Fup

4 The Second Heart

Although he never said anything, and used his need for sleep and sweet dreams as his excuse, Granddaddy Jake didn't like the Sunday morning pig hunt, didn't like it at all. It bothered him that Tiny was becoming obsessed with killing Lockjaw. Hunting was one thing, killing another, and obsession in any form was, to Granddaddy's experience, utterly treacherous; you couldn't be born if you wouldn't let go, and very few people could deliver themselves of obsession. The tight excited flash in Tiny's eyes disturbed him with its helplessness. He blessed Fup for accompanying Tiny, for despite her intensity she was slow, and together they only covered about an eighth as much territory as he could have alone or with dogs. Granddaddy, in his innermost heart, didn't want Lockjaw killed; he firmly believed that Lockjaw was the reincarnation of his old friend Johnny Seven Moons. This belief constantly surprised him, since he generally held that reincarnation was a pile of horseshit five feet deep.

Johnny Seven Moons was the only man besides Granddaddy who had ever taken a drink of Ol' Death Whisper without flinching. Granddaddy had first met him shortly after he'd given up gambling in favor of the still life. He'd been sitting on the front porch sampling his fifth batch when he saw an old Indian man coming across the yard wearing a battered cowboy hat and a black serape. Although he's never seen him before, Granddaddy Jake recognized him from stories as Johnny Seven Moons, an old Pomo that wandered the coastal hills without an apparent home or source of income. According to some of the stories Granddaddy had heard, Johnny Seven Moons had trained as "doctor" or medicine man before the crush of white civilization had disrupted tribal ways. Johnny Seven Moons was widely suspected of conducting extensive sabotage on local fences and heavy equipment, and he generally wasn't welcome in the area. However, he was always spoken of with a strange respect-he was always polite and soft-spoken, and with his shamanistic past came a rumor of powers… nothing ever specific… just a sense.

Granddaddy had sensed it before Johnny Seven Moons reached the porch, asking if he might do a chore or two in exchange for something to drink, preferably whiskey. They sat on the porch and drank whiskey for two days and well into late evening of a third. Grand-daddy Jake found him to be an excellent companion, for in that time Johnny Seven Moons didn't utter a word-just sat sipping from his jar, gazing at the day, the night, calmly and extremely still.

On the third evening he took a deep breath and turned to Jake: "Let me tell you about my name, Seven Moons. I added the Johnny when the white man came because I thought it sounded young and sexy, but it didn't seem to do much good. I think it's bad now to just make up names, but I keep it to remind me you must live with your mistakes. I earned my name Seven Moons when I trained as a doctor. I went away alone to find my name in a vision. I wandered and sought without food for three days, a week. Nothing happened. On the seventh day, as the sun touched the sea, I came across a group of maidens from another village out on a foraging trip for reeds and berries. It was a warm fall night. They were camped along a stream, cooking a fat salmon, and had acorn bread and berries. Have you not found in your life that hunger becomes most intense near the point of imminent satisfaction? I joined them, and we feasted. And that night, as the full moon traveled the heavens, I made love with every one of them, and with each I felt the full moon burning in my body, a great pearly light exploding inside my head. Seven Maidens. Seven Moons." He paused, smiling in the dusk. "Your whiskey… four moons, maybe five."

From that first visit until he died six years later, Johnny Seven Moons dropped in on Jake about every two months, and while Jake enjoyed his usually silent companionship, he relished the rare utterance. Seven Moons, whether out of a reverence or distrust for language, never said much, but when he did, he always said something. Jake could remember a few in particular. Once, as they'd watched the sun go down over the ocean, Seven Moons had said with the sweet weariness of constant marvel, "You know, I've seen 30,000 sunsets, and no two that I can remember have ever been the same. What more can we possibly want?"

Another time, he'd swept his hand across the landscape, and said, "Yarrrg, you white men did a lot to take it from us, but nothing to deserve it. You desire to tame everything, but if you just stand still and feel for a moment you would know how everything yearns to be wild." He spat. "And all these people with fences, fences, fences. Isn't the whole point to keep nothing in and nothing out? But I know you understand this Jake, for you have no fences, and devote your life to making whiskey and keeping still, and those are noble activities, worthy of a man's spirit."

The statement had haunted Jake when Tiny started building fences. But when Tiny had turned his hunt for Lockjaw into an obsessive ritual, what haunted Jake to his core were the last words he remembered Seven Moons saying to him.

Jake had walked out the ridge with him to say goodbye, and just before they'd parted Seven Moons had pointed at some fresh pig rooting and flashed a stupendous smile: "Ah, there we see hope-the domestic gone wild. Pigs are so lovely. Their bodies are made to hold up the sky. I wouldn't mind being a pig sometime… a big ol' crazy boar. That would be great."

Granddaddy Jake couldn't get it out of his mind, so he finally told Tiny what he thought might be the case, that Lockjaw was the reembodied spirit of Johnny Seven Moons, and that maybe he should think about that before he got too fixed on killing him.

Tiny adamantly shook his head. "It's just not true, Granddaddy," he replied, almost pleading, "when people die, they're gone. Gone. And that's all."

So Granddaddy Jake let it drop. There was no point. His notion wasn't as strong as Tiny's need. He'd said his piece, and in doing so satisfied what he felt was his responsibility both to his grandson and his old Indian friend. Johnny Seven Moons, in whatever form his spirit had taken, would have to look out for his own ass. And so would Tiny, wherever his spirit was taking him.

A few nights later, out for his nightly stroll, Granddaddy Jake met Lockjaw on the old saddletrail that ran out to the Claybourne place. They met blindly at the top of a rise; both recoiled for an instant, then charged. Granddaddy was knocked high in the air, did a splaying one-and-a-half somersault, and smacked down on the rain-softened earth like guts on a slaughterhouse floor. Fortunately the only thing he broke was the jar of Death Whisper in his overcoat pocket, and though Lockjaw made a few jaw-popping lunges, slashing at Jake's ribs, the fumes from the spilled whiskey soon had the mammoth boar staggering, his jowls streaked with tears from his burning eyes, mucous bubbling in his ravaged snout. He lurched off into the brush, leaving Grand-daddy Jake to assess the damage to his person. He felt himself all over, methodically, expecting to find himself torn to shit and bleeding, but all he found were a couple of patches of slobber along his right side. And it came back to him then through the shock: the sight of Lockjaw looming above him, hooking with his head, huge in the dark, but old, he was old, the sag of skin, the ripple of ribs, both tusks missing, snapped off at the jaw line or else fallen out.

"Gawddamn," Granddaddy moaned, staggering to his feet, "good thing it was a fair fight-don't think I coulda held my own if he wasn't already worn down about as much as me." He scraped off the mud as best he could in the darkness then headed on out toward the Claybourne's. He was glad now he hadn't pursued it with Tiny, trying to make him see that Lockjaw might be Seven Moons, because now he wasn't so sure that such was the case. The Johnny Seven Moons he remembered would have stopped to lick up that spilled whiskey.

He didn't tell Tiny. After thinking on it for three afternoons, mulling it with that slow, voluptuous thoroughness that is a reward of the still life, Jake reaffirmed his neutrality. He wouldn't tell Tiny anything about Lockjaw, and he wouldn't tell Lockjaw anything about Tiny. That decided, he turned his attention to other pressing matters, like teaching Fup to fly.

He'd been sitting on the porch one afternoon letting his mind wander as usual, taking a sip now and then, pouring a little into Fup's saucer, when he'd suddenly realized he was already getting bored with immortality. He needed a task, a task that would not only challenge his wisdom, but enlarge it: he needed to teach something he didn't know. A pupil, fortunately, was near at hand. Reaching down and stroking her sleek neck, he said coaxingly, "Fup, I think you should learn to fly. It'd do wonders for your social life. Hell, maybe you could pick up a husband-or at least zoom off for a quickie in the cattails with some emeraldheaded stud. Tiny and I have talked some about getting you a mate, but the truth of it is I ain't got an ounce of pimp in me… and anyway it would be an insult to your good looks."

Fup looked at him without a sound and wearily tucked her head under her wing.

"Good Christ, sweetheart," Granddaddy persisted, "just think about it-you could fly from here to Mexico, just soar along looking down on it all and give it a great big quack!"

Fup removed her head from under her wing, and in a voice strong, deliberate, and not without a hint of mockery, responded "Quack… Quack… Quack." Then hissed a bit, and stomped around. Granddaddy Jake took it as a beleagured agreement.

But Fup did not agree at all to the diet. Tiny had agreed only with great reluctance, noting, correctly, "She's not going to like it."

"If you want to fly," Granddaddy argued, "you got to make sacrifices. How's she gonna get off the ground with all that weight?"

"She's just big for her age," Tiny defended. "It's all in proportion."

"Tiny, she's not just big for her age, son; she's enormous for maturity. I've seen millions of mallard ducks in my time, and Fup is not just a touch bigger, or a wee bit bigger, or half-again, or twice: she's about seven times the size of whatever's next. Now I don't think she's grotesquely fat or nothing like that-just a bit too heavy for flight is all. Hellfire, we'll still feed her, just not as much."

But Fup wanted as much, and when she didn't get it, she sulked. She examined the portions as if straining to see them, then, spotting food, gulped it in a frenzy of false gratitude, turned her back, and shit in the dish. She kept to her daily routine, somewhat sustained by the extra goodies Tiny slipped her at work, but she pouted and languished at every opportunity. She was seriously pissed, a disposition hardly improved by Granddaddy's teaching techniques.

At the most marginal of opportunities, Jake was fond of telling anyone within earshot the three great secrets of how to proceed when you don't have the vaguest idea what you're doing. The secrets, in the order he invariably listed them, were intuition, reason, and desperation. His intuition as a flight instructor persuaded him that it would be best to simply seize Fup, take her out in a nice open spot, and fling her up in the air. She would probably be startled at first, but instinct would no doubt make her open her wings, and from that point she would surely get the idea.

Fup, without the slightest flap of her wings, hit the earth like a sack of cement, flopped once or twice weakly, then lay still. Sweet Jesus, I killed her Granddaddy thought to himself as he ran to her, but at his approach she was instantly on her feet, her bill snapping open and shut with a sound like a speedfreak playing castanets; she took a dead bead on Granddaddy Jake, then charged. Granddaddy, cupping his gonads with both hands, took the sharpest angle to the porch, but he wasn't fast enough: Fup hit him like a pulling guard on a blindside trap, hard and low. As he woozed to his feet, reeling, cursing the lunatic soloist playing the gongs in his head and thinking that he was sure taking a beating from the animal kingdom lately, Fup wheeled and started back. Immediately, and wisely, Grand-daddy Jake surrendered.

Obviously, the intuitive approach wasn't working too well, if at all, so Jake effortlessly shifted to reason and the mechanical beauties of logic. He wasn't the least bit disturbed that his intuition had been wrong: intuition often missed, sometimes spectacularly, but when it connected it saved so much time that the spirit leaped forward… and, of course, there was no use denying the basic human delight in being right the first time. Reason was more reliable, but slow. But then patience is not a luxury for immortals. There is time to get it right.

But first, after reasoning that a happy duck would make a better pupil than a spiteful one, he abolished Fup's diet, and even gave her a little more than her normally opulent rations to make amends. He was quickly restored to her good graces, and Tiny was tremendously relieved.

With her respect and affection renewed, he worked out the premises and mechanics, then started from what reason told him was the beginning: if you wanted to fly, you had to flap your wings.

So every afternoon except Sundays, facing each other on the porch, Granddaddy Jake tried to teach Fup to flap her wings. It wasn't easy. She would stretch them out as if airing her underwings, and sometimes tried a desultory flurry, but she didn't seem interested in any sustained flapping. He persisted. Standing in his stockinged feet on the porch, flailing the air with his bony arms, he promised her, with each beat of his wings, the raptures of flight; promised her it was better than coming all night with a sixteen year old creamette from the Iowa farm country; better than sourdough bread and drippings; better than moonlight falling on the silver firs and vanilla leaf; better than an explosion of blossoms in the brain's core-that flight was all you could eat, all you could want-great freedom and grand fun. An hour a day till his arms ached and his face turned a cloudy purple, yet going on, sputtering the incoherent secrets of an ecstasy that, without knowing it himself, he had the faith or foolishness to promise.

After two stubborn months of teaching, one day Fup began flapping her wings in concert with his mad flailings. Granddaddy Jake rejoiced.

When Fup had the flapping down pat, Granddaddy reasoned the next step was the takeoff, and to practice that they moved into the front yard. Jake made a few short half-speed runs across the yard to demonstrate the basic technique. Fup understood immediately, and soon they were both hauling ass downhill toward the pond, their wings and arms respectively pounding the air for lift-but though flight whispered to their bodies, beckoning, neither quite left the ground on the first couple of tries. On the third attempt, as Jake let go for all he was worth, legs pumping, his arms flailing wildly, he felt the first tremor of ascent break loose within him; like any good teacher would, he looked back for a moment to see if Fup was airborne yet, and in that slight split of attention he ran full-tilt into the walnut tree and got knocked colder than absolute zero.

When he came to, strangely calm, Fup was waddling around him quacking with concern. He reached out a hand to comfort her, sat up, and began to assess the damage, an act, he thought, that was beginning to recur with depressing regularity. His nose was broken or loosened up good. His upper lip was split pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as it had been when Alma May, his third or fourth wife, had hit him with a potato masher when he'd suggested doing it dog-style on the kitchen table. The lip, like the nose, would heal. But it depressed him to discover that he'd knocked out the last two teeth that met, and as he dully ran his tongue over the tender, salty sockets, he felt a melancholy weariness seep through his blood. To spend eternity toothless was a dismal prospect-but who could tell, maybe after a couple of hundred years his gums would get tough enough to work over a rack of ribs. You just had to be still and have faith, that was the main thing. There was no heart in giving up. But he was glad that tomorrow was Sunday and he wouldn't have to give Fup her flying lesson. He was tired. He felt a powerful need for rest. He was getting the shit knocked out of him something fierce lately and he needed to think on it, figure out what in the name of heaven was going on. Something was, that was for sure. But he was also sure that he would probably never understand it, and that contributed heavily to his sense of exhaustion. It was a puzzle where not all the pieces fit. He knew he'd better get used to it if he was going to be serious about immortality. He was nearly a hundred years old now. He was almost out of teeth and running low on breath; and, he thought to himself, if things kept on like that, it wouldn't be long before he'd need a whole new body just to keep up with his spirit.

Tiny and Fup left the house next morning at first light. They cut around the top of Rifkin's Draw and then down along the southern fence that Tiny had built when he was sixteen. They paused for a minute to let the dawn-light brighten, then, with Fup in the lead, they began to follow the fenceline along the edge of a tanoak thicket, heading toward a seep-spring where Lockjaw was fond of wallowing. They hadn't gone a hundred yards when Fup began nosing the trail like a pedigree hound; in moments she was quacking excitedly. Tiny shifted the weight of his.243, easing his thumb to the safety. He couldn't see down the fenceline on his side because a small stand of pepperwood sprouts blocked the line of sight. Fup plunged straight through them, her neck snaked out flat, still wildly quacking, and Tiny crashed through right behind her. When they finally cleared the pepperwoods, they both stopped in a sudden split second of silence: Lockjaw was lying twenty feet away, on his belly, staring at them, his left hind leg caught in the twisted mesh of fencewire.

Tiny raised the gun to his shoulder, his concentration locked on the pig. Fup was quacking incessantly at his feet, shrill, hysterical. He centered the bead directly between the pig's unwavering eyes. It was Lockjaw, he was sure, but he looked old or diseased, no tusks, ears tattered, the jet black bristles along his spine turning a ghostly grey. Tiny took a deep breath, trying to shut out Fup's maniacal quacking; he let the breath out slowly, holding the bead steady between Lockjaw's eyes, and started to squeeze the trigger. Fup, flapping frantically at his feet, saw his finger tightening and bit him as hard as she could on the leg.

"It's Lockjaw, Lockjaw!" Tiny bellowed, kicking at her. Fiercely quacking, she scurried out of range to the right. Oblivious, Tiny quickly brought the bead back to a dead hold between Lockjaw's eyes. As he pulled the trigger, Fup hurled herself upward at the barrel, knocking Tiny off balance. He tripped backward, Fup in front of the muzzle as the gun fired. The blast and shock of the bullet tore her apart.

Tiny couldn't breathe. On hands and knees he crawled toward her shattered remains. Gasping, he reached out to gather her in his hands, gather her back together, but his hands refused. When he finally touched a mangled wing and her blood smoked on his fingertips, he heard, far away, a great, wracking cry torn from his body. He sat back on his haunches and wept.

Then he stopped. He felt Lockjaw staring at him; he turned, ready. Lockjaw's head was stretched out flat, resting on his forelegs. His gaze was direct, vast, utterly indifferent. Slowly, the eyes began to cloud and film over, lose themselves behind a dull silver glaze, the color of the sky just before it rains, a color like the back of a mirror.

Tiny got to his feet, walked over to the pig's body, took the fencing tool from his back pocket, and cut Lockjaw's leg free from the fence. The huge, gaunt body slumped over on it side. Tiny knelt beside the body and delicately touched the left eye, leaving a faint, bloody fingerprint on its filmed surface. It didn't blink. He moved his hand down and pressed his palm firmly against the pig's rib-cage just behind the shoulder. There was no heartbeat under the coarse, stiff bristles against his damp palm. For a moment he thought he felt a movement inside, a dull pulse, but he wasn't sure. The last quiver of nerves, maybe; the involuntary movement of smooth muscle that lasts beyond death. Then he felt it again, certain this time, and carefully began moving his hands over the pig's body feeling for the source of the pulse.

A hand's breadth above its penis, against the lower ribs, he felt a steady movement. He put both his hands on the bare belly and gently pressed. It was a steady pulse against his palms, not the sporadic twitch of guts. He rolled Lockjaw over on his back, the pig's legs, already stiffening, awkwardly protruding into the air, then laid his head against its belly. He felt the steady pulse resonating in his cheekbones.

Bracing the pig's body against his leg, he took out his pocketknife and opened the long slender blade he used for gutting. He started the cut at the pelvic bone and ran it alongside the penis on up to the sternum, blood feathering in the wake. When he let the pig fall back on its side the guts spilled loose. Within the coils of warm guts was a thin, slick, membranous sac, blood orange, throbbing. Deftly, using just the tip of the knife, Tiny slit it open.

Inside, he saw what his mother had seen shining on the bottom of the lake: a point of light; rich, steady, dense. It divided into two. Into four. Eight. Beginning to whirl as it instantly multiplied through the blinding trajectory of form toward some new coherence, the arc of energy into matter, the white parchment of a scroll unfurled flashing in the sun.

The whirling light, as if consolidated or absorbed, faded into the form of a duckling. Fup shook herself free of the clinging membrane, fanning her wet wings as she issued a few soft tentative quacks. Growing by the moment, she continued to fluff herself under Tiny's astonished gaze; fullgrown, she uttered a triumphant burst: QUACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK-WACK.

When Tiny reached to touch her, Fup exploded into flight, straight up like a puddle-duck should, an explosion of water and wings. Tiny screamed. Fup leveled off and swung to the east, merrily quacking. Abruptly, amazingly graceful for her bulk, she banked off the wind and came sailing back over.

"FUP! FUP!" Tiny howled at her, waving his arms as she passed. She went into a high, curving, climbing turn and circled back around him. Suddenly she folded as if shot and plummeted a few feet before spreading her wings again, quacking wildly as she banked, swooping, and then she quit quacking and started to ascend above him in a perfect, opening spiral. Tiny stood rooted, stunned, watching as she vanished into the sky.

Granddaddy Jake, slammed awake by the gunshot, had lurched outside in his longjohns and followed Tiny's wails to a knobhill overlooking the fence. He'd crested the knoll just as Tiny had gutted Lockjaw, and had stood transfixed as Fup had seemingly risen from the pig's body and began her spiralling ascent. He watched entranced, whispering over and over to himself, "I don't fucking believe it." Yet he believed it without hesitation.

When she'd disappeared into the sky, he'd started to yell to Tiny but Tiny was on his hands and knees in the grass, searching for Fup's remains. They were gone: not a scorched feather, not a scrap of flesh. There was no trace of her.

Torn by gratitude and terror, Tiny whirled to his feet and ran to the fence. He stopped in front of a redwood post, locked his hands together into a single fist, and swung with his entire weight. The blow snapped the post off at groundlevel-but such was his talent as a fence builder that the tension of the wires held it vibrating in place. He tore at the wire until his hands were slippery with blood, screaming, "There you are! Go on through. Go on. Go on through…" until the pain calmed him enough to remember the fence tool, and he used the strong cutters to snip the wire, each taut strand hissing past him like a snapped nerve. When he cut the last wire, the suspended post whipped back the other way, just missing his Granddaddy, whom he hadn't noticed, but coming close enough that the old man dove the other way on sheer reflex. Still on the ground, Granddaddy hollered, "Damn ya, Tiny that's enough. Get your wits about ya, son-ya coulda sliced me up like a hardboiled egg-"

Tiny, hearing his voice, dropped his fencing tool and ran over, sobbing, and picked up his Granddaddy and held him tightly, Jake's skinny, long-johned legs kicking in the air. They held each other a long time, Tiny crying, Granddaddy Jake soothing him, "It's just fine, son, just fine; go right on ahead" as he patted him on the back with his bony wings, and then they walked back up to the house to have a drink of whiskey-a drink, according to Granddaddy, that was bound to be glorious, for it was totally needed and completely deserved.

And after that one drink, Granddaddy, as if savoring it, didn't have another drop for a week. Tiny didn't work on his fences. They'd gone back to bury Lockjaw's remains before the birds got to him, and though they both half-expected him to be gone, the body was still where they'd left it, completely stiffened now, the guts thick with flies. They buried his remains at the edge of an old white oak. Even Granddaddy took his turn with the shovel, violating his cardinal rule never to break a sweat before noon.

For most of that week they sat on the front porch and watched spring unfurl, talking about what had happened. Tiny told Granddaddy over and over how he'd accidently killed Fup, how she'd been blown to pieces as she seemingly protected a pig she supposedly hated, how then, as Granddaddy Jake could bear witness, she'd uncoiled fullgrown and feathered from inside Lockjaw's body and flew away. He wanted to know how that could have happened.

And each time Granddaddy Jake told him essentially the same thing: "It beats the shit outa me. Oh, I can think of reasons: she saw he was dying and wanted you to respect his death, let him die it himself; or she didn't want to see him shot while he was trapped in the fence, which maybe she thought was dishonorable; or maybe we've just assumed ass-back-wards that ol' Lockjaw had been trying to dig her out of that posthole to make her a midnight snack, while it might've been he was trying to rescue her, or maybe she thought so at least. It could be all of that and more, or not any of it at all. And how she got in that pig, and out, I don't rightly know. It just ain't possible to explain some things, maybe even most things. It's interesting to wonder on them and do some speculation, but the main thing is you have to accept it – take it for what it is, and get on with your getting."

When Tiny went back to work at the end of that week, he started by cutting large passages in all the line fences, and after that he began splitting redwood for gate posts. By week's end the posts were in place, and he was about to start hanging the first gate when he decided that to do a truly fine piece of work the gate posts would have to be carved. He consulted with his Granddaddy, who was in complete accord that one gate post should have the image of a boar's head carved at the top, and maybe another one could have a leaping rainbow trout, and one absolutely should have a duck, a flying duck in memory of Fup, and for the main road leading to the house twin bears would look fine, and for the northside, where you headed into that nice meadow, a three-point buck like the one he'd killed there in '64 would be perfect… and yes, yes, he thought it was a good idea, for after all, fences were only as good as their gates. When Tiny made the first stroke with a mallet and chisel that afternoon, he felt his life changing in his hands. He watched as her image rose from the wood.

And when Granddaddy Jake started drinking at the end of his week's abstinence, he started slowly, just gradually building up for his 100th birthday party three days later, where he, and Tiny, and a third of the people thereabouts got so drunk they could hardly grunt and point, much less quit laughing.

A 100 years-and-one-day old, Granddaddy Jake woke late that next morning to a sweet spring day. He sat on the porch with a jar of Or Death Whisper to help pull last night's icepick from his brain, and when he felt like he was ready for another 100 years he fixed a big venison stew with sourdough biscuits for dinner. After dinner he and Tiny split the last piece of birthday cake left from the party. He watched and advised as Tiny sketched out some of his ideas for gatepost carvings, and then went out for his evening walk.

When he returned, he had a couple of extra slashes of whiskey to take off the chill, stripped down to his longjohns and got in bed, read a piece in an old Argosy about some soldier-of-fortune in the Amazon who was adopted by a tribe of headhunters and married the chief's comely twin daughters and had five kids and ran around naked until the missionaries came, and with them hell, and all our daring escapes from hell. He didn't think it was too bad a story even if it was probably bullshit. He turned off the light and dozed.

He was dreaming of those lovely twin daughters snuggled warm against him as the full moon rose over the river blinding and clean. He heard a muffled cry, a child in another room, years ago, and then heard his name whispered, perhaps Tiny trying to wake him, or one of the chief's fine daughters murmuring his name in her sleep. He listened intently in the darkness, a concentration that seemed to draw him from himself into an empty poise. He heard his own heart quit beating, the last lungfull of breath leave him in a luminous silence. He waited, completely still. He heard his soft cry return through his flesh, fading toward the moon. And then the whisper of wings as he was lifted.

He could feel in the way he was borne that they weren't angels, wouldn't have them be angels, was so sure they were ducks that he didn't even bother to open his eyes. He patiently gathered another heartbeat, another breath, and then told them stubbornly, emphatically, without a trace of repentance or regret, "Well goddamnit, I was immortal till I died." He waited, but there wasn't another breath. Collapsing through himself, he relaxed and let them take him.