Why Are We in Vietnam?

  Then they hear the helicopter. Man conceived of fucking in order to get fucked. There is no doubt of that. So, off they plunge, trying always to keep a ridge between them and the copter, and looking for streams so they leave no track, and know already they’ve left a track. Well, for the next two hours right into two in the afternoon, it’s no action, just pain, they going in deeper into Brooks Range and Cop Turd buzzing about, looking here, looking there, but never too far away. And then around two P.M. he departs, figuring, they hope, that Cop Turd finally decided the hints of trail they left might be animal. No, that ain’t it, Cop Turd must have set down long enough to examine their steps—hell, CT is out of gas, Al Bell with his Bell 47J is out of gas. That all—he’ll be back.

  Then they discover a valley. It’s for the boys, better believe it. A bowl below snow level, maybe two miles by one mile, meadows and wood, tundra and rock, and clearings and shapings, could be the Colorado Rockies it’s so sweet right in the middle of the beginning of all that snow wilderness, tucked between ridges of snow, and so the boys work a trail in a false direction into a creek, back up on their steps a mile (you try walking backward a mile) and slip into the forested bowl leaving behind the fields of snowfields and see for a last sight one pale pink fox go springing through the snow to pin a field mouse in snow and Arctic grass, flip, flop, oops and out, nub, nudge, you’re dead mouse and a little echo out in the air, one small sorrow. And then some squirrels dart from the wood, run out by the fox, coax him to chase, and go back up a stand of black spruce at the edge of the bowl, black spruce again after the boys thought the biome was dead and finished. And a wing of sparrows go rip-titting and coo-cawing after Fox cause he can’t catch Squirrel, and Fox he humps and scratches and whines and cries, he cries, dig, cause Squirrel won’t come down to get killed. Maybe he’s thinking of the children at home on a starve.

  Man, our two little hunt boys, Killer I and Killer II, are excruciated. They near to being sick from the sweet they want to laugh so hard at Mr. Egomaniac Fox—come on down, Squirrel, be a good fellow. Yeah, they feel so good they stop for an inst, head to head, toe to toe, and mill it up, each taking ten good lumps to the gut.

  “Hurt?” screams Tex.

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause I’m a Royal Commando, sir.” And they cackle. But the moment they stop (1) the King of Mountain Peak M.E.F. shit, (2) Mr. Awe and (3) Mr. Dread—that troika—that Cannibal Emperor of Nature’s Psyche (this is D.J. being pontiferous, for we are contemplating emotion recollected in tranquillity back at the Dallas ass manse, RTPY—Remembrance Things Past, Yeah, you remember?) yeah the CE of NP, Cannibal Emperor for sure, Mr. Sender, who sends out that Awe and Dread is up on their back clawing away like a cat because they alone, man, you dig? why, they just dug, they all alone, it’s a fright wig, man, that Upper silence alone is enough to bugger you, whoo-ee, all the twiddles have turned to plummets and they don’t even know from what, and then know, it’s their laughing up in the silence. They turning everything on in the wrong way, and they ready to retreat. And mixed shit is ready to drop in again on the lip of their liver.

  But that meadow is beautiful. Arctic flowers, more white mountain aven with yellow centers, and the tundra gone to red and yellow and berries, dwarf huckleberries, cranberries, which they eating to calm Mr. A and Mr. D and the Cannibal, Mr. Sender, and the tart comes up out of the berry, one fine vein of sugar drawn from sour ice. And earth, taste of sunlight the sentimental might declare, but the troika is on them again, Cannibal Emperor to the fore, whoa whoa what I dread, they can but hardly breathe, and D.J. first to dig into the dimensions of the message which is simple, yes, direct—bear is nearby. That is it—a bear is near. And Tex don’t argue—all in a funk without a gun, they pick a tree, they up it fifteen feet, high as they can go, they wait there on the edge of the meadow, the minutes go by. And then they remember they have left the packs behind and down they go all shaking, up the tree they work again, getting the packs up, and before they once more in the upper whippy weak crack snap branches of the black spruce like pegs, not much better to sit on, well, lo, behold, bear, there bear, out at other edge of the meadow and he don’t see them, no, nor smell upwind from them, they ready to swear they smell him.

  Now, bit by bit, they cool, get back cock. Because they safe, yeah, man, safe unless the branch break, and Mr. Bear he’s all right, because their mind-ass transmitter after Awe-Dread Bombardment from Mr. Sender is chucked down to relaxed little beeps (the boys is quietened now from being up in the Brooks Range all alone—you in need of a great cool-out—you try it) and because the boys are relaxed, half in soft fear, half sweet fatigue—ain’t slept, remember? they just now look, and what do you think Grizzer is doing?

  Well, he after a meal, man, and he like every fat ass in the world: when he eating, you could ring a fire siren under his nuts and he never miss a beat in the gourmandize, he’s humping up on all the berries—they ain’t been too many this season, remember?—and so he grab with a paw and hooks in about two hundred buffalo berries at a pop, and swallows, and lets blue juice and red juice run out of the sides of his black wet leather mouth, and then raises one paw in the air and wipes said mouth on his shoulder as if he imitating a weight lifter sniffing his own armpit, then griz burps, yeah, old bear burps and spits out the next mouth of berries, and then he sighs (and they chilling him with their pistol eyes, so young and up tight with trying not to breathe they could be airline hostesses serving Frank Sinatra African rock-tail frozen ass lobster) yeah, and fighting silently over who holds the binocs, and daring each other to climb down the tree and watch from the ground, and then each of them being not up to the dare, and not certain—does private honor of Texas good heart and clean shit require they touch boot leather to ground?—but while they debating in the lowest whisper ever heard, “You go,” no “Fuck, you go,” it gets too fascinating and they just watch some more, because Old Bear has the burps, and now he out in the tundra with his dark mahogany hide digging up sod and scrubbing at roots, and he works at that like a gardener, digging in one of his big mitts, bigger in plan than a volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dallas edition (which is bigger than the standard edition, natch) he’s all claws in that sod and turf of poor old skinny misery tundra, he like a rake, yeah, he just cuts out pieces of turf and turns them over. The underneath is tundra root of all variety, thick as nerves and shoots, thick as lamp wire, thick as your finger, and Grizzer just eats away at this mat looking just like a roast beef hash, crust, black and almost charred, digging into the mat of the earth and contemplating what the dirt and the nerve roots and the accumulated experience of the various bugborers and slugs have to say. And in the middle of this, sitting sad and munching slow after slowly uprooting, expunging, and devouring five square yards of peat with many a heavy sigh and one or two fine from the heart burps, Griz suddenly decides his ass is on an itch and he looks to scratch it, and flings away his mat, and works his butt on the tundra, scraping and scratching and rolling on his back, and thumping and bumping his ass, and then he gets up like a fat woman and walks off in a grump to the other end of the meadow and sidles to a young tree and takes a bite out of the bark on the trunk about seven feet up, just rising on his hind legs sort of lazy and taking a deep easy bite, mean and pleasurable, like a businessman copping a goose on a bare-ass nightclub waitress, yum! and then he turn around, old Griz, and shove his insatiable ass against the bark of the tree, and he rub and he slide and he shimmy like you rubbing a Turkish towel up the crack of your own sweet potato, and then he grunt and lie down and go to sleep right there.

  And boys wait, ten minute, twenty minute, the squirrels flitting, mice heads popping in the tundra, sparrow settling on the back of Grizzer, indeed! and a hint of the wind spring up in the afternoon and see a white hare, hop, hump, hop, he gone, looking like white Benny bump tail on a caribou, and a marmot in a burrow, and a weasel so Tex would swear, D.J. do not see it. Then they decide to go down and keep working dow
nwind from sleeping Grizzer, but griz starts to stir. And over the ridge which they can just see through the binocs, up in snow country again out of the bowl, is a sight they hear first and cannot believe cause a hundred or more, maybe many more, caribou are passing on the ridge and that convention of antlers looks just so fine and unbelievable as a forest on a march. And while the boys watch they hip into a little aggregate of fact which is those antlers (known in plural as a calliope of antlers) are a-zigging and a-jogging and a-twigging because there are lines of dance shaping and reshaping around three or four caribou gentlemen known as Bull Fuck 1, Bull Fuck 2, etc., each of them with cows and kids, but there’s a vigorish in the air, a rumble to be heard among these beasts, they stepping and hopping like rutting season is near, and two of them BF 1 and BF 3 stop for a second in the brisk September afternoon air and hunker down their hind legs, and then give each other a clout with their antlers like football linemen making contact, slap, snap, sharp and fast, then they break off like they’ve had a taste of goodies to come but must go back to march route, and all this, especially the clear crack of antler clatter, sharp as shoulder guards hitting each other in loud clear hill ringing echo has done one bit of work, Grizzer he’s up, he shakes, he wheels in a circle once, twice, then he off like a bull locomotive driving up to the ridge, and busts up and out of the bowl and makes a mad-ass charge at the procession of caribou, and they who have been traveling in the deep of their noncarnivorous communion to new forage, new land, new love, and winter quarters, are off now on a tear, as are the boys, now down from the tree and scrambling up the ridge to have a look at the sight of hundreds plus of beast all running silently through the snow and Grizzer after them cutting through the middle of that calliope of antlers scattering like fish, then regrouping out and around Mr. Bear and taking off and they all getting away, of course, of course, except for one calf who stumble in fright and griz right down on young beast and with one paw at the neck and the other on the flank, goes in with mouth open to rip her belly and get the living blood and taste of live entrail, whatever that may be, whatever taste to have fat-ass Grizzer so avid ass for it, and when calf breaks loose half for an instant, pain springing it near to free, why, Grizzer flips her down again and having had his taste of her live, kills her now by slamming his teeth through the big muscles of her back right through to the spine and vertebrae which he crunches in two closing his big mouth and she breaks like a stick of wood and is there lifeless and her death goes out over the ridge and slips into the bowl and the afternoon takes a turn and is different having just passed through one of those unseen locks of the day, everything is altered, not saying how.

  And Grizzer he eats awhile, and paws at flesh, he feeling fat and sort of food disgusted, and then works a little half-ass at covering the carcass over, but he’s not heart in it, and after a while just contents himself by taking a piss at the head, and a big bear drop of baubles at the tail, Griz like a baron hasn’t learned to read or write but sure knows sealing wax, let me put my humper monicker mooney on this. And goes off, Griz #2 about as different from Griz #1 with the big eye dying that D.J. would kiss LBJ on the petoons just to have a rifle to take down Griz 2 and see how he look when he die, similar or very different as if the center of all significant knowledge right there.

  The bear is gone, and they down from the tree and exploring the bowl, but modestly, stepping in the big cool, feeling clean but weak, and too sweet, sweet as caribou. Instinct take them up the bowl and onto snow ridge and there is a caribou, mother of the dead calf, and she hardly look up when she see them, she just stand with her head down and her nose on the flesh of her dead, pushing off the snow and bits of dirt Griz 2 left, and her hooves in passing and by accident go through the bear bauble old Baron Bear has left and kicks her into a fright as if hate was suddenly stinging her feet, and she circles about in a dance, but never takes her nose off as if she is going to smell on through to the secret of flesh, as if something in the odor of her young dead was there in the scent of the conception not ten months ago when some bull stud caribou in moonlight or sun illumined the other end of the flesh somewhere between timber slide and lightning there on the snow, some mystery then recovered now, and woe by that mother caribou nuzzled in sorrow from her nose while the sky above blue as a colorless sea went on and sun burned on her, flies came, last of the flies traveling over the snow and now running a shuttle from Baron Bear’s pile of bauble to the nappy spotty hide of caribou mother, she twitching and jumping from the sure spite of the sting but not relinquishing her nose and the dying odor of her yearling calf and D.J.’s head full spun with that for new percipience, since could it be odor died last of all when one was dead? and took a separate route, and where could that lead his mind, for the secret of D.J.’s genius is that he pure American entrepreneur, and so his mind will always follow a lead. Never been a businessman yet wasn’t laughed at in the beginning, you bet. And here was the lead about the death of odor but then, just then, a flight of cranes went over, one hundred, two hundred, so now there were hundreds and hundreds, yes, men, they could no longer count numbers flying overhead in formations of V and diamond and echelon and hovering on course, two hundred like one, and birds wrapped up in the mission to go south carrying some part of the sky in their thousand wings as if the very beginning of autumn, seed of the fall, for North America below in all the weeks to come was in the high cawing and wing beat clear up to the fanning and vibrating of reeds some high long-gone sound such as summer coming to the very end.

  That was all they saw that day. They traveled over ridges, slid down new snow on slopes and went in further. A still was on them. The cranes had emptied the pocket of this territory and they moved on seeing not a tree nor an animal nor a sight but for the glaciers ahead and the loud crack of their boom in the late afternoon, and the ridgelines, the ridgelines now beginning to dance in the late afternoon with transparencies behind turns of transparency and sunlight rising up straight from the snow in lines of razzle reflection, their eyes gritted, and afternoon chill was still good on them yes, and yes, for the colors began to go from snow gold and yellow to rose and blue, coral in the folds of the ridges when the sun still hit, coral bright as the underside of the horn of the Dall ram and there were two, a couple, high again on the farthest ridge, first animal they’d seen in hours and then they saw one more. It was after they put up a tent. They came to one more bowl with a few trees, a hint of bare ground, and a crazy salty pond, mud and salt at its edges but very sure of itself in the snow hills like all that Northern land so ready to declare it has a purpose when none to be seen, and they put up a lean-to in grove of black spruce, last black spruce this side of the Pole, D.J. ready to swear, and lit a fire and cooked grub, roast beef hash, yeah, beans, bread, coffee, chocolate bar, so tired they jawed the food like cattle plodding, and lay down side by side drawing heat from the fire up the blankets into their legs, boots tied to a stay overhead, heat of the fire putting iron back into their body like the iron and fire of faith for those black spruce twigs and short branches and rotten punk for start (which punk D.J. had not forgot was from the lore of his father of whom he could not yet think) fuel for the fire out of the soil of this land up on the top, cold bare electric land of North, magnetic-electro fief of the dream, and D.J. full of iron and fire and faith was nonetheless afraid of sleep, afraid of wolves, full of beauty, afraid of sleep, full of beauty, yeah, he unashamed, for across the fire and to their side the sun was setting to the west of the pond as they looked north, setting late in the evening in remembering echo of the endless summer evening in these woods in June when darkness never came for the light never left, but it was going now, September light not fading, no, ebbing, it went in steps and starts, like going down a stair from the light to the dark, sun golden red in its purple and purple red in the black of the trees, the water was dark green and gold, a sigh came out of the night as it came on, and D.J. could have wept for a secret was near, some mystery in the secret of things—why does the odor die last and by
another route?—and he knew then the meaning of trees and forest all in dominion to one another and messages across the continent on the wave of their branches up to the sorrow of the North, the great sorrow up here brought by leaves and wind some speechless electric gathering of woe, no peace in the North, not on the top of the rim, and as the dark came down, a bull moose, that King Moose with antlers near to eight feet wide across all glory of spades and points, last moose of the North, came with his dewlap and his knobby knees and dumb red little eyes across the snow to lick at salt on the other side of the pond, and sunlight in the blood of its drying caught him, lit him, left him gilded red on one side as he chomped at mud and salt, clodding and wads dumping from his mouth to plop back in water, like a camel foraging in a trough, deep in content, the full new moon now up before the sun was final and down silvering the other side of this King Moose up to the moon silhouettes of platinum on his antlers and hide. And the water was black, and moose dug from it and ate, and ate some more until the sun was gone and only the moon for light and the fire of the boys and he looked up and studied the fire some several hundred of feet away and gave a deep caw pulling in by some resonance of this grunt a herd of memories of animals at work and on the march and something gruff in the sharp wounded heart of things bleeding somewhere in the night, a sound somewhere in that voice in the North which spoke beneath all else to Ranald Jethroe Jellicoe Jethroe and his friend Gottfried (Son of Gutsy) “Texas” Hyde. They were alone like that with the moose still staring at them. And then the moose turned and crossed the bowl the other way and plodded through the moonlight along the ridges of snow, moonlight in his antlers, gloom on his steps. And the boys slept.