“I know it. I hunted that whole territory,” the kid said.
“She’s a good river. I been on her most of my life one way or another. Used to be in the old days we’d float log booms down from the falls. Mile long, some of them booms. Me and a pike pole walkin’ the length of them, keepin’ them movin’ right down to here. Then after a couple days we’d head back up and do ’er all over again. Right to freeze-up. But that was years ago.”
“You lumberjack?”
“Some. I liked it better on the water but you had to cut and fall in order to get out there. Got to be a boomer if you worked out well enough.” He shook his head sadly. “Nowadays they use trucks. Takes the heart out of it.”
“When was this?”
“Hell, I was young. Your age. I went to work when I was fourteen.”
“So I guess you called me here to tell me that?”
His father sipped from the bottle. “You get right to it, don’t you?”
“Got to. Winter’s coming. Stuff needs doing.”
“I got to ask you a favour.”
“Seems to me you’re the one who owes.”
“I do. I know that. Sometimes though, you got to give to get.”
“I already give forty.”
“I ain’t talking about money. Money’s no use in this particular thing.”
“What then?”
“I want you to head into the backcountry with me.”
“You must be drunker than I thought.”
“I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There’s a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east.”
“I know it.”
“I want you to take me there.”
“Why would you want to go out there in your condition?”
“Because I need you to bury me there.”
The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered by years. His father twirled the bottle slowly with a thumb and two fingers.
“You won’t make it forty miles,” the kid said.
“You didn’t walk here, did you?”
“Well?”
“I’ll ride your horse.”
“So it’s my walk then?”
“Jesus, kid. I’m dying. Where’s your heart?”
He turned from his father and looked out across the slick black of the water.
“All right,” his father said. “You won’t do it.”
The kid slapped at the table with one hand. He stood up and there was silence behind him as everyone stopped their talk to watch. He shook his head and rubbed at his chin with one hand.
His father sat leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and lit another smoke. “There’s things need sayin’.” He said it flatly, looking down at his shoes.
“Why? So you can feel better?”
“I was thinking about you.”
“You never thought of me before.”
“I did so.”
“Yeah. Right.” He reached out and took the bottle off the table and held it up and studied the level of it, sniffing at the top of it before setting it back down and kicking at his father’s chair. His father raised his head slowly and peered at him sideways. The kid sat down.
“I need you to bury me facing east,” he said. “Sitting up, in the warrior way.”
“You ain’t no warrior.”
His father sat and sucked at the smoke between the pinched ends of his fingers then tossed it over the railing. He stood and reached out and took the bottle and raised it to his mouth and swallowed twice, hard, and then pitched the bottle over the railing too. He turned to the kid and he weaved some but put a hand down on the tabletop to steady himself and looked at his son with half-closed eyes. “I was once,” he said. “Need to tell you about that. Need to tell you a lot of things.”
“So you want to walk and talk about the good old days?”
“Weren’t no good old days. But you need to hear still. It’s all I got to give ya.”
“Ain’t never gonna be enough.”
He looked at the kid and there was no more talk so he turned and made his way slowly across the deck and through the door into the barroom. The men at the other tables watched him go. They looked at the kid. He sat with his feet propped on the chair his father had just occupied and rolled a smoke. When he was finished he set it between his lips and held it there without lighting it, content to stare away across the water to the black hulk of the mountain. Then after a few minutes he stood up slowly and made his way to the door and walked through the bar without looking at anyone and out into the flat dark of the street. He looked up for the shape of his father making his way back to the house but he was nowhere to be seen. There were few people on the street. The kid stood there looking at the outline of his shadow spilling across the street. He could smell sulphur from the mill and the mouldy smell of cheap beer and he turned finally and followed the stars north through town, stopping to buy a few sour apples that he fed to the mare before bedding down beside her in the familiar dilapidated warmth of the barn.
HE COULD SEE THE MOON through the slats of the barn when he woke. It was early morning and it was in its descent but it hung in the sky like a glacier pouring down light with the sheen of melting ice. There were shadows everywhere. It was bright enough that he could see his way to the back door of the old barn and he got up and walked there to smoke. There were coyotes in the field. He could see the sleek shape of them trotting and bounding near the fence. Six of them. Cavorting. Celebrating moonlight. From where he stood leaning on the bottom half of the door he could see the huff of their breath. Clouds of it roiling then dissipating in the early morning air as they chased each other, and the kid thought of fog and the way it shrouded the land in the frosted wet of spring and autumn, the punch of ridge or scarp or mountain behind it sudden as a bear. They wheeled and dashed and now and then they yipped at each other and then stopped suddenly and looked at him. He cupped the smoke in his hand and turned his wrist so the lighted end of it pointed behind him. They waited. Silent. Still as the air around them. In the phosphorescent glow of the moon he thought he could see their eyes, dilating, peering hard at him with the ancient light of the wild in them, measuring and judging him in the dim distance. They lowered their heads, their snouts poking near the ground, and watched him. And then they began to dance, or at least that’s how it seemed to him. One by one they began to weave sinuously back and forth, cutting between each other, snout to tail, a walk then a half-trot until one of them nipped at the tail of another and they exploded into a frenzy of playfulness, abandon, and a joy so sudden and pure that the kid smiled and leaned harder on the door to watch it. Then the largest one broke the dash, halted, raised its nose to the air, whirled, and loped to the trees. The others followed in a dark line. They vanished into the trees, winked out of view as though the woods had folded itself around them, cocooned them, the chrysalis impermeable, whole, wound of the fibres of time, and the kid wondered what shape they would bear when they emerged into the moonstruck glades.
It was cold and he shivered. There was some sacking