Where the Sea Used to Be (6 page)

The cabin smelled strongly of wood smoke: almost twenty years' worth of fires. It was cold and drafty—as if they had crawled into an ice cave—and Wallis went over to the stone chimney and felt the cold rocks over the fireplace.

There were dried flowers hanging from all the walls, dulled and subtle splashes of sun-faded blues, old yellows, pinks, and fading reds. There were cloves of garlic hanging in the kitchen, and in the living area there were pelts and furs: snowshoe hare, coyote, beaver, wolverine. There was a patch of some kind of fur over a bookshelf, a dark patch that looked pubic—Wallis would find out later that it was buffalo—and next to it was a ball of white hair that Wallis felt sure was wolf.

There were books everywhere: books on the shelves, which lined all of the walls except the south wall, where there was a big plate glass window—Wallis could see the snow driving sideways against the glass and piling in drifts—and there were books stacked along the walls, and below the big window, and a trail of stacked books that wandered crookedly into the kitchen.

Mel was building a fire in the wood stove: splintering kindling, pieces that were half-split already and had some twist in them, so that she could pull them apart with her hands. Wallis looked at her bookshelves—at the books themselves, and at the objects that surrounded them—feathers, stones, dried bundles of sweetgrass, more old flowers, an arrowhead, a piece of driftwood in the shape of a face, and an old fly-fishing reel, and some dry flies, scattered loose like fluff from cottonwoods in the summer.

He heard Mel tear apart a green-sounding piece of wood and then she said
“Shit,
” and Wallis turned and saw that she had gotten a splinter stuck up in under the back of her hand—into a vein, it seemed, for bright red blood squirted as she pulled the splinter out. It had gone in nearly two inches. As she removed it it seemed to keep coming forever, but finally it was all out, and the blood came in a stream. She lifted her hand to her mouth and sucked for a moment, then wiped the blood on her jeans and kept splitting wood. She lit the fire and opened one of the stove's doors for it to draw air, and Wallis listened to the fire snap and then roar. Mel passed him, sucking on her hand once more, and went down the narrow hallway to go doctor her hand.

He walked over to her desk, to the corner by the stone fireplace. It was immaculate: papers stacked neatly, technical papers about juvenile dispersal of wolves in Labrador, and her field notes, sketches of tracks with gait measurements. He noticed there were no photographs at her desk—that there were none anywhere in the cabin. There were maps all over her walls, but even they seemed to speak of the future: diagrams of where she believed the wolves would go next, rather than where they had been. Wallis knew little of their cycles, and did not yet understand that wherever wolves had been was also where they would return.

Mel came back out with a bandage over her hand. The cabin dimmed; the propane lamps sputtered as the temperature outside grew colder, deeper into dusk, as if the whole cabin, or the world, were sliding down a funnel into darkness.

“Come here,” Mel said. Her bandage glowed pale in the cabin's orange-hued dimness. “Look at this,” she said, opening her propane refrigerator. The yellow battery light glowed when she opened the door.

The refrigerator was about four feet tall, old and bare and white. Inside, there were only a few items on the side door—eggs, mayonnaise, mustard—but in the center, where all the wire racks had been taken out, there was a huge gleaming fish, a silver sockeye salmon so large that it had been doubled over to fit. The effect was that it appeared to have been surprised in mid-leap. The curved, toothy, underslung jaw; the wild eyes; the torpedo-shaped head—and that silver, with the black speckles and red dorsal line down the side of the fish—it was all as shocking to Wallis as if a human body had been hanging in the refrigerator.

“Matthew sent it to me,” she said. “I haven't had time to eat any of it yet. I'm anxious to eat it, but I also like looking at it. Isn't it wonderful? Smell it,” she said. “Touch it. Look.” She leaned in and sniffed the fish's flanks.

The water rattled in the pot on the stove. Mel left the refrigerator door open and went over to the stove and took the lid off, then poured tea. They moved over to the window to sit in chairs and watch the snow come down in the last bit of light. They said nothing, just watched the snow come down harder, piling higher. It was difficult for Wallis to not be panicked by this. He was used to doing the diving himself; he was not used to being buried by the earth.

He relaxed and let it come. But as he relaxed, it seemed to snow harder.

The refrigerator door was still open. The light shone on the bright salmon. The salmon watched them with its toothed grin, as if it had them right where it wanted them.

Mel continued to watch the snow. She held her tea glass in her cupped hands, so that the steam seemed to be coming from her hands.

The fire popped. They watched the light go away, watched the night come in from out of the woods: watched the tea cups stop steaming, watched the snow turn bright in the night and the woods turn black; and even when they could no longer see the snow falling, could see only white shiftings, they sat there and felt the compression of it—felt autumn leaving.

Mel went to the refrigerator and with a large knife cut some meat from the side of the great fish. She placed the small offering on two small china plates, bone-colored with a faded blue floral pattern, and handed one to Wallis.

They ate in a darkness that was broken only by the orange firelight. The fish did not taste salty, as he had imagined it would, though he could taste the smoke of the alder in which it had been cooked. He could taste other things in it, too, things he knew nothing about.

They drank more tea, staring out at the paleness of the swirling snow. When Wallis could no longer stay awake, he lay down on the couch and pulled an elk hide over him for warmth.

Sometime in the night Mel got up and added wood to the stove, then returned to her seat by the window, where she lit a candle and read. At some point she got up and rinsed the fish's residue and odor from the plates and put them away, but Wallis dreamed of the ocean nonetheless. The earth desires life—this was the last thing he remembered thinking before he fell asleep beneath the elk's skin, and with the beginning of winter trying to bury everything on earth below.

He dreamed of the ocean, dreamed of the forests that had yielded the years of firewood that had been burned in the cabin to give it its smell. He slept long and hard, moving from dream to dream—dreaming of Susan, and then of Matthew, and then of the falconer—dreaming like an elk moving through a snowy meadow, pawing beneath the snow for green grass.

 

In the morning the snow had stopped, and the day was bright and cold. They skied back to town to see if Danny had found his deer. Mel had an extra pair of skis that belonged to Matthew, and she gave Wallis some of Matthew's clothes to wear. The clothes were too large, but warm. They moved slowly, Wallis following in Mel's tracks as he tried to learn how to use the skis. He fell often, but it was not a thing that was beyond his ability to learn.

Coyotes came to both sides of the road and stood on top of snowy logs and watched them pass. Here and there would be a stump where a woodcutter had felled a tree for firewood.

The deer had been moving at dawn—trying to adjust to the cold, and to find the browse that was now hidden. Their trails wandered delicately through the woods like sentences trying to describe something great and wonderful just ahead, though Mel and Wallis saw none of the deer themselves, only the signs of their passage, and it made Wallis feel as if he were late for something.

“Yesterday was Thanksgiving, wasn't it?” he said.

“I think so,” said Mel. “I think that's what all the food was about.”

A band of ravens followed them, curious about their procession and intent. From time to time the ravens would call out to one another in their odd croaks, then would fly ahead in a sprint, doing barrel rolls and spins; but after a while they disappeared, though for some time Wallis and Mel would still hear their shouts in the woods ahead—a sound almost like human voices.

When they got to town, they went around to the back of the bar and peered into Danny's window, where they saw him sleeping on his bunk, mouth open, snoring, swaddled in a mass of hides and blankets. There was no sign of the deer. Mel said that if he'd found it, it would be hanging from the rafters in whole or part. Danny's lantern and pack were on the porch. She took the hatchet and bone saw from his pack, examined them, found no blood or hair.

“Let's go look for his deer,” she said.

They entered the woods where the deer, and his pursuers, had entered. It had snowed several inches, but the path of the pursuers' passage was still visible under the soft swells of snow. They followed it until it ended, only a few hundred yards into the woods.

From that point, they followed the faint snow-muted trace of Danny's lone passage—trusting that he had been on the deer's tracks, that he was not leading them astray. Sometimes his tracks were hard to find, and Mel would have to brush away the snow to find his footprints in the compressed ice beneath the new snow. Occasionally when she did this she would find bits of frozen blood, and would point it out to Wallis, who told her he was color-blind, that he couldn't see red, nor red and green in combination. This surprised her so much that she stopped skiing for a moment. “Oh,” she said. “So is Matthew.”

She wanted to keep thinking about this, to ask if it were coincidence, or if it were a thing Old Dudley sought in his geologists, but she knew these thoughts would get her off the focus of finding the deer, and so she let them fall away unconsidered, as if to be buried by falling snow. Wallis didn't remind her of Matthew, but perhaps she was missing something.

They followed the faint scallops of the deer's trail. They came to the place where Danny had given up and turned back, and now the tracking became harder. At one point Mel stopped and showed him a blood-mark against a spruce, where the deer had brushed against the tree. There were coarse brown and white hairs caught in the bark.

Wallis found Danny's knife: skied right over it and felt it clink against his pole. He stopped and dug it out, picked it up. It was a nice knife.

“You're good at finding things,” Mel said.

Wallis shrugged. He was enjoying the outing, but was impatient to begin his job. He felt as if he were betraying himself, letting his talent slip away from him, by his traveling horizontally, rather than straight down.

“Danny won't believe it,” Mel said. “He'll be very pleased.”

The tracks disappeared beneath velvet mounds of snow, but Wallis saw that Mel knew deer so well, and had already in tracking this one learned its rhythms well enough, that she could tell what the deer was going to do in response to the landscape. She stopped and began clawing at a mound of snow; she uncovered a red-smeared depression, an ice-cast of where the deer had lain.

“Spruce and pine trees have a physical quality,” Mel said. “Cedar is a tree of spiritual qualities. This deer's not ready to die yet. He'll stay in the spruce and pines for as long as he can. Only when he knows he's going to die will he go down into the cedars. But that's where he's headed,” she said. “I think he knows already.” She lifted her hand to her throat. “If the snow hadn't fallen, you could see all the blood,” she said. “It would look like a forest of blood. I can smell it, even beneath the snow.

“It would have died here,” Mel said, pointing, “if folks from town hadn't kept pushing it. It would have laid down under this cedar and rested, and gotten ready to die. But they must have been right behind it, at this point. Closer than they realized.

“I've seen them get shot and fall down in a stand of fir or spruce or pine, then get up and crawl a hundred yards or farther to die under the cedars,” she explained. “Scientists will give you some mumbo-jumbo about physiological responses, that the cedars are darker and cooler. They'll talk about thermal regulation and reduced fucking phototropism. The truth is simpler. The deer are leaving this layer of earth and are going to the next kingdom, and the cedars are a bridge between those two worlds.

“Science has never been all the way right about anything,” she said.

They traveled now with great anticipation through a tangle of old cedars. There was a silence and stillness, a compression of space and time, which they felt as a ringing in their ears. They slowed, then stopped, knowing the deer was nearby, but that they just were not seeing it.

“There,” Mel said, and Wallis saw the deer curled up, as if only resting. It was beneath the shelter of cedar fronds. A light dusting of snow had filtered down onto its back. The antlers rose sweeping into the branches, so that it seemed the antlers had become the branches. The deer's back was to them, so that it appeared he was not dead but instead only looking off in the other direction, ever vigilant.

They cleaned and boned and quartered him and loaded him into their packs, along with the hide and antlers. They cleaned him with the knife Wallis had found in the snow, the bone-handled knife that had helped kill him. Before leaving, Mel rearranged the bare bones and hooves into a running position beneath the tree. The blood from where they had cleaned the deer, though no longer warm, had soaked down through the snow, where it would stain the ground until spring: soaking down into the soil an inch or two, but then no farther.

The packs were heavy. Mel carried most of the weight. They followed their own tracks back out. When they reached the part of the trail where Danny had still been tracking—closer to town—Mel pointed to a grove of trees whose trunks were coated with ice. She had noticed the grove on the way in but hadn't commented on it, wanting to see if Wallis would notice it.