“Holy shit,” Steve laughed, still high on the coke.
Zack thought of the grizzly today ripping the elk leg apart, how when he walked the mountain seemed to tremble. “He meant me no harm, that griz. He just sniffed me and went away. He wanted the elk.”
“He recognized your spirit. That you’re a good man. That’s why he didn’t kill you.” Curt huddled over the fire with his cup of Jack, his shoulders touching Zack’s and Steve’s, the fast-falling snow blanketing them, “Just think, how many thousands of years, we humans, in dark caves, in the cold, the fear of the bear coming in …”
Zack smiled, seeing Curt as he was, entirely without subterfuge or bullshit. Slim, tall and muscular in his white-tanned elk vest, long black ponytail, high hard cheeks and wide black eyes, an elkhorn knife at his belt and an eagle-feathered white Stetson on his head, impervious to the biting cold, unafraid of grizzlies … Yet human too, with a wife, a ranch, a truck that didn’t run right.
They’d always been close, Curt more friend than guide. Someone you care about beyond normal human connections. Who had your back, and out of respect and gratitude you had his.
Maybe it was the woods, the wilderness. Hunting. Made you closer in the old way. He glanced at Steve, grinned. Steve telling another of his funny stories. Closer to him too.
TREADMILL
WHILE CURT FED his horses Steve and Zack scrubbed the iron skillet in which Curt had cooked the elk liver and onions and the tin pail in which he’d boiled the potatoes. They washed the plates and silverware and dumped them in boiling water so nobody came down with the shits, and rinsed their coffee cups and turned them upside down so snow wouldn’t freeze inside them.
They sat close to the fire, which always leaves you too hot in front, Steve said, and too cold behind. But better than the deadly night. That kills you if you stray from warmth.
The thought of dying out there in the cold made Zack shiver. His body was worn and aching – from the miles hiked through deep snow in subzero winds, from slinking silently through dark timber seeking the distant flicker of an elk’s tail between the trees, from kneeling to peer beneath the low boughs for the glimpse of a deer leg between the trunks … Intense and exhausting. But how lovely to come home to the fire’s brave heat and light, to booze and hot food, good friends, a warm sleeping bag. To be rescued another night from cold death.
He thought of the feeling he’d had seeing the firelight through the trees on their way back to camp. Out of the cold darkness. Back to our roots.
But this year his body was paying the price.
It was harder to do what he used to do easily.
On TV he’d always encouraged kids to play football, but was that right? Wasn’t he enticing them into an impossible lottery, a hundred thousand to one? But making them pay the dues anyway, the broken bones and dislocations and battered muscles, the torn cartilage and tendons, the smashed knees, the jaw that won’t shut right, the ringing in your ears and the confusion in your head, with the knowledge that every year the pain and soreness just get worse?
He was here now, whatever it took. He hadn’t tagged the elk the griz had eaten, so he could hunt another. Tomorrow he’d climb above 9,600 feet, where the big bulls hid in dark timber on the north-facing slopes.
He tugged off his boots and socks and stretched bare feet toward the fire. How funny and pale his toes looked, like white worms. “How blissful this is.” Then, as if to explain: “Leaving LA, getting out of that weird scene for a week.”
Steve smiled. “That’s why we do this, every year.”
“And to stay in touch.”
Standing with his back to the fire Steve hunched his shoulders into the heat. “How you doing, your other investments?”
“Not so good, why?”
“Just wondering … The world out there is changing. Money’s getting hard to find.”
IN THE LOG-POLE CORRAL Curt opened a bag of oat cookies and gave each horse three. You had to be careful to give them all the same number or there’d be trouble. He rubbed down each horse, along the neck across the withers and back, murmuring, “You good buddy, Tom, my beautiful gray baby,” or “You too Kiwa, don’t you act jealous, I’m giving you a good rub too, and you got three cookies just like he did …”
Then he gave each a muzzle bag of oats, marveling as always how warm they stayed, how the snow melted off their muscular backs, their short hair. He gave each a hug and a kiss on the ear, sniffing their lovely odors, and from each got a warm nuzzle in response.
He checked each hoof for impacted ice or a wedged stone in the frog, rubbed their legs to make sure each horse was warm and comfortable, broke free a chunk of new alfalfa for each from one of the two bales Tom had carried on his packsaddle up the mountain.
Not wanting to return to camp, he sat on a corral pole enjoying the evening and the bitter stars cutting through the branches. It was so free, this, so open, so wild. What the ancestors had.
What was bothering him, he realized, was Zack and Steve. Something different about them this year. A tension, distance. Out of touch.
Though you couldn’t live in a place like Lost Angeles or New York and have any connection to the earth. When you move away from nature, like the ancestors said, your heart becomes hard. No matter how real you think you are. How much money you have.
Our first teacher is our own heart, the ancestors also said. But how can it teach us if it becomes hard?
Zack seemed to love the wild country. But if you did, how could you go back to what he did? Curt had seen him on TV, the famous linebacker talking football between commercials. Tall, rugged with a hard jaw, square-faced under a blond crew cut.
Not a guy you want to mess with. Not ever.
But who was he? Sometimes a real person who then faded into his TV talk, looking at you with those deep blue eyes.
Never ever trust a guy who looks you sincerely in the eye.
And Steve this millionaire banker, an ultra-marathoner, whatever that is, still complaining there’s no cell service up here and he can’t call his wife and kids every night. Give them a break, buddy, away from you.
Though in his own way just as tough as Zack, runs ten miles on a treadmill every morning, he says. Dark-haired and narrow-faced, the opposite of Zack.
Where did he get time to run on a treadmill, with all this investing he did?
Isn’t their entire life a treadmill?
“The markets are a scam,” Steve had once said. “The world would be better off without them.”
How, Curt had wondered, can you keep doing something the world would be better off without?
And Zack had said the same thing about TV football. How you got into high school football because you loved it, loved it despite the pain. Then college, and if you work like a demon, are very good and very lucky, the NFL. But then, maybe after a few years and many injuries, you start to see it’s fake, unreal. Has no real value. Just hurts lots of people … In more ways than one.
So how can you keep doing it?
Back in camp he checked that everything was covered and safe from the deepening snow. For morning he put the coffee and filters, the big pot, and the bread all under a tarp, and tucked the dozen eggs by the foot of his sleeping bag so they wouldn’t freeze.
FOR FOUR DAYS Steve hadn’t talked to Marcie and the kids. It had become a gnawing desire, as if he couldn’t breathe without the reassurance of their voices. He turned on his phone, fingers numb. No service. 8:12 pm, so just after ten in New York. Marcie’d be checking the kids’ homework, keeping them off the internet. Telling them good night stories