Moontrap - Don Berry (49 page)

I 'm comin' up.

No. No, it's too late for that. It ain't that
simple, I 'm comin' up. It's too late to run anymore.

Monday was now down into the lowest depression of the
saddle, a couple of hundred yards below the small grove of trees, He
left the shelter of the last boulder and started up the opposite
slope to the security ofthe fir thicket.

The old man watched him climb contemptuously, a tiny
figure scrabbling up the rocky slope. Still, he was sorry it had to
be this way. They'd run together, he liked the Jaybird when it came
to that. But  there were times when a man had to choose who was
going to be with him. And this was one of the times. He didn't want
the Jaybird with him now.

Sorry, hoss, he thought.

He was surprised to find tears in his eyes. He
blinked and shook his head angrily It don't matter a damn to me, he
thought.

The hawk swirled back, coming this time from the
left, a dark, swift arrow in the sky. The old man watched it pass
again. He lifted his rifle a little, by way of salute.

Monday had stopped in the middle of the opposite
slope and was looking uphill at the fir grove. The old man followed
his glance and saw another figure appear at the edge of the woods.
Even at this distance, when the men were tiny, he recognized the
small dark-suited man. He had a name, but the old man couldn't
remember it. The faint sound of voices came to him, but he could not
make out the words.

"Listen to'm," he muttered. "They're
talkin' to each other." He coughed blood again, and this time
could not shift his head to the side. It trickled from his mouth
after the coughing was finished, and stained the front of the leather
shirt, mingling with the blood of animals long since dead. Weakly he
pushed the scalp locks over his shoulders, so they wouldn't be
spoiled. He wished the hawk would come back. If the hawk came back,
he would talk to it.

Monday half turned on the slope, pointing down toward
the base of the ridge, still talking, explaining something. The small
dark figure at the edge of the grove slowly raised the rifle, and the
old man saw the tongue of white smoke leap out down the slope. The
crash echoed between the peaks just after, roaring in his ears.
Monday doubled over suddenly and kicked backward, knocked off his
feet. He tumbled a few yards down the slope, dislodging a tiny
avalanche of rocks beneath him. He rolled up against a small boulder
and stopped.

C'mon, get up, the old man thought. That ain't no way
t' die. But the crumpled form did not move any more.

The old man blinked again.

The tiny figure at the woods lowered the gun and
rested the butt on the ground, looking down at the boulder. After a
moment he walk-slid down the slope and bent over the crumpled form.
At the edge of the trees the old man saw other figures moving. The
man stood up, still looking down at Monday. Then he turned and called
something up to the others.

A whole line of men came out of the dark obscurity of
the fir grove and made their way downslope. They collected in a tight
circle around the boulder, looking down at the dead man. The old man
heard the tiny chatter of their voices, like distant birds. He wished
he were sure of his load, he wished he could see more clearly. But
with every second the number of shots he had grew less. He would have
to be sure.

A wave of redness swept in at the corners of his
vision, and he rested his forehead on the rifle butt again. Loosely
he spat out the blood that was collected in his throat. His breath
was coming raspingly now, he could hardly make his chest work, and a
froth of blood formed at his mouth.

Suddenly he felt warmth on his face, and opened his
eyes. The first red crescent of sun had appeared above the horizon.
He looked at the flaming brightness, but he could not get his eyes
open all the way. He wanted to take it all in his eyes, he wanted to
be blinded by the radiance and brilliance of the great flaming disk.

He looked down the slope again, and the circle of men
around the corpse had disappeared. His vision was coming and going in
waves of blurriness now, but he could make out the motion. He saw
them spread across the slope in a line, seeking out the protection of
boulders, frightened, cautious, careful.

Come on, he thought.

He blinked again, but he could not clear away the
liquid, shifting haze. His head wavered as he watched, and he knew he
could not wait. He had not time to wait for cowards. He had never had
time for that. He put his head down again, trying to gather up the
strength that was in him. He would charge them. If they wouldn't
come, he would charge them. The way it used to be. With the shrill
defiant shriek keening strongly across the peaks. He would do it,
just one last time. To show them what a man was.

He lifted his left hand to support it against the
wall and was surprised to find there was no pain at all from his
side. Staggering, he pulled himself up until his chest was resting on
the wall. His mouth hung open and loose. With one last brutal thrust,
he raised himself erect above the waist-high pile of rocks.

He opened his eyes. From his left there came the
swift shadow that was the hawk, swinging past him and swooping up
into the space above the ridge. The terrible cry of hate died in his
throat, and he watched the pitiless grace of the great bird of prey
as it rolled easily on one wing.

Below him on the slope, a thunder roared, and the
great white smoke-flowers bloomed mysteriously in the dawning sun.
The old man raised his rifle high.

"
Hello, bird," he said.

The wall in front of him exploded into shards and
dust, and the massive hammer smashed his frail body and broke the
bones of his chest.

Startled by the thunder, the dark and silent hawk
slid down the sky and over emptiness again. An updraft rustled softly
in the feathers of its breast, and it gave its body freely to the
unseen currents of the world.

There was time. It would all pass. The mountain would
remain when the gross and roaring animals had gone, and in a later
time small creatures would be lying on the sun-warmed rocks. Then the
solitary dwellers in the wind would come to rake the sky with their
sharp wings, for this was their way and the way of the world. It had
been so since hawks first hungered in the sky. It had always been so.

The draft lifted it in a sweeping spiral that rose
slowly into the vast silence of the new day.
 
 
 

Introduction by Jeff Baker

A few years ago, I was standing on the bank of the
Clackamas River with Robin Cody, author of
Ricochet
River
, a novel set on the same river we were
skipping rocks across. We were talking about other novels set in
Oregon and how there are only a few really good ones.

H. L. Davis'
Honey in the Horn
is the only novel by an Oregonian to win the Pulitzer
Prize, and that was in 1936. Bernard Malamud wrote
A
New Life in
Corvallis and based it on a
fictionalized Oregon State University, then moved to Vermont before
the locals figured out they were being teased.

Cody said he thought the Great Oregon Novel was
Sometimes a Great Notion
by
Ken Kesey. No doubt about it, Cody said—
Sometimes
a Great Notion
is big, it's raw, it's
stylistically inventive, it gets right what it's like to live in this
rugged, beautiful land.

True enough, I said. I love that book, and I think it
shows Keseys brilliance way more than
One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. There's one novel
that's better, though, one that has more to do with who we are as
Oregonians and how we came so far in such a short time and lost so
much along the way. It's
Trask
by
Don Berry, and it changed my life when I read it as a teenager.

Cody's next rock whizzed suspiciously close to my
ear. He liked
Trask
just
fine but thought Notion was more ambitious and more successful on
more levels. Kesey was aiming higher, he said, and he pulled it off.
He wrote about a family, a town, an industry, a way of life. Nobody's
come close to getting so much about Oregon into one book and doing it
in such an intense, exciting way.

I still like Trask better, I said. We agreed to
disagree and went back to skipping rocks over the green surface of
the river. Three years later, Berry and Kesey were dead. They were
Oregon's best fiction writers of the post-World War II generation
and, despite obvious differences in temperament and style, had much
in common. Both were born elsewhere but considered Oregon their home.
Both did their best work before they were thirty in marathon sessions
of intense creative concentration they were unable or unwilling to
repeat in later years. Both turned away from writing novels in favor
of other, more personal artistic pursuits that included living their
lives as art, and both spent their last years experimenting with
technology that didn't exist when they were ambitious young writers.

There's a statue of Kesey in downtown Eugene. His
life is celebrated by his many friends and his novels have never been
out of print. His influence on twentieth-century American culture is
immense—as a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the
counterculture of the 1960s, as a proponent of drug use to expand
consciousness, and as a rebel who took every opportunity to
cheerfully challenge authority.

Berry's life and accomplishments are less well-known
but no less interesting. He was a key figure—along with Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch—in the small group of writers
who attended Reed College in the late 1940s. A self-taught researcher
who never took a history class, he wrote an influential history of
the Rocky Mountain fur trade called
A Majority
of Scoundrels
. A musician, a painter and
sculptor, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, and a spiritual seeker,
toward the end of his life he put his restless energies into an
amazing Web site (www.donberry.com) and became one of the first
writers to fully explore the possibilities of the Internet.

His most important artistic achievement is the three
novels (
Trask
, 
Moontrap,
and
To
Build a Ship
) published between 1960 and 1963
and written in a spasm of sustained creativity unequaled in Oregon
literature. All three are set in the Oregon Territory in the decade
before statehood and form a loose trilogy that tells the story of our
state's origins better than any history book. They are set firmly on
Oregon soil and mix historical figures such as Elbridge Trask, Joe
Meek, John McLoughlin, and the Tillamook chief Kilchis with fictional
characters. Berry believed fiction could tell larger truths as
effectively as history and shared the opinion of Ben Thaler, the
narrator of
To Build a Ship
,
who thought "literal truth is not the important consideration .
. . history tells us only what we have already made our minds up to
believe."

More than forty years after they were first
published, Berry's novels speak for themselves and need no detailed
explication. (It is interesting but not necessary, for example, to
know that unlike Berry's childless Trask, the real Elbridge
Trask—after whom the Trask River is named—and his wife Hannah had
eight children before leaving the Clatsop Plains for Tillamook Bay.)
A brief examination of who Berry was, how he wrote these remarkable
books, and what he did with the rest of his life can provide a more
complete context in which to appreciate a true Northwest treasure.

Berry was born January 23, 1932, in Redwood Falls,
Minnesota. His parents were touring musicians; his father played the
banjo and guitar, his mother was a singer. His father left the family
when Berry was two and did not see his son again until Berry was
eighteen, although they enjoyed a friendly relationship in later
years. His mother moved frequently around the Midwest and Berry said
he attended six schools in five states one year. Berry was small for
his age and extremely intelligent, the kind of kid who had to get
adults to check out books for him from the library. In grade school,
he was given the nickname "China" for his interest in the
far east.

By the time he was fifteen, Berry and his mother were
living in Vanport, the city that was destroyed by a flood of the
Columbia River in 1948. Berry took the newspaper notice of his death
in the flood as an opportunity to leave home and disappear. He
attended high school in Portland and was offered scholarships in
mathematics by both Harvard and Reed.

In 1949, Berry was attending Reed, working in the
bookstore and sleeping on top of a boiler he tended on campus. He was
invited to live in a house on Southeast Lambert Street with several
other students, including Snyder, already a serious student of
Eastern philosophy and on the way to becoming one of the finest
American poets of the twentieth century; Whalen, a Portland native
who became a prominent Beat poet and later a Buddhist monk; and
Welch, another poet whose
Ring of Bone:
Collected Poems 1950-71
is one of the best
books from the Beat era. The young men formed what they called the
Adelaide Crapsey-Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration Poetasters Society
and drank wine, wrote poetry, and goofed off for the better part of
two years.