The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass [beautiful books to read .TXT] 📗

Long after Ann and Gray Owl and the pack of dogs had passed through, the birds would awaken, their bright, dark eyes luminous in the moonlight, and the first sight they would see would be the frozen marsh before them, with its chain of still-steaming vent-holes stretching back across all the way to the other shore. Perhaps these were birds that had been unable to migrate owing to injuries, or some genetic absence. Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on.

And what would the snipe think or remember, upon reawakening and finding themselves still in that desolate position, desolate place and time, but still alive, and with hope?

Would it seem to them that a thing like grace had passed through, as they slept—that a slender winding river of it had passed through and rewarded them for their faith and endurance?

Believing, stubbornly, that that green land beneath them would blossom once more. Maybe not soon; but again.

If the snipe survived, they would be among the first to see it. Perhaps they believed that the pack of dogs, and Gray Owl’s and Ann’s advancing torches, had only been one of winter’s dreams. Even with the proof—the scribings—of grace’s passage before them—the vent-holes still steaming—perhaps they believed it was a dream.

Gray Owl, Ann, and the dogs headed south for half a day until they reached the snow-scoured road on which they’d parked. The road looked different, Ann said, buried beneath snowdrifts, and they didn’t know whether to turn east or west. The dogs chose west, and Gray Owl and Ann followed them. Two hours later they were back at their truck, and that night they were back at Gray Owl’s cabin; by the next night Ann was home again.

She says that even now she still sometimes has dreams about being beneath the ice—about living beneath the ice—and that it seems to her as if she was down there for much longer than a day and a night; that instead she might have been gone for years.

It was twenty years ago, when it happened. Gray Owl has since died, and all those dogs are dead now, too. She is the only one who still carries—in the flesh, at any rate—the memory of that passage.

Ann would never discuss such a thing, but I suspect that it, that one day and night, helped give her a model for what things were like for her dogs when they were hunting and when they went on point: how the world must have appeared to them when they were in that trance, that blue zone, where the odors of things wrote their images across the dogs’ hot brainpans. A zone where sight, and the appearance of things—surfaces— disappeared, and where instead their essence—the heat molecules of scent—was revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.

I suspect that she holds that knowledge—the memory of that one day and night—especially since she is now the sole possessor—as tightly, and securely, as one might clench some bright small gem in one’s fist: not a gem given to one by some favored or beloved individual but, even more valuable, some gem found while out on a walk—perhaps by happenstance, or perhaps by some unavoidable rhythm of fate—and hence containing great magic, great strength.

Such is the nature of the kinds of people living, scattered here and there, in this valley.

Swans

I GOT TO KNOW Billy and Amy, over the years, about as well as you get to know anybody up here, which is to say not too well.

They were my nearest neighbors. They saw me fall in and out of love three times, being rejected—abandoned—all three times.

And though that’s not the story, they were good neighbors to me then, in those hard days. Amy had been a baker in Chicago, thirty years before, and even after coming out here to be with Billy she’d never stopped baking. She was the best baker who ever lived, I think: huckleberry pies and sweet rolls and the most incredible loaves of bread. I’ve heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner. I’ve read accounts of people who’ve died and come back to life, and their stories are all so similar I believe that’s how it is.

And that’s what this end of the valley—the south fork of it, rising against the flex of the mountains—smells like all the time, because Amy is almost always baking. The scent of her fresh loaves drifts across the green meadows and hangs along the riverbanks. Sometimes I’ll be hiking in the woods, two or three miles up into the mountains, and I’ll catch a whiff of bread, and I’ll feel certain that she’s just taken some out of the oven, miles below. I know that’s a long way for a human to catch a scent, but bears can scent food at distances of seven miles, and wolves even farther. Living up here sharpens one’s senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes