Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Bangley said, What’s wrong with you Hig? You look kind of fucked up.

I shook myself. The way Jasper does.

Nothing.

Maybe you need a vacation Hig. You been working too hard in the garden. Men weren’t meant to be farmers the way I see it. Beginning of everything fucked up.

He meant take a vacation lying in the hammock I strung in the shade of the house. Between two ornamental trees, a Norway spruce and an aspen that always looked to me a little lost down here, and like they were shaking their limbs longingly at the mountains where they belonged.

I breathed. Yeah, maybe you’re right. But listen I want to go up there. If there are elk. Jesus. We’d be like kings.

We are like kings Hig. It took the end of the world.

He began to laugh. Gravelly, a little like a cough. Unpleasant.

Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day. Huh Hig? Captains of our fate. Ha!

Then he really did cough. A short fit. When he came out of it he said, Well you go up there. Do a little fishing. Recreating . Unwind. Get us a goddamn ghost elk. But get a deer, too, why don’t you Hig. Something we can eat.

He smiled straight across, stared at me with his eyes that sparked like gravel in a streambed.

Not more than three days. I mean it. Every day you’re gone fucking around we are vulnerable.

I cocked my head and looked at him. It was the very first time he had admitted to my usefulness.

I don’t sleep that good he said. To tell the truth.

He coughed once more and spat out the hangar door. Well, good luck, he said, and walked off.

He didn’t sleep well when I was gone. Like a wife. Fucking Bangley. Just when I thought I wished him really gone.

We would leave the next morning in the dark. I could cover the eight miles under cold stars and make the trees with the air getting gray and grainy. I packed the pack for three days though I thought if we got on an elk it could be longer. Bangley would have to deal. I could tie the pack into the sled and drag it, but I kept it light and I preferred it on my body with the sled almost weightless behind on the way out. I knew the creeks and I moved from drainage to drainage so I packed two quarts of water only.

I decided to make one more flight. Both to scout the hunt and to give Bangley one more day of security in three directions. The afternoon was fine with just a light breeze stirring off the mountains, warm in the sun but almost winter cold in the shadow of the hangar. I had the woodstove going and the kettle on, steaming. I made tea from the jar of summer flowers, leaves that I dried: wild strawberry, black raspberry, mint, and sat in Valdez , the recliner I had pulled out of the home entertainment room of one of the mansions. It was named after the Exxon tanker that had wrecked and spilled in Alaska.

It was a split double recliner for husband and wife presumably, but now for me and Jasper, with a lever on each side and covered in the finest calfskin. It was very soft. I put an heirloom quilt on his side, patched with prints in blues and yellows, and with a repeating pattern of a log cabin made from squares and triangles in printed cloth, every piece different but with the same twist of smoke coming out of each chimney, paisley or polka dot or ribbed with color, so it gave an impression of a fanciful village evenly spread over a country of geometric fields and flowering crops, and at a retiring hour when everyone was indoors enjoying the warmth of a fire. As we were. It was comforting to look at and comfortable sitting in the deep chair in the waves of heat from the stove, levered halfway back and drinking tea.

I could almost imagine that it was before, that Jasper and I were off somewhere on an extended sojourn and would come back one day soon, that all would come back to me, that we were not living in the wake of disaster. Had not lost everything but our lives. Same as yesterday standing in the garden. It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

It was like I was living in a doubleness, and the doubleness was the virulent insistence of life in its blues and greens laid over the scaling grays of death, and I could toggle one to the other, step into and out of as easily as I might step into and out of the cold shadow of the hangar just outside. Or that I didn’t step, but the shadow passed over like the shadow of a cloud that covered my arms with goosebumps, and passed.

Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occurred to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. And life was inside death, virulent and insistent as a strain of flu. How it should be.

It was memory that threw me. I tried hard not to remember and I remembered all the time.

Spencer was his name. Going to be. Sophie if a girl. Very English. In the second trimester we decided we wanted to know. Melissa’s family was Scottish. Came over from Melrose when she was seven, enrolled in a West Denver primary school and was made to stand in front of the class and repeat words like arithmetic while all the kids giggled and the teachers died of cuteness assault. She said she lost the accent completely in two months. Adaptable as only a seven year old can be.

Her father’s name.

Not sick, not once, the whole time. Never nauseous. Never craved avocados and ice cream.

She didn’t like to hunt at all but she loved to fish. She fished with me when she could. In some ways she was better than me. She didn’t have the distance and accuracy in her cast but she could think more like a trout than probably anyone alive. She would stand on the bank of a creek and just breathe and watch the bugs flying in and out of the sunlight.

The guides, the freaks, did stuff like pump out the stomach of their first fish with a rubber bulb to see what they were eating right now. As if being caught, netted, held in the scalding air wasn’t traumatic enough. They put the fish back, but did they live after that operation? They claimed they did, I doubted it. She didn’t do anything like that. She snugged the halves of her rod together, strung it, pulled the line straight down from the top guide with a whizz of the reel and let her slender fingers slide down the length of the leader, the tippet, and pushed back the brim of her Yankees cap, and then she asked me.

Hig what should I put on?

I studied the hatch flitting in the sunlight or swarming the surface, turned over a few rocks to look at the larvae.

Eighteen Copper John on the bottom, a Rio Grand King, pretty big, on top.

She’d move her lips around looking at me like I was putting her on. Then she’d tie on a bead head prince and an elk hair caddis. Big and small just the reverse. Or she’d go with a purple wooly booger, the one with the brass conehead, which is like a swimming minnow mimic and an entirely different strategy.

Why do you ask me? I said. I think you ask and then do just the opposite.

Her smile, bright and sudden, was one of my favorite things on the planet.

I’m not disrespecting you Hig. I’m doing a survey. Kind of calibrating what I’m thinking against the finest fisherman I know.

Flattery now. Jeez. Fish on.

She usually outcaught me. Except on the big rivers, the Gunnison, the Green, the Snake, where a long cast was helpful. The last time we went fishing we had a terrible fight.

I drank the tea. It occurred to me that Jasper owned more special quilts than any dog in history. He had his Valdez recliner log cabin quilt, his flying hunting dog quilt, his outside sleeping quilt covered in Whos from Whoville. He was lying flat on his side with his butt against me and his legs sticking off the cushion and he was snoring.