In the Distance

14.

He learned to wrestle the horse and the burro down. It started like an embrace, with his cheek to the animal’s neck. He would then force it to bend one of its fore knees with his own leg while pushing down and to the side with the full weight of his body. At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their sides and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days. He passed no settlements or paths, and there were no signs of trappers, prospectors, or Indians. For weeks, the only human forms in sight had been his own extremities and his own shadow. The flats around him allowed for no ambushes or surprises. Sounds seemed to travel faster in the freezing air, and if anything happened to escape his eyes, it quickly reached his ears. His solitude was total in the shoreless plains. And yet, he felt cornered. The slightest stir in the skyline, the feeblest rustle in the scrubs sent him down with his animals. They stayed quiet with their ears to the ground and the dirt in their nostrils. Håkan measured time with the artery throbbing underneath the living leather of his horse’s neck. After at least one hundred beats (double if he thought the threat was grave), he would look up, and the three of them would get back on their feet and resume their march.

So great was his fear of running into anyone who might know about him and his deeds that, in addition to the illusory shadows that sent him diving with his animals, he started to detect signs of human presence at every turn. A few broken twigs (and there were many broken twigs throughout the sagebrush steppe) signaled, to him, the passage of a rider; a few stones in a somewhat regular pattern (and he saw patterns everywhere) represented the remnants of a campfire whose ashes had been scattered by the wind; a pale weedless streak on the ground (and streaks striated the plains in every direction) was taken to be a trail; a well-traced circle in the bunchgrass (and whim had drawn countless circles all over the flats) meant that cattle had been left to graze within rounded-up wagons. Several times a day, he dismounted and picked up some dry dung to make sure it was not horse manure—and if it happened to come from a horse, to establish how old it was. He inspected carrion and blanched bones, looking for evidence of human method in the way the bodies had been butchered. The air, which he had always found odorless, now seemed to carry all kinds of human smells, from cornbread to gunpowder. Multitudes had just left the circle of his reality or were just about to invade it. With the advancing cold, the ground got harder, and instead of the mossy, muffled thud Håkan was used to, the hoofbeats acquired a wooden resonance. He made eight pouches out of tarpaulin, filled them with dry grass and old rags, put the horse’s and burro’s feet inside, and tied them to their ankles. The boots rendered the hoof-falls inaudible, which gave the journey the lightness of an unfulfilled idea. For the most part, Håkan rode almost sideways, with one ear forward, listening for other travelers in the soundless expanse. The plains that first had seemed to him impenetrable in their barren sameness, and then a source of knowledge, now became a ciphered surface, saturated with coded messages that pointed to one single meaning: the presence of others—men who would see him in his rotten, infected condition. They were always just behind the horizon. And so was winter.

Seeking to avoid further encounters with the last stragglers on the trail and looking for milder weather, Håkan headed south, always with a slight slant east. Winter was a giant wave gathering in the distance, surging over the plains, ready to break and wash away the minute rider in a whirlwind of darkness and ice. Already, the shadow cast by this massive wave had caught up with him. The days had grown shorter. The sun had lost its authority. The brown grass was crisp with frost. Firewood became immune to tinder. Water lapped under glass cobwebs. Game grew scarce. Provisions had to be rationed. He ate different plants that got him sick, until he finally found a succulent stalk that he would grind with the butt of his knife into a bittersweet, slightly salty pulp that reminded him of the licorice candy his mother had given him with great ceremony three times in his life, and that he had pretended to like. For some time, he ate crickets, but soon the supply grew scant until they all vanished completely as the cold set in.

Since he had only a few blankets to wrap over the hodgepodge of an outfit the Indians had made him, peltries quickly became as valuable as meat. Most animals had migrated south or holed up for the winter, but some dogs, rodents, and cats still rambled around, their eyes convex with hunger and despair. He caught his first badgers and rats with a deadfall trap. Smashed to a mass of hair and flesh under the heavy rock, the smaller creatures—most of his catch—were hard to skin and impossible to eat. One afternoon, as he was discarding a particularly damaged rabbit, he remembered his father’s glue. A few times a year, his father would gather the skins and carcasses of dead animals (mostly mice and hares snared around the house, although he had once used parts of an elk he had found rotting in the forest), scrape the hides, and boil the shavings together with bones, tails, and tendons for a couple of days, adding as little water as possible, until it was all reduced to a viscous syrup, not unlike resin. He would then remove the bones and use the paste for minor repairs. Once, particularly satisfied with the results, he challenged Linus to split up two planks he had bonded together with his concoction. Linus—proud of being treated like an adult and, moreover, eager to perform a feat of strength—grabbed the planks and, without any visible effort, snapped them asunder. It was so quick, he was unable to even blow out the big breath he had taken in preparing for the effort. After the initial surprise, Linus smiled proudly, until he looked up and saw their father’s face. He told the boys to clean up the mess, then turned around and left. Even if the glue was not strong enough for wood, Håkan thought that it might be used to hunt small game. The main obstacle for making the paste was to keep a fire going for all that time—not only because of the scarce firewood and the intense wind, but mainly because it increased his chances of being seen. Having spent the next few days stocking up on fuel, he devised a screen out of blankets and tarpaulins that had the double virtue of shielding the fire from the wind and concealing its glow through the night. After boiling down the shavings and scraps of his pulped prey for almost two days, he poured the glue on a piece of oilcloth and baited it with biscuits. The first victim, a gopher, managed to escape. A second gopher also broke free from the sticky trap but was slowed down enough for Håkan to be able to deal a clean blow to its head. Most animals, although confused by the sudden thickness under their feet, succeeded in fleeing with their biscuit. Even if he was disappointed, Håkan felt closer to his father with every defeat. In time, however, between the deadfall and the glue (which, once cool, became an amber block that could be melted and reused over and over again), Håkan managed to catch a decent number of prairie dogs, ferrets, weasels, badgers, rats, hares, and even small dogs.

He started making a coat out of the pelts. All the dissections Håkan had performed under Lorimer’s supervision had turned him into a consummate skinner. With no more than a few incisions, the furs almost slid off the frame, as if they had been lined with silk and the flesh they covered had been made of wax. In some cases, he was able to leave the empty skin almost intact, which gave the impression that the body within had simply melted and evaporated. After skinning his prey, he scraped off the flesh and fat from the hides and strapped them up to dry across his horse’s saddlebags and the burro’s croup. Remembering those Indian women he had seen tanning buffalo hides while their husbands lay unconscious from drink, Håkan rubbed the brains of the freshly caught animals into the stiff furs to soften them. Since most of the brains were so small, he mashed and mixed them with water. During a drought, he discovered that his urine produced better results.

After some pounding, the dry sinews from the larger animals split into fibers that Håkan separated and used as thread to stitch together the disparate patches of cured leather with his surgical needles. It was a slow process (hunting, curing, threading, sewing), and the first snow had already fallen. Without a gun, there was no hope of getting one of the last few bears or larger cats he sometimes saw in the distance eating the carrion he had left behind. He once smeared himself with gore and lay down, pretending to be wounded, hoping to knife a bobcat that was on his trail. The bobcat never came. Not too many days later, however, something better made up for this failure.

Through the light snowflakes that melted before touching the ground came the cry of a baby. As always, Håkan’s first reaction was to wrestle his horse and burro down. In the mist, the weeping continued. The small, airy drops felt like a cold halo hovering over his face, contrasting with the warm glow coming from the horse’s muscles twitching under his cheek. No voices of men or women. No jingling of harnesses or creaking of springs. No rumbling of wagons or tramping of beasts. Just the lonely wail. Håkan’s horse got restless, but he pressed on his neck and made him stay down. A long time went by. The weeping never stopped, always issuing from the same spot in the white mist. Other than the cries, complete silence. It stopped snowing. The fog thickened. Cramped and soaked, Håkan got up, mounted his horse, and rode into the crawling clouds. With each step, the wails grew louder. The plains barely insisted against the fog. Håkan got out his knife. As he moved along, the ground ahead of him faded into reality from the whiteness ahead. Then, in a slight depression by some shrubs, a lion took shape. It was lying in a pool of its own blood, lightened by the snowfall. Next to it, a wailing blind cub. It was getting hoarse. Håkan dismounted and immediately saw that the cougar had died trying to give birth to its second, breached offspring, still stuck halfway out. Håkan rolled the mother over and put the crying kitten to one of her teats. From its outstretched hind legs to its head, the lion was taller than Håkan. The cub nursed greedily. After a few moments, realizing that nothing came out, it started crying again. Håkan tried to milk the lion. Then, he went through his provisions and offered the kitten everything he had—charqui, sugar water, dried meat from different animals, oats, bacon, and moistened biscuits. Håkan now heard rage in the cub’s desperate cries. He made a cut into his own forearm and put the kitten’s snout to the blood, but it would not taste it. Håkan looked into the crying mouth and saw the ribbed vault of the palate, the sharp little teeth, and the white scales on the pink tongue. He smelled the clean breath coming from the empty stomach. Then he looked into the creature’s watery eyes and wrung its neck. Mother and cub were skinned.

His animals were exhausted and ill fed, but Håkan knew their only hope was to outrun the northern cold. He gave up all aspirations, however small, of heading east. The constant gales made him feel as if he were falling rather than walking. His face was windburned; his hands scabbed; his feet frostbitten. The horse proceeded with his head tucked low, almost bent into his chest. Every so often, Håkan had to stop and turn around to rest from the relentless, deafening, insane howl that left no room for a single thought in his head. There was no way to light a fire, and he slept wrapped in his lion skin. When this was insufficient, he wrestled his horse down and huddled up next to him. One night, when the horse refused to stay down, Håkan learned that the burro was happy to have him sleep against his rib cage, and in this way they shared each other’s warmth through several storms. During those days, his only relief came from thinking how unlikely it would be to meet someone else in that obliterating scream. His loneliness was perfect, and for the first time in months, despite all the roaring and lashing, he found calm.

A modest mountain range emerged on the horizon. After months and leagues of desert and leveled grass, the rugged undulations rolled up into the sky like an otherworldly phenomenon. Some of the summits were even lost in the low clouds. The sides, unbelievably, were green. Perhaps he could find shelter there, and maybe the winds would be milder on the other side. Two days later, he was halfway up the most accessible of the sierras. Relieved by the change from the invariable flatness of the steppe, Håkan rode on up with joy. And the trees. The evergreen trees. The vertical trees. In the canopy, friendly birds (not the desperate, demented scavengers that sometimes overflew the plains) chirped and labored on their nests. Sliced and opened up by branches and needles, the ashen sunlight recovered some of its glow as it landed in thin, discrete rays on lichen-lined stones. Life bustled in the underbrush—chipmunks, earthworms, foxes, insects. By a fir, Håkan found some buttery mushrooms that reminded him of the chanterelles he used to pick with Linus. In Sweden, these were not winter mushrooms, but Håkan plucked one and, recognizing the fresh yet overripe smell, took a cautious bite. He teared up and suppressed a sob. Toward sundown, he found a narrow cave where he cooked the mushrooms in lard and ate them with his eyes closed. The following day, he rested. When he woke up from his long, mossy sleep, he set a few traps and got to work on his coat.

Inevitably, the garment came together around the skin of the lion. Håkan had taken good care to strip it off making as few incisions as possible to preserve the integrity of its shape. With a few leather patches sewn or glued to some essential spots hidden on the reverse of the fur (ears, forehead, snout, jaws), the cougar’s head, which had been reduced to a rag, regained some of its majesty. It hung behind the wearer’s neck but could also be fitted as an ominous cowl. The forelegs, thrown around the neck, were meant to be worn as a scarf, which the weight of the paws, stuffed with dust and pebbles, kept in place. The lion’s back draped down on Håkan’s, so that the cat’s tail looked like the continuation of the man’s spine. From this so-far sleeveless robe, Håkan hoped to make a proper coat, for which he was sewing together all the smaller pelts he had tanned along the way. During his stay at the cave, he caught a fox that made up, almost on its own, a full sleeve. Because the cougar’s skin covered nearly his entire body and the game in the little mountain forest had been abundant, he now had spare leather, with which he devised a small foldable shelter.

Had the pasture not been so scarce, he would have spent the entire winter there, peacefully sewing, trapping, and eating mushroom stew in the den that was quickly becoming the most homelike place he had known in his travels.

Once he went over the cusp and climbed down the southern face, he was glad to have moved forward. On the other side of the mountain, the winds were gentler, the grass more tender, and the sun less remote. It still snowed every now and then, and the nights were long and bitter, but according to his calculations, winter should have been half over, and if this was the worst, he was sure to survive. Although he was still heading south, he gave his course a modest pitch toward the east. The sierras were far from insurmountable, but somehow Håkan was more at ease knowing that they stood between him and the trail. He still scanned the plains for signs of men, but there was not a single trace left by fire, tools, or cattle.

Although he had ridden through unmarked plains in the past, this time something was out of place. He. He did not belong in that landscape. He wondered when those fields had last been in someone’s consciousness. He felt them staring back at him, aware of this encounter, trying to remember what it was like to be looked at in this way.

“Gräs,” Håkan said out loud, sensing the wonder and the injustice of making all those individual blades of grass that swayed into the edge of the earth come together for the first time under the domain of that single word.

He feared sunset and often spent the entire day worrying about night. The lack of firewood and the violence of some of the gusts sometimes made it impossible to build a fire. Anticipating this, back at his cave in the mountain, he had taken the precaution of building his little tent. Made of flexible sticks, leather, and quilts, it was an elongated, curved triangle with two convex sides, like the inverted bow of a small rowboat (or like the head of certain fish or the beak of certain birds), and an opening. He would pitch it windward and crawl in, lying on the base to keep the structure in place. The tent covered only his upper body, but the streamlined prow cut through the gales, always about to crush the little hull of the upturned craft that seemed to move at a dizzying speed despite being completely motionless. Whatever sleep he got during these wild, fireless nights was thanks to his small refuge.

From daybreak to sundown, he marched on, never dismounting to eat and pausing only when he came to a stream or some standing water to refresh the horse and the burro. On these occasions, he would lay a few traps. As he drifted south through that unknown land, a growing discomfort rose in his body. It had an abstract origin, like a mysterious humor rising from his innards that became denser as it ascended through his esophagus, until it coagulated into a lump at the end of his sternum, right between his clavicles. The semisolid ball made him want to vomit. Even though he had ingested plenty of rotten meat and too many noxious plants, he somehow knew that his sickness had not been caused by something he had eaten. The source of his malady was outside him. It was the plains. It was his constant motion through the void. Perhaps the lack of proper food and rest exacerbated it, but the undulated expanse itself had become sickening. Just looking at the plains made the lump denser, and it got harder and more asphyxiating as soon as he started to move across the steppe. The brown, the knolls, the murmur, the glare, the dust, the hooves, the horizon, the grass, the hands, the sky, the wind, the thoughts, the glare, the hooves, the dust, the knolls, the hands, the horizon, the brown, the murmur, the sky, the wind, the grass made him queasy. Sometimes he tried to make himself throw up but only felt the veins in his head bulge and threaten to burst as he retched. Minor events interrupted the nauseous monotony—buffalo, a rainbow—but after their dispersion, the illness only returned with renewed force.

Håkan kept traveling south for a few weeks. Life got easier as the air warmed up. Still, he was surprised to see that despite the milder weather, the vegetation became sparser. Hard, razor-sharp grass grew only in patches. The bushes turned bristly and hostile. Scaled animals soon outnumbered furred ones. A red desert was overtaking the brown desert. As he moved forward, the terrain acquired familiar features—the crimson dust fading into purple as it reached the jagged skyline, the heat coming out of that white hole in the firmament, the general indifference toward life. Had he been here before? It reminded him of part of his journey with the Brennans. Or was it the wasteland where Lorimer and his party had found the plundered Indians? Håkan was stunned by the realization that he could not tell these two places apart, and his confusion frightened him. Had he, somehow, despite the fact that he checked his compass regularly, managed to get lost? Had he returned to one of those places he had already been to? How many deserts could a country have? Lorimer had taught him that, against everything his senses told him, the earth was a globe. Had he already made his way around it? Had his journey south (and slightly east) taken him all the way back northwest, from where he had come? Comparing the length of his ride with the time he had spent sailing north from Cape Horn on the ship that had brought him to America, it did make sense. He wept. Had he traveled around the world for nothing? An even more terrifying thought sank in. Was reason abandoning him? Was his brain sick?

There were no plants, no fuel, no water. He did not know where he was. He did not know if he was sane. The only choice was to turn around, go back into the grassland, and then, no matter what, head straight east.