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

stronger. I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn’t pull. I’ve seen a child chase down a runaway tractor and catch it from behind, climb up, and turn the ignition off before it went into the river. Several old women up here swim in the river all year round, even through the winter. Dogs live to be twenty, twenty-five years old.

And above it all—especially at this south end of the valley—Amy’s bread-scents hang like the smells from heaven’s kitchen.

All that rough stuff—the miracle strength, the amazing bodies—that’s all fine, but also, we take it for granted; it’s simply what the valley brings out, what it summons.

But the gentle stuff—that’s what I hold in awe; that’s what I like to watch.

Gentlest of all were Amy and Billy.

…

All his life, Billy worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land in the bottoms, six days a week. He’d take the seventh day off—usually a Sunday—to rest his machinery.

There weren’t any churches in the little valley, and if there had been, I don’t know if he and Amy would have gone.

Instead, he would take Amy fishing on the Yaak River in their wooden canoe. I’d see them out there on the flats above the falls, fishing with cane poles and crickets for trout—ten- and fifteen-pound speckled beauties with slab bellies that lived in the deepest holes in the stillness up above the falls, waiting to intercept any nymphs that floated slowly past. Those trout were easy to catch, would hit anything that moved. Billy and Amy wore straw hats. The canoe was green. Amy liked to fish. The hot summer days would be ringing with stillness, and then when Amy hooked one, it would seem that the whole valley could hear her shout.

The great trout would pull their canoe around on the river, held only by that one thin tight fly-line, spinning their canoe in circles while Amy shrieked and Billy paddled with one hand to stay up with the fish, maneuvering into position so he could try to net it with his free hand—and Amy holding on to that flexing cane pole and hollering.

They were as much a part of the valley, living there in the south fork, as the trees and the river and the very soil itself, as much a part and substance of the valley as the tremulous dusk swamp-cries of the woodcock in summer.

And the swans.

Five of them, silent as gods, lived on a small pond in the woods below Billy and Amy’s cabin, gliding in elegant circles and never making a sound. Amy said they never sang like other birds—that they would remain silent all their lives, until they died, at which point they would stretch out their long necks and sing beautifully, and that that was where the phrase “swan song” came from.

And it was for the swans as much as for anyone that Amy baked her bread. She had a park bench at the pond’s edge that Billy had made for her, and every evening Amy would take a loaf of bread there and feed it, crumb by crumb, to the beautiful big birds as dusk slid in from out of the trees.

Amy would toss bread crumbs at the black-masked swans until it was dark, until she could see only their ghostly shapes moving pale through the night, the swans lunging at the sound of the bread crumbs hitting the water. I had sat there with her on occasion.

On the very coldest nights—when the swans were able to keep the pond from freezing only by swimming in tight circles in the center, while the shelf-ice kept creeping out, trying to freeze around their feet and lock them up, making them easy prey for coyotes or wolves or foxes—Amy would build warming fires all around the pond’s edge. Wilder swans would have moved on, heading south for the hot-springs country around Yellowstone or western Idaho, where they could winter in splendor, as if in a sauna, but these swans had gotten used to Amy’s incredible breads, I guess, and also believed—knew—that she would build fires for them if it got too cold.

They weren’t tame. She was just a part of their lives. I think she must have seemed as much a natural phenomenon to these swans as the hot springs and geysers must have seemed to other swans, farther south.

From my cabin on the hill, I’d see the glow from Amy’s fires begin to flicker through the woods, would see the long tree shadows dancing across the snowfields, firelight back in the timber, and because I was her neighbor, I’d help her build the fires.

Billy would be out there, too, often in his shirtsleeves, no matter how cold the weather. It was known throughout the valley that Billy slept naked with the windows open every night of the year, like an animal, so that it would help him get ready for winter—and he was famous for working shirtless in zero-degree weather, and for ignoring the cold, for liking it, even. It was nothing to see Billy walking down the road in a snowstorm, six miles to the mercantile for a bottle of milk or a beer, wearing only a light jacket and with his hands shoved down in his pockets, bareheaded, ten below, and the snow coming down like it wasn’t ever going to stop.

Billy had always been precise—a perfectionist, the only one in the valley—but during this year I am telling about he seemed more that way than ever. Even his body was in perfect shape, like a mountain lion’s—a narrow waist but big shoulders and arms from sawing wood endlessly. But there were indications that he was human and not some forever-running animal. He was going bald, though that was no fault of his. He had brown eyes almost like a child’s, and a mustache. He still had all of his teeth (except for one gold one in