David Vann - Goat Mountain

I couldn’t risk being overtaken, had to keep moving. My footing uncertain beneath me, deep channeled rut carved by water. Large stones uncovered and gathered at the seam, and my feet slipping along the walls. In darkness, I wouldn’t know how deep. I could be following a channel that cut until the hill on either side was over my head or even higher and I wouldn’t know. Submerged and believing I was still on the surface.

But the slope became less steep, walls lay down and rut filled. Shallow curve of ground, smell of sugar pines and sound of air moving through their tops, the road no longer a channel, and the toe of my boot kicked an enormous cone and I stepped on another, crunching down through it, and I was where my grandfather had gathered his cones.

I had to rest a moment. Went down on my knees in soft needles and grass and tilted to the side to let the rifle butt hit ground and head fall. I pushed cones out of the way and curled into a fetal position, first and final form. Breathing hard. The ground already cold, all warmth of the day gone.

Here is where they had decided to leave me, knowing I might not make it back, knowing the buck would be wasted on the road. I wondered what had been said. They might have said nothing. They might have just climbed into the truck and left.

I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. All familiar shapes can become unfamiliar. One of the tricks of this world is the feeling that we belong.

All we have is necessity. I got up from that ground because I was cold, and I would walk again because camp was the only refuge. I heaved that head and rifle again onto my back and tried to find my way in darkness.

The road no longer well defined. My feet sifting through grass and the ground become uneven and almost immediately I was lost. This was no road. I stood in place, listening, as if the road might speak, and tried to find some internal compass, some sense of whether I had strayed to the right or left. The air curling around me, always a confusion, always misleading. The air is where the devil does his tricks.

But of course there is no devil. We only want there to be. We want someone in charge. Hell is anarchy, each of us in charge of everything and nothing and hearing no other voices ever. Isolation more terrifying than punishment.

If I chose the wrong direction, I would be twice lost and turned around and never find my way back. I cut to the left but stayed low to the ground, dragging the buck’s head and the rifle, sweeping my free hand over grasses, feeling their tops, searching for a hollow, a place where the grass had been flattened.

My palm a diviner, searching for disruption, for a track in the void. My eyes closed, as if that might help. Closed against the darkness. Reaching back to some earlier knowledge of air and ground.

And the air did cave, and my hand swept down, and the flattened grasses formed a faint track, and I rose again, too tired to lift the head, holding antlers in one hand, heavy and slumped, my rifle in the other. A figure shuffling alone in darkness in a dry place of thorn and scrub, carrying a severed head and a gun. How could that not be a landscape of hell? And it had duration, also, an infinite time on that road, climbing the slope and traversing and falling repeatedly off the track into spines.

I don’t know what the devil would look like if he did exist. I think he would have my face, but I know the rest of him would take a different form, and that form could not be of only one beast but would be all the beasts we fear, foreign and corollary. You’d never be able to see the devil entirely, always some part of him shifting and hidden. He can never be outlined.

My grandfather was the closest form I knew, his face my own but deformed and soulless, his body shifting constantly and never seen in full, terrifying and capable of anything. He was close enough.

I shivered on that road and drew closer and closer to him, bearing my burdens like gifts. A severed head to placate the fiend and avoid annihilation for one more day.

And as I walked, a strange thing happened. I began to believe that I could see. The world illuminating just faintly, some internal light I could cast into the void, and then brightening into dark blue, and I realized it was the moon, hidden still behind mountains but turning one part of the horizon white, outlining ridges and peaks far away across the valley.

The road visible now, all forms of the air receding, all become thin, no longer frightening. I hiked faster, trying to warm, desperately cold, my teeth clacking and shoulders bent down and stretched. I knew where I was now, and not far left to go.

Falling forward, stumbling, the road clear, the land flattening and space opening up among the trees waiting on this hillside, a stillness to them, a great calm, a reassurance. Grown in parallel, all knowing the same warp of the earth. The world returned. Vacant mountain, no demons here.

The moon a stationary thing as it moved. Solid and near. Light soft, indirect, and all revealed, the ferns of the reservoir and wild grape climbing all along that bank, shape-shifting, large leaves in mounds and trellises, filling every gap and hollow, a kind of blanket to cover deadfall and rut.

I was the only demon here, my cargo a form of blasphemy in that peaceful night, scuttling along, hunched and burdened. Rushing now, almost running, and I looked over my shoulder, felt that I was followed, some other part of my own self, feeling too exposed now in the light, needing cover.

Running, those horns bumping at my thigh, nose swinging into my knee, the rifle solid in my other hand. Passing beneath ponderosa pines, the small dark shapes of their cones above me against the whitened sky. Up rises and around curves and down across flats, more contour than I had ever realized in the truck, the land growing, but I was gaining.

Scrape of my boots loud but I felt I could outrun anything now, and I pounded up the final draw toward camp, steeper than I had remembered, and hit the open space just before our grove.

I slowed here and went down on my knees, dropped the head and lay in the dust of the road with my rifle as I had the previous night, waiting and listening for any sign of my grandfather. Breathing hard, winded, and my blood pounding, but I waited until I could calm and hear. He had no relation to the ground. That was the problem. Those pencil legs without sound, and the orb of him above that, able to shift anywhere. You wouldn’t know what you were seeing or hearing until too late.

The heat falling away from me again, and I could find nothing, and my skin slick now with sweat and chilling. The trees before me, thick grove in which the men slept and the dead man waited. I rose with the antlers and left the road, followed the stream. The meadow just beyond was another moon, luminous and white.

The dead man hanging without his sack, banded by shadows. Hanging from his bare and bloodless ankles. I could see him and then not see him and then see him again as he shifted through those trees.

The sound of the water a camouflage he was using. I could not hear his movement, only the stream, endless. A sound growing as I neared, taking over until I could no longer hear even my own blood and breath. Trees rotating on their bases across the ground, as if all were held on a great dial. Some low sound to that, deep tumblers of stone, but it could have been only the water, a heavier fall into a deeper pool.

His chin ducked close against his chest, the tops of the trees his references, and he slid among them at will. This was the temptation, this is how the demon has always moved, never looking directly. Shadows everywhere around Jesus, and what he had to learn was that there was only his own.

I held the buck’s severed head high as I entered those trees, held it before me as a shield, no beast here more terrifying than I could be. Those luminescent eyes, dead galaxies holding an afterlight, and the dead man could no longer slip away, veered and shifted and went nowhere, was held in place at the hooks and contained until I stood before him and the dial no longer moved beneath me and the trees rooted again.