Goat Mountain

8

THE SKY FROM BLACK TO DEEP BLUE, THE DARK HULKS OF the trees standing above us now, the lantern extinguished. Gathering our last things, my pockets filled with.30-.30 shells. The stars erasing. We would be late for this hunt, not yet in position at first light.

I waited in the bed of the pickup, one foot cold and soaked. Shivering in the cold, but the sun was coming soon and the day would be hot. The light a kind of trick, in each moment a different blue, washing out slowly. It was hard to say what blue was.

Even the sack could have been blue, and the body inside it. Hanging from that pole, still waiting. A patient dead man. And I wondered whether we would ever move him. We might not. He might just hang there forever.

Tom already waiting in the cab, and then my father walked over, stiff and slow, still cold, and finally my grandfather rose from his mattress and had somehow changed into dry clothing also, but he no longer had boots. Soft shoes instead, leather moccasins. And his head bare. The hat with earflaps soaked or gone. White hair in short tufts on either side of his head, the wide baldness between. Speckled skin, and slack, like a great white toad. Mouth too small and eyes too small, but otherwise recognizable. He climbed in, the pickup lurching and recovering, and then we drove out.

This land gone pale, all color drained. Shadow and distance only rumored, soon to be. Etchings of lines, of tree trunks vertical and fallen, of ridge and cloud and road and no distinguishing between them, only lines carved into the same flat plane. The light not a light of this world but more a temperature, a coldness through which we could see. And our movement along that road felt without orientation, as if we could be turned on our side and not know it.

And then none of that was true. The hillside became real, a great solidity extending, and the trees stood vertically and the road was cut into the earth, and the sky above was in its own separate plane and all had been made again and the previous light was only memory and not even that.

We passed beyond the area of the imaginary buck, beyond the waste of deadfall and poison oak, and I could feel it rising already along my face and neck and hands, my skin growing and itching. A distraction, always annoying, something that had to be ignored. What I was looking for was my first buck, and I would not let that be taken away.

But my father turned downward into the lower sections, thick brush and narrow low ridges, a place I would be unlikely to find a buck. This seemed intentional. The pickup winding down and then up steep fire roads like a roller coaster with the brush scratching along both sides. A constant high scree and no view anywhere, all bucks no doubt fled before us from the sound. The sky turning white and yellow. All of us straining to hold on as the truck twisted and lurched and the hood pointed into the sky and then down into ditches. A kind of punishment from my father, pointless hunt, no hunt at all.

Manzanita leering at us from both sides, deep red and peeling, taking a multitude of forms, arrays of thin branches all reaching straight upward or thick trunks twisting off sideways, leaves shaped exactly like eyes, twisting between white and green, thousands of them.

Small birds everywhere, exploding through the manzanita as we neared. Low brown swoops and landings and chittering. The baffled sound of those tiny wings against air, a textured sound surprisingly loud over the low whine of the truck. Smell of wet earth, overnight dew, our tires digging and the truck wanting to bound forward, held back constantly by that low gear.

The sun high on Goat Mountain above us, yellow on the broad rock faces, and the air seared into nothing, no color to the sky. We were still in shadow, mosquitoes wavering around me in the cold.

The bucks would not be here at this time of day. They’d be out of the brush, in the open sections, under the trees or in the glades, feeding. And my father knew that. But he kept crawling over these closed-in slopes in a place where we would see nothing. These hills shaped like a carton of eggs.

Mud in the troughs down low between hills, and the truck slid and caught and slid again and my father drove on recklessly, willing the mountain to try to stop us. He climbed again, the tires slipping, and descended into a worse trough, a place too wet for brush, mired the tires and dug out, crawled forward again, mired and sank until all four tires spat mud and water and did nothing but dig down. We were no longer moving.

My father let off the gas, and I looked over the side, the tires sunk in past the hubs. We were somewhere below bear wallow, the only area on this entire dry mountain where you could bog down in mud, and my father had driven straight for it.

I walked around the bed looking for a dry place to hop down, but the mud was everywhere. We were an island.

My father turned off the engine, opened his door and stepped out, sank to midshin. We’ll need to dig out, he said.

How? I asked.

I don’t know. He rocked a bit, pulling a foot free and letting it sink again. Then he looked at the sky. I looked up, too, and there was nothing. The sun coming down closer, and you could feel its heat, but we were still in shadow.

My father slapped a mosquito on his neck. Rocks, I guess, he said. Rocks or wood. Help me look for stones. Find some big ones.

My grandfather and Tom weren’t moving. Apparently they weren’t going to help. So I left my rifle in the bed and hopped down, my boots become surfboards, sliding sideways into the muck, gone in their own directions, and I fell backward with a great slap. My butt and back hitting the surface and then settling, sinking, the cold ooze.

My father yanked me onto my feet. Quit fucking around, he said, but there was no heat to it. He was a sleepwalker, stepping away through the mud, looking for rocks.

We climbed the hill beside us, found stones and freed them and threw or rolled them toward the truck. Each stone partially buried. Some wouldn’t budge, connected to too much rock below, and on these I yanked and lost some skin from my fingertips.

Like farmers tending our crop on this hillside, the sun reaching us finally. It could have been a vineyard, except the vines were dry brush, snapping and scraping against us, and the fruit emerged through the ground itself, just breaking the surface. Dark fruit with white lichen on its skin, ancient fruit, ripening long enough for the lichen to grow. Crops for a world slowed down, seasons extending for eons, winter impossibly far away. Timeless but dislodged now and thrown into the muck.

We wedged the biggest stones behind the tires, one each, tamped down as low and close as possible, my father kicking with his heel. Then the next biggest in front of the tires, tamped down also, and more stones in front of these, creating a road out. On my knees in the muck, rolling and placing the stones. Cold but the sun warming us. My father and I working together, and my grandfather and Tom seemed not to exist. It seemed like just the two of us, and I liked that.

We’re getting close, I said.

Yep, he said. Closed-mouthed, allowing nothing. Hair a fringe in the light. I remember the weight of the need I felt, because I was still a child, only eleven years old. I think a child will have nothing less than ingesting a parent, swallowing them whole from the world, and anything other is a disappointment.

It was too soon that my father stepped into the cab and turned on the engine. I stood on the hillside and watched as he gently gave power to the wheels, trying to keep the tires from spinning.

Push from the back, he said out the window.

Okay, I said, and I slopped over to the tailgate and tried to push as he gave power again, though my feet only slid backward in the muck.

But the pickup lurched forward, bracing against those stones, and then he gave it more gas and tried to get momentum and the entire truck swerved off the stone path, mired to the side but with enough speed now to slide forward onto higher ground and pull itself uphill by its front tires as the back ones spun helplessly until they too found a grip and he gunned it up that hill, fishtailing and exhaust in the air.

He stopped at the very top, the body still rocking, and I waded through mud and stones and climbed that hill after him a kind of beast unrecognizable, caked entirely in mud. A bigfoot risen out of the earth and shambling along until I would dry in the sun and all movement would slow and I would be caught midstride, paused until the next rain, which might not come until winter. The rain would loosen my joints again and I would climb higher along the mountain and look for snow and a cave and come out every once in a while just to leave big footprints to make people wonder.

We like bigfoot because he’s a reminder of who we were not so long ago. And if I were bigfoot, I would do my best to help the legends. I’d eat half a deer and leave its remains scattered on the road. I’d figure out some spooky noise, some hooting grunting thing that nothing else could make, some reminder that language had to be invented. I wouldn’t try to explain myself. If I saw a campfire, I’d come close but not too close, and I’d snap a few sticks.

I raised my arms as I neared the truck, and tottered side to side, and moaned. More a zombie than bigfoot, but it was my first time. And it didn’t matter. No one commented, if they even noticed. I pulled my great hairy bulk over the tailgate and my father knew I was there simply by the movement and drove on.

I held my rifle again and struggled to remain standing as we twisted and climbed and fell downward into gullies. Scanning the brush for bucks, but I could rarely see more than fifty yards to either side, and no buck was going to wait that close as we thundered in.

We entered trees finally, the road still slick, and I recognized the lower entrance to bear wallow, a place I had always loved because I wanted to see a bear and had never seen one. Shaded in here, a wider gulley, very flat, the stream lazy, slowed to a stop. The earth much darker, black mud, and growth everywhere, high grasses and ferns and skunk cabbage and nettles. My father sticking carefully to the path of more solid ground that wound along one side, and even then the tires were sucking and slipping. The air cool and moist and the smell of rot.

The wallows visited recently by bear. You could see their great rounded shapes and footprints along the edges. My father stopped the truck, as he always did, so we could gaze at these signs. But this time, I was already covered in mud, so I lowered over the side and slogged through cold black ooze and standing water, home of leeches, perhaps, or even worse. I lay down in the wallows, where the bears had been, the cold soaking into me, all the caked mud loosening and blending with rot, and I did mud angels on my back.

The dead man was not the only innocent. I was a kid, and I was playing, as kids do, and the men were watching me from the truck and seemed fine with waiting, and the dead man seemed to exist in another world. We had no part in his history.

I rolled over and lumbered along through the mud like a bear cub, my belly just above the surface, hands and knees gone from view and then emerged and sunk again. The truth is, I was being cute. I was trying to be cute for my father and grandfather and Tom, and it’s very strange to think of it now. This is why I can’t get the story to fit together or make any sense of who I was. I had just blown a hole in someone, killed a man, and now I was acting like a bear cub. This could make sense only if killing was natural, something we were meant to do. My hands were paws and I was looking side to side, ready to snap at a butterfly or dig my snout into honey. I was in a playland entirely unlike the rest of the ranch. Giant green leaves from the skunk cabbage, curled and bright. It was possible to forget where we were.

I flopped onto my side and enjoyed the squish and ooze. I had just been a bigfoot, was a bear cub now, and I even thought of dinosaurs. Bogs and marshes and mud pits just like this were where they went to be remembered. Dying out on dry ground you could only vanish, but if you crawled into the mud, you might make it into a museum exhibit a hundred million or two hundred million years later. Truth is fairy tale. We can’t really believe there were dinosaurs, because we can’t imagine that span of time. We can see their bones and tell ourselves we know a brontosaurus walked and that huge neck swung through the air, but that’s not the same as belief. Belief is much closer, more intimate, than knowledge. Dinosaurs happened in a different world. But killing is still with us. Killing is a past world that overlaps with ours, and if we can reach back into it, our lives are doubled.