Three days later, Bear passed back across the same ridge dragging an improvised two-pole sledge loaded with dripping hog parts, and there lay Sir, still living, a baleful look in his eye, a deep growl rippling his black lips like windblown curtains. Bear scooped him up in his arms and placed him amid the meat and pulled him home. Sir not only healed enough to go back hunting but was, if anything, more passionate than ever about the chase of hogs, as if every one of their kind that fell into death under Bear’s rifle was Sir’s personal retribution for never shitting effortlessly again.
ON DARK NIGHTS
when I lay on my pallet listening to the sounds outside the window, I tried to match the names of creatures Bear had taught me to their various calls and signals. The peeps and creaks of insects and amphibians, a lone night-roaming skunk or possum crashing through the bushes as loud as a family of bears or panthers. Night birds in the trees. Martens and minks and other dark-goers stepping crinkly in leaves. One word bothered me especially.
Yunwi-giski’.
Bear said it denoted a cannibal spirit, an eater of man. Bear’s people had lived here since some dim elder time and knew this place with an intimacy and depth that could not be improved upon. Why would they bother having such a word if there were no such things as cannibals in the immediate vicinity? Example in point: they had a word for a hog bite. Not two words, one word.
Satawa.
My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem. The other thing that struck me is that this was a language with little interest in abstractions but of great particularity in regard to the things of the physical world. If they had a word like
Yunwi-giski’,
how could there not be its physical correspondent out roaming the night woods hunting for the meat of people?
But at such times, it always calmed me to remember the girl with the silver bracelets, to think of her scent, the way she stepped inside my big wool coat and shivered against me. Two forlorn children finding comfort with each other. More than once I went and buried my face in the coat’s lining, and every time the smell of lavender was fainter than before. As if the girl who had stood within its compass was fading from the world.
WHEN I CAME
to the end of the shelf of unsellable books, I began slipping a few additional titles into my orders. Thirty pounds of baking soda, six iron kettles, a mixed dozen of red and blue and grey strouds, shot and powder, five hoe heads, two plow irons and the associated collars and harness, a keg each of sweet and sour pickles, one slim copy of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
in the Malthus translation.
I was careful. A French dictionary and grammar in one order and
Manon Lescaut
in the next. If the antique gentleman noticed these oddities, he must have felt that a book now and then was not worth a quarrel.
THAT FIRST WINTER
was horrendous. The first snow fell before the leaves were off the trees. Most of the month before Christmas was bitter cold. Mostly I remember that on the coldest nights, long past anyone’s reasonable bedtime, I heated water over the hearth fire and dippered it onto oats and bran and drizzled the mush with dark molasses and carried the bucket out to Waverley in his run-in shed. It was a porridge I would not have discriminated to eat myself. I went out even when many degrees of freeze pushed faceted curls of ice from the broken ground of the store yard or when snow stood deep in the woods. Nights when it was crackling cold and the stars were hard points in a black sky and the snow squealed like mice under the weight of my feet. Such nights, I had to clear Waverley’s water bucket by lifting out a silver lens of ice. I would hold it to the moon to view the fractured light and then spin it away to shatter against a distant black tree trunk. Waverley would bury his snout in the steaming oat bucket nostril-deep and eat with powerful messy suction until he was forced to come up for air. Then he would raise his head, oats in his eyelashes, take a long in-breath all the way from his belly, and then go down for more. All the while, his slow brown eyes looking at me thankful and happy. I would put my hand under Waverley’s blanket of wool batting and waxed canvas, and, no matter how bitter the night, touching his shoulder was like palming a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.
THERE WERE NOT
many Christians among them in those years, and neither were they especially Druidic celebrants of winter solstice, so Christmastime went almost entirely unobserved except among the few families of converts. And even there was division. Some observed the twenty-fifth of December and others waited until Old Christmas. So the best I could do was split the difference and give gifts to anyone who came in the store on the first day of January by the new-style calendar. Everybody got a little bit of spice tea twisted up in paper or a few pieces of peppermint candy. I gave Bear a small bottle of good Scotch whisky, and he drank it immediately by the fire. He took the first shot in his usual manner: I poured a little into a cup and he threw it back at one go. Then he looked straight at me in startlement. He put his nose down in the empty cup and took a long breath in. And then a relaxing out-breath. Deep, deep in each direction.
He believed he would have another.
I KEPT THE
ledgers by the new-style calendar—the names of the days in the week, the numbers of days in the month. But in my mind, those were beginning to mean nothing, and it was just the four seasons and the thirteen moons wheeling across the night sky that marked real time. Bear’s people thought of the moon as masculine, which at first made little sense to me for everybody knows it is just natural that the sun is male and the moon female. But Bear said, The moon, he’s like men are. He slips around in the dark. And by the old clan ways, that was what even married men often had to do if they wanted to sleep alongside of a woman and not a bunch of snoring, farting bachelors bunking in the townhouse. Men were in charge of war and the great woods and its animals, but women ran the clans and the household and the fields, and men entered those domains only at the pleasure of the women. There were men who never entered the houses of their wives except late of a night to ease in and crawl under the covers and be gone by daybreak.
SNOW KEPT FALLING
beyond all reason. Then, one afternoon shortly after the New Year, Bear came riding up the cove on his little packhorse with his long legs dragging in the snow. Against my objections, he made me go with him to his place, for he said worse weather was coming. I rode Waverley in his wake back down-valley to his place, and I spent the majority of the next two months in Bear’s winterhouse out behind his cabin. I don’t know how I would have made it through that weather on my own. One after another, blizzards blew in from the north and spilled across the high mountains down into the coves. Howling wind, ice storms that broke stout limbs off the trees, snow that stood knee-deep for weeks at a stretch. Bear’s winterhouse was a little tightly made structure of thick boards covered with a heavy layer of mud for insulation and then sheathed with clapboards to keep the mud from washing away. It stood on the earth square to the cardinal points of the compass. It was about the size to keep a few large dogs in, and you could not stand up under its low ceiling. If you wanted to change britches, you had to flop around on your back. You crawled or duckwalked in through a low door at one end. A fire pit stood at the other end, and since Bear was pickier than most, he had a smoke hole about as big around as a persimmon in the roof above it. A flat rock the size of a grave marker stood as fireback. Along both long walls stretched sleeping benches made of peeled poles and river cane, piled with smoky quilts and the hides of deer and one old buffalo of yesteryear.
The first time you crawl in one of those places the smell about knocks your head off. A ripe mix of smoke, meat cooking, the various odors of people, both the good and the bad. But you get to where you don’t notice it at all. February we hardly stuck a head outside other than for toilet urgencies and to stomp through the latest fall of snow to feed and water the horses in their lean-to, Waverley all shaggy-coated under his blanket, ice hanging in his mane and tail like bright beads.
Day and night came not to signify. Our light was the fire. Smoke lay in a cloud above our heads, where it collected before going out the little hole. We kept housecat hours, sleeping three fourths of the day, and the rest of the time we cooked and ate and talked. Though he was not as shiftless as Aesop’s grasshopper, Bear did not believe too overly much in hoarding up for winter. In general he relied on the favor of the Creator to get him through, but we did have basic food. We baked potatoes in the fire, made stews of corn grits flavored with bear jerky. We fried pancakes out of batter made with pumpkin or sweet potato and spread the crisp rounds with walnut butter or drizzled them with honey warmed by the fire. Snacked on popped corn and drank tea of dried herbs. Some nights, our dreams corresponded. I dreamed once of a circus, and over breakfast Bear described an impossible animal with a snake for a nose and great butterfly wings for ears.
Bear claimed there were old men and women he knew as a child who practiced a deep form of winter sleep and could den up nearly as long as bear or groundhog in a state of consciousness more akin to death than anything else. Those old ones would not eat or drink or dream or even rise from slumber to piss for nearly three months. But now the exact art of it was lost, like knapping flint into knife blades sharp enough to shave the hair on your arms.
Even without that lost art of sleep, our emergences into the world were so seldom and brief that it was hard to keep up with the changing shapes of the moon. Our limited powers of unconsciousness left us with long stretches of wakeful time to pass. We traded stories. Spearfinger. Uktena. How the Possum Lost His Tail. Jack and the Heifer Hide. Percival. And
Don Quixote,
which became a particular favorite of Bear’s. By the time the deep snow began to melt, we had run out of known tales and resorted to making up new. The Old Man with Thirteen Young Wives. The Girl with the Silver Bracelets.
Then sometimes, to let our imaginations catch up, we would sit in silence for hours watching and listening to the fire. And at long intervals Bear would just come out with some question or statement.
—If you knew that tomorrow afternoon the sun would flame up and consume all the world, would you spend the time between now and then praising the beauty of creation or would you sit in a darkened room cursing God with your last breath?
—If tomorrow you came down with an illness that you knew with certainty would kill you, how many different things would you feel? Would relief be at all prominent among them?
On that latter question, when I opened my mouth to speak, he put his hand up and said, It is a mistake to answer too quickly. Then he said, Disease is nature’s revenge for our destructiveness.
I also remember him saying, Interesting fact of creation: the deer has just enough brains to cure its own hide. No more, no less.
Now that’s not exactly a deep secret. One deer brain is widely known to be exactly the right amount of brains to tan one deerhide. It’s the way Bear said it that stuck in my mind. You knew he’d been studying on the matter and found the correspondence to be more than coincidental and convenient.
There was plenty of time for thinking in the winterhouse with the snow banked almost up to the low eaves and the world silent as death except for the little trance-provoking sounds of the fire. I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.
But when I tried to put what I had taken from his stories into an overall theory of fearlessness, Bear was uninterested in abstract expressions of life truths. He only responded by telling another story, The Origin of Strawberries. A man and a woman fall in love, which is always a good start. Then, of course, they quarrel bitterly. The woman flees from him. The man follows behind. So it is also one of the good stories of journeys and trails. Various things happen, but the man makes no headway against her flight. Then, taking pity on the man’s yearning and despair, the Sun creates little green spring plants with crimped heart-shaped leaves and red heart-shaped berries and casts them in the woman’s path. She picks the berries and eats a few, and their sweetness and their stains on her fingers and lips remind her of love and desire. She picks all that she can carry, and the strawberries bleed in her cupped hands. She turns back on the trail and begins traveling retrograde to her anger. She meets the man and holds the red berries out to him. He eats one, and together they follow the road home.
Then, as stories will do, one led to another, and Bear told of his first wife. She was named Wild Hemp and had died only a year into the marriage when they were both just seventeen, and he still missed her with a bitter ache even though that was way back in the bad times, the violent years after the Revolution, when Sevier’s militia from the lost state of Franklin crossed the mountains and burned villages and cornfields and sent the people scattering away from the broad river valleys to hide up the dark coves. One of Sevier’s men shot Wild Hemp down as she fled. Bear had never entirely found peace about it, and always in his heart there was a little bit of war still flaring all these decades later.
—Grief is a haunting, he said.
The first year after her death, he was agonized by her ghost, which—as the spirits of the loved dead so often do—manifested itself in the form of crushing despair not at all akin to poetic melancholy but more like the grim aftermath of a brutal beating that he reckoned he might not live through.