Goat Mountain

1

DUST LIKE POWDER BLANKETING THE AIR, MAKING A reddish apparition of the day. Smell of that dust and smell of pine, smell of doveweed. The pickup a segmented creature, head twisting opposite the body. A sharp bend and I nearly tumbled off the side.

Kneeling on a mattress tied over the pickup bed, all the camping gear beneath. Northern California, 1978. Gripping through lurches and bends, the metal hot even in morning. Switchbacks up the mountain. I had a shoebox of rocks, and when we hit straight sections of road I’d grab a rock and huck it at a passing tree. The fling and bend, the stone thrown to the side, a thrumming sound, turning and chopping through thick air but swept forward by momentum. Forced off course, bent into an arc, swept forward beyond intent. I had a feel already for that arc, prefiguring it, aiming well behind. Pumping a fist into the air whenever stone bit into flesh. The heavy thud over the growl of the engine, perhaps even a glimpse of bark torn free.

The sky coming down closer, the day heating, the air doubling and doubling again, pressing the smell from all things. Metal, exhaust, oil, dust, weeds, pines, and now a long stretch of dry yellow grass, a valley with sugar pines, a valley that meant we had entered a new land, away from the lake. Every fall this hunt, every fall this return.

We stopped at Bartlett Hot Springs. Pulled over into the momentary twilight of our own dust, my father not waiting for the air to clear, opening his door right away, stepping out a shadow tall and thin, shouldering his rifle. My father etched and luminous even in shadow, a thing set off from the rest of the earth, overly present. Walking away now, up the trail toward the springs.

From the other side of the cab, my grandfather stepped out carrying the lemons, and then my father’s best friend, Tom, who had been crammed in the middle, always there from my earliest memories, same as family. Wearing glasses that caught a reflection as he looked up, even in this oblivion of dust. We’re here, he said.

I hopped off my father’s side of the pickup. Reached into the cab, behind the seat, for my own rifle, a.30-.30 Winchester lever-action carbine with a peep sight, cold metal, not yet heated by the day. No shoulder strap, so I carried it in my hand as I walked up toward the springs. The way I had been and always would be, I thought, hiking with this rifle low in my right hand, barrel tipped downward. Tilt of a needle, that rifle, tilt of the planet itself, sending me forward.

Bartlett Hot Springs long closed, decades before, gated and fenced and abandoned. A leftover from an earlier time. The trail a back way in, narrow pathway through chunks of gray rock embossed with lichen black, orange, green, and white, small wheels and gears and rosettes for telling futures and recording all past. The world stamped onto the world, repeating itself endlessly.

Low branches, dead and snapping against us. On the lookout for rattlesnakes. But the path short enough, and soon we were on a kind of terrace. Old lawn overgrown by grass and weed, old concrete cracked in discrete chunks, vast areas overrun. An enchanted place for me, and only for me, because I was too young to remember, and so in my mind this place could become more.

Women in sun hats, lace and frill, men in multilayered coats with watches and canes. Come to this haven to bathe in the springs and drink from them. This was how I imagined it, and my family somehow a part of that, older and grander. There would have been music, a band in a gazebo, and lanterns hung from the trees at night. Old oaks in here, thick and gnarled but with open space between. There would have been dancing.

My grandfather sat heavy against a low concrete wall overgrown and nearly invisible. A small spigot caked with white mineral. Ready for a taste? he asked me.

My mouth pinching without meaning to. The water would be sulfurous. Yep, I said. My grandfather enormous, a wide inflation of belly beneath a brown hunting shirt and jacket. Always wearing this jacket, even in the heat.

He’d brought a glass, cut the lemon and squeezed two slices as I watched, opened the tap and let the rust run brown then clear. I was always first to taste, and I wondered whether something could have changed since we were last here, the water become poisonous, not only in taste.

Bartlett champagne, my father said, one corner of his mouth in a grin. Long cheeks, like my grandfather.

All three of them watching me now, amused but trying not to show it. The glass filled and sparking in the light, the water moving on its own, the lemon rinds dissolving. Smell of it in the air. Sulfur from deep in the folds of the earth.

I took the glass, cool in my hand, though I’d imagined it warm, radioactive, and I sniffed the top, coughed and regretted that while the men chuckled softly. Then I drank it down fast. The earth’s fart, gassed and concentrated through miles of crustal rot and cavern.

Their eyes moist with tears from trying to hold in their laughing, but I could see that. Go on and laugh, I said. I know you’re laughing.

My father taken over by it, eyes closed and mouth puckered, but I could see his chest and gut in convulsions beneath his dirty white T-shirt. The squeaky sound of Tom’s laughter held back, his face turned away. Sorry, he finally said. It’s just your face.

My father put his hand up to cover his mouth.

Like a frog trying to swallow a horse, Tom said, and turned to look up toward the heavens with his lower lip stretched in a grimace.

My grandfather lost it and let out a snort, his belly jiggling as he tied the plastic bag of lemons.

What are you doing with the lemons? I asked. You all still need to take your turn.

My father’s eyes squeezed shut with how funny this was, and I saw that no one else was going to drink. Fine, I said, and grabbed my rifle and walked back to the truck.

I climbed up on the mattress and kept my rifle with me, because from here on out, any buck we saw was fair game, and I felt ready to shoot something.

I could hear their laughter up there, but they stopped as they came close, climbed silently into the cab, and we were off again. The wind chill because I was wet with sweat, my T-shirt damp. Palms flat on the cab, rifle pinned under one leg.

Looking for bucks now. Curved antlers in the dead dry branches on a hillside of scrub, or a brown patch of hide standing under a sugar pine, or lying in the shade. Only so many shapes and colors a deer could be, and all the rest was background. Eyes trained to let background fall away, eyes trained to disappear the world and leave only a target. Eleven years old now, and I’d been shooting this rifle for two years, looking for bucks since before I could remember, but this hunt was the first time I’d be allowed to kill. Illegal still in age, but old enough finally by family law.

The world was mostly empty. I knew this already. Most of the land held nothing. A desert. But my father told stories of ducks everywhere on the lake, game everywhere in the woods, and there were photos that showed dozens of ducks laid out, dozens of fish on the lawn, grouped according to size and type, photos of my father and grandfather and Tom and their friends all posing in a group with their bucks, two each, ten deer in a weekend, with good racks. And so it did seem possible that this desert had once been populated, and that I had been born too late. In tens of thousands of years of humans, I had shown up just twenty-five years too late, and I was angry about this, even at eleven years old, angry at my missed inheritance.

The wind hot now, my T-shirt dry, and no way to know elevation. We were up in mountains but in a valley, the air hot and thick. And though I had seen this road every year, parts of it still surprised me, stretched farther than I remembered. It would take two hours to reach our land, and that was a lot of territory to pass through.

I was a sentinel above the cab, posted for lookout, but my eyes had dried in the wind, squinting now, and for miles I did not see a single living thing other than birds. The birds were still here. Flickers in low swoops with wings wide and banded white. Blue jays and scrub jays loud even over the engine and tires. All the little brown birds, nameless and pointless, right along the road. Doves a pale cream gray, quail running along the road then flaring. An occasional raptor, sign that perhaps other things, or small things at least, lived out in the dry grass. The leftovers. I would kill dove and quail, and after they were gone, I would kill field mice and the little brown birds.

The pickup slowed and we turned down a gulley and onto a beach of large smooth stones. We halted, and there was no dust. The creek low, no more than a foot of water, but fairly wide, at least ten yards. The stones a brightness of color under the water, blues and deep liver red, a break from the yellow grass, brown dirt and bark, green needles, pale blue sky. Richer colors. Glint of fool’s gold along the shallow edges, in the sand.

We knelt in the stones, sniffing at the water first, distrusting what might lie dead upstream, but then we drank, cold and clear and heavy. The colder it was, the heavier it became, pressed in close to the stones, running low toward the center of the earth like mercury. Inside each of us now, a downward pull. I was purging the taste of Bartlett and lemon.

Each of us a kind of magnet. I believed that. Each of us feeling some kind of tug. No action inconsequential. Each step taken another step toward an end. I’d known that ever since I’d had memory.

We remounted and drove the pickup through, climbing the bank on the other side, cab and bed twisting, and I was clinging to a small ridge over a side window, feeling the pull backward. Thinking of horses, of a time when we would have crossed on horses, leaning forward in our saddles, low over a mane, and I was bitter I hadn’t seen that time. The modern world, all of it, an aberration. Given a TV instead of a horse, a terrible cheat.

The road narrow and low along a hillside, traversing. Stands of trees we passed through then exposed again to the sun. Feel of the air, thinner in the cool sections, fattening up in the light. The day moving on and I was getting baked. Rifle pinned under a leg, but no sign of deer anywhere. Rock and grass and low brush.

The chaparral a kind of blight on the land, thick and unending where no doubt there once had been trees. The bucks lay low in the brush during the day, kept out of sight. Dry brown stalks everywhere, perfect cover for antlers.

The view shortened, the road traveling from pocket to pocket, valleys opening up and closing, but finally we began the long gradual climb along linked ridges that would lead toward the ranch. Views out to other ridges, other mountains in the distance, a sense of the world and possibility expanding.

The road curled along rises and then cut more deeply into the side of steeper ground. The land falling away to my right, the road narrowing from one lane to less than that, small rocks popping under the tires, and my father slowed, pulled instinctively away from the fall, the tires on the left side on higher ground, the pickup tilting down toward the bottom of a long deep canyon. Slowing to five miles an hour, picking through rocks and bumps.

Up ahead, a slump, land that had caved away and left the road broken. My father slowed and came to a stop fifty feet away. No room to turn around. We might have to back out. I looked at where we had come from, and the track was steep and narrow. Easier ground was far away.

My father stepped out, Tom after him. My grandfather, on the low side, stayed put. Well, my father said. That doesn’t look good.

I was feeling vertigo, so I jumped down on the uphill side, holding my rifle. Loose rocks at my feet, sheared and flinty and fresh, a dark gray, no lichen, unearthed recently, fallen from the long scarred hillside above. No vegetation, only ruin. We were driving in scree, traversing a slope of talus, and this had been my nightmare, exactly, for years, driving along the side of a steep mountain with the rock coming down, the momentum of that, unstoppable, though in the dream it was closer to being sand, finer grained, and I was in a school bus rather than a pickup. Still too close to the dream becoming real. I felt what I felt in the dream, that we would be swept away, swept downward to our deaths in the canyon below.

My father put his arm around. Don’t worry, all right? We’ll be okay. This has happened before.

This was not reassuring, to hear that it was repetitive in real life, just as in the dream.

Tom looking up at the slope above. It’s all coming down, he said. Few years, won’t be a road here anymore.

My father looked up and studied. Could be, he said. Cutting a new road won’t be cheap. But it’s Forest Service here. They’d have to do it.

Yeah. What do you want to do?

My father exhaled and puffed his cheeks a bit. Let’s go check it out.

So we walked ahead to the slump, three of us single file along the cratered road. About half the width caved away and gone down the hill. Fresh dirt, a darker brown, not yet bleached by the sun. The stone almost black. I was looking at shattered trees below, uprooted, stripped and thrown, the damage continuing beyond the talus slope into forest. The shock of a boulder flung from hundreds of feet above, crushing at point of impact but radiating outward, cracking of every cell in long pale lines like dominoes. I remember thinking that, as if I could see into the meat of the trees.

Enough room on the uphill side, my father said. The truck would fit there.

Just the angle, Tom said. That’s pretty steep.

Yeah. Takes a lot to roll, though.

We could sit on the uphill side, try to weight it down a bit.

Okay.

I looked back at the pickup and saw my grandfather walking toward us along the route we had just taken. He wasn’t looking at us, his eyes never looking anywhere, just vaguely ahead. His face showing nothing. Just one foot in front of the other, heavy slow movement that could last for three steps or three days, a walk that could have a destination or not. No glance down at the destruction below. My own grandfather as foreign as a person could possibly be.

The four of us stood there a while, saying nothing, and that was it. No more discussion. I didn’t like this at all. We got back in the truck, Tom and I sitting on the uphill side of the mattress, our legs dangling, while my father drove slowly toward the slump and my grandfather remained in the passenger seat. Apparently he was content to tumble down the hill along with two other generations if that’s the way it worked out.

Facing uphill, I couldn’t see what was happening on the other side. If the tires went off the edge, I wouldn’t know until I felt the tilt, and by then it would be too late. I could try to jump, but I’d already be falling through air. Gravity the most terrifying thing in this world, the pull into the void.

My father in low four-wheel drive, moving slowly, rolling at less than five miles per hour. The side lifting as if on a wave, lifting and tilting and I was leaning forward, seeing the wheel well expand as the weight came off the tire, and I didn’t know how my father or grandfather would get out in time. They would be trapped in the cab.

I could feel the mountain rolling over beneath us, gravity swinging high in an arc to pull from the side. Gravity a pendulum, and the four of us and this pickup the anchor to that pendulum.

But the side lowered, and the world leveled off, and we had not fallen.

Well that was a little hairy, Tom said. The truck stopped, and he climbed back into the cab. We would have to cross this way again in a few days, though by then the road could have changed.

The men in the cab, me on lookout, and we were high on the flank of a mountain now, an open curve of slope without trees. Only low clumps of brush and dry grass, all other ridges too far away to shoot a buck, so there was nothing to search except the warp of the hill as it was revealed ahead, waiting for antlers skylined and the quick jump and run.

A sunny, beautiful day of blue sky and breeze and birds and our pickup winding toward the gate, which would come just as we hit forest again. I was feeling the excitement I always felt on arrival, because this place was not the same as any other. This was where we returned and had returned for generations. This was what we owned and where we belonged and where our history was kept, all who had come before and all that had happened, and all would be told again during this hunt, and for the first time my own story would be added if I could find a buck.

The last bit of road through cutaway embankments and manzanita, a section I never remembered. And when we emerged, we could see Goat Mountain before us. We entered along the southern flank, a ridge rising to our right past the upper glades and on to steep slides of rock we never hunted. Below this, thick forest, and somewhere in there was our camp and spring and meadow, and below it, the reservoir and bear wallow and lower glades and switchbacks and the burn where a fire had swept through and every other place that had been written into us.

We always stopped here to look, to see who we were. Six hundred and forty acres shared with two partners from the Central Valley. Far away from anything. Divided up in several chunks along the entire side of a mountain, reaching down almost to the edges of the long thin valley below and Cache Creek.

No one spoke. And we could have stayed there looking for any amount of time. But the pickup rolled slowly forward again, the pull of setting up camp, and the track angled down into trees where all views were lost and leaves fallen already from the live oak, smooth dry plates rimmed by spines. Red and green of manzanita. A scrub jay with its harsh call and then an explosion of quail from right beside the road, lumpy brown bodies throwing themselves on low flight paths, wobbling and indecisive, into other brush and trees beyond. I was trained to raise a shotgun and fire, aching now to sight in on those dark topknots as the birds flared their wings for landing. Each of them pausing for an instant, my eye freezing the moment when I would aim and pull the trigger, a moment of perfection, but I was never allowed to kill birds here. No gunfire to spook the deer. And so the quail vanished again into brush and the pickup swept forward and I felt a dull regret. Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end.

The air cooler now, the road fully shaded, patterns of shadow in the steep slope that fell away to the left. And finally we arrived. The gate ahead thick steel painted the color of dried blood. Heavy pipe construction that no truck could bend, both sides anchored six feet deep in concrete, and a lockbox too thick to shoot. Even a rifle slug would only smear and ricochet. An evolution of gates over the years, and this the final one, put in by my father, a gate that could never be destroyed by any poacher, a gate that would never have to be replaced.

I jumped down and followed my father, who lay in the dirt under the lockbox and reached upward with both hands through a narrow steel chute. This prevented anyone from getting at the lock with bolt cutters or a gun. But there was hardly room for a key, either, working blind and cramped. My father grimacing, his shoulders rising up from the ground. Goddamn poachers, he said. I can’t quite turn the key. Get down on the ground behind me.

So I lay facedown in the dirt and gravel and leaves and my father braced against me, raised up, and I heard the lock spring open.

Finally, he said, and he worked a bit more to fish the lock out.

I stood up and brushed off the dirt and leaves as my father swung the gate wide. Tom and my grandfather were standing here now, looking up along the ridge. We got a poacher, Tom said.

I went over next to them and looked up and saw, far away, on an outcrop of rock, an orange hunting vest.

How’d he get up there without coming through this gate? Tom asked.

Must be coming in on dirt bikes, my father said. Too heavy to lift over this gate, but if they follow the main road, there must be some trails now that cut over.

I don’t know of any trails, my grandfather said.

Opening weekend, Tom said. Shooting and spooking everything on opening weekend. And why does it matter to them when they hunt? They’re breaking the law anyway, so they might as well shoot one in June.

Once they carry it out of here, no one knows where it came from, my father said.

True.

Well let’s take a closer look, my father said, and he walked back to the cab. I didn’t know what he meant, but he came out with his.300 magnum. He stood and brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed up at the poacher. A large black scope. It was a beautiful rifle, oiled dark wood. A rifle for shooting bears, too big to use on deer, but it was what my father used anyway, some part in him willing destruction. I had seen that rifle take nearly the entire shoulder off a deer as the bullet came out the other side.

He’s a pretty one, my father said. Enjoying a sunny day looking out over all our land and our bucks.

King of the world up there, my grandfather said.

Roll the truck closer, my father said.

So Tom went and released the emergency brake, easing forward to where we’d been standing.

My father aimed again, but this time his elbows were on the hood for balance. He pulled back the bolt and then drove it home, a shell in the chamber. Let’s see if he can hear that. I want him to take a look over here and see what’s aiming at him.

But the poacher had not moved or looked in this direction, as far as I could tell. He was far away, probably more than two hundred yards, so I couldn’t make out his face exactly, but it seemed he was looking down the slope farther ahead.

Tom had his rifle out now, too, aiming up at the poacher through his scope. But I had only a peep sight on my.30-.30.

Come take a look, my father said, as if reading my mind.

So I held the rifle, braced my elbows on the hood of the truck. Smell of gun oil in close, like my.30-.30, but otherwise not the same at all. Heavier and perfect, smooth wood and dark blue metal fused together as if all had been born of one piece, and the balance when I put the stock to my shoulder was perfect too, a thing meant to be and easily become a part of me.

The scope an illumination that seemed without source, a view directly into the world, my own better eye. Texture of rock at over two hundred yards, more than two football fields away. Dark rock with grains and bumps and ridges from weather, a wide slab, and I followed it to the left, to where the poacher sat at the edge, his boots dangling, a rifle lying across his thighs. Jeans and a white T-shirt in the sun, the orange hunting vest. Orange baseball cap. Wanting to be seen. Out here in the open, on our land. He had long sideburns, light brown. His face and neck pink from the sun.

I traced an arm with the center of the crosshairs, moving up from elbow to shoulder. The poacher seemed to sense this, the most uncanny thing. He turned to his left and looked directly at me, into the scope, and he scooted his legs around until he was facing forward. He had seen us, seen something. Some color from the hood of the truck or a reflection on a rifle scope. His hands lifting his binoculars from around his neck and looking straight at me with great dark eyes.

My hand tightened on the stock, and I held my breath. The crosshairs floating just between those lenses. Locked in time with this man, locked in this moment held still.

A slow exhale, careful, as I’d been taught, and I tightened slowly on the trigger. There was no thought. I’m sure of that. There was only my own nature, who I am, beyond understanding.

The world itself detonated from some core and I was flung through the air, landing in the dirt. The aftersound in my ears and pumping of blood. My heart jackhammering. The rifle beside me in the dirt, my right hand still on the grip.

My father lifted me by my shirtfront and threw me backward and I did not hit ground where ground was supposed to be. I’d been lofted past the edge of the road and the earth fell away and I kept falling, hit from behind by a tree trunk or branch and another and another, still falling through air, twisting, and a rush of shadow from the right was all I saw before my right shoulder hit hard in dirt and leaves and I cartwheeled and slammed a trunk with my left leg and was spun around to hit ground with my head and neck and then upright, seeing straight ahead as if I were running down this slope, and I threw my arms out from instinct and flinched sideways to catch the next trunk on a shoulder and was flung beyond bearing until I skittered through leaves and finally lay still, not knowing how I was possible or what would be.