freeze every night, and the swing of the season felt good, as if the whole country were undergoing a blood transfusion, and Sess Harder himself had never felt better. He’d got his meat—the lucky bear and an even luckier moose, a big bull in rut that had drunk so much water Sess had heard the sloshing of it in his gut from a hundred yards away—and he’d netted maybe a hundred washtubs full of whitefish and suckers on their annual migration to the deep holes of the river where freeze-up wouldn’t affect them. And rabbits. The newborn of the year, crazy for anything green to put on winter fat, and as easy to snare as the air itself. The cache was full, the berries picked and the vegetables canned, and this was his wife, his sweet-cream wife, sitting the seat in front of him with the long arch of her athlete’s back rising up out of the anchor of her hips and flank, working the paddle with her squared-up shoulders and tailored arms, and not so much as a peep out of her.