Knots

Yesterday, I realized I have been tying my shoes wrong my whole life. For some reason the almost twenty years of shoes coming untied, of having to be retied again and again, of double knotting after hours of frustration hadn’t led me to re-examine my technique. I had simply blamed the shoes, the laces, the uneven terrain. I had never stopped to look at my knot. I had never realized that there could be a fundamental error in my action. I couldn’t criticize my own faulty ‘granny’ bowknot because I had no idea it could be the problem. Are not all bowknots created equal? Now I know otherwise, and from now on will tie a ‘square’ bowknot. From now on my knot will hold—if not perfectly then at least better.

I wish that more of the worries and cares of my life could have such simple revelatory solutions. What a joy it would be to awake to the knowledge that to get on with people who disagree with me all I had to do was cross their opinions over mine rather than under. To see that to find the sacred in the everyday all that was needed was a slightly more careful forming of a loop of time for myself in the day for prayer and meditation. That to break myself out of indolence all that was needed was a second half hitch of urgency.

Stooping to my laces everyday, I now think: “This simple thing has needed to be corrected all your life. What other actions need to be remedied?”

A poem

Egad! A month with no posts. Unacceptable. Here is something to tide you over until I get my writings on my dear school and the Krampuslauf up.


The road to hells canyon
is tangled but not hard
the greatest dangers
are the suddenly desperate dear
quiet ranches
keep silence spreading
on the early morning fog
the use of politics
is roughly equal to baling twine
both holding a strange grip around the provender of lives
both coming out mostly when the days slop downhill
the turkeys stand amidst the horses
both anxious for the tardy feeder
held up late last night by finances
and put to bed on shining beer
to ill remembered arenas with his wife

on the view from my window

From my desk in my bedroom, I can see the peak of the Hohe Warte. When the day is clear, as today and most days, I can discern the tiny splinter on which is the summit cross, the "Gipfelkreuz".

My rented room is small, perhaps 10 feet by 12 feet, and has no door. I have a curtain to seperate me from the kitchen, and this is plenty. My bed isn't much more than a matress on the floor, and my wardobe is simply a row of hooks on the wall. All of my furniture is cheap, mass produced, and simple. It is all from Ikea. This frustrates me in the same way that not having enough money to be generous frustrates me. My walls are blank, except for one tiny hiking map which names the peak I can see out my window, along with the others in the chain to the north. It is from a fifty year old guidebook, but the peaks don't change.

The Hohe Warte is the furthest and tallest object that I can see from my window. The complete panorama of the "Nordkette" is obstructed and cropped harshly by my window frame and the wall of the neighboring building. The resultant view is three times as tall as it is wide, and is sectioned like a good baroque landscape painting into fore- mid- and backgrounds. The foreground is composed of the neighboring stucco wall, and extends up to the peak of the metal roof of that building. Above this peak is the gentle slope up to the rim of the glacial plateau which girds the valley, finally the craggy rock of the Hohe Warte touches the clear blue sky.

The neighboring building is much like the one in which I live. It is of indeterminate age, and variable disrepair. I would guess it is quite old, but has been renovated several times, and the traces of age are best visible where layers are peeling away. The lintel of a window, for instance, has fallen off, and shows behind it the slowly rotting mortar between the bricks; draws attention to the brown stain on the wall above. I wonder many times if this is a symptom of unstoppable decay, or a sign of shoddy original workmanship. At any rate, it forms be the symbol of death the inevitably shoulders into the late renaissance still lifes. But the eye is drawn upward from this dreary subject by the peak of the red metal roof. In the morning, as the sun slowly advances, there is a curl of steam which drifts up from the crisp line of dark and light, carrying ones eyes up to the plateau.

The hillside is shared by traditional Alpine houses, a church tower, and the crowns of various trees. The houses are stuccoed brick on the lower floors, with the final level being dark stained wood. At this time of year, the geraniums have been exchanged for fir boughs. Every house has a balcony, and the railings are always cut with curling patterns, carefully repeated and uniform. These houses are the works of craftsmen, and at one time were also their homes. Many have frescos on the outside, invisibe from where I sit, but seen on my outings. These frescos depict the trade of the family, and give they houses their names. Various examples I have seen include a tinker sharpening a scythe, a whimsical parade of children carrying the cakes made by the confectioner, or the huge mural of bells in the great house of the bellmaker. Now the houses seem to be almost all inhabited by the wealthy, although to their credit, they seem to do value life in these homes. From my window, I can see laundry drying in the sun. I know that most of the homes have vegetable gardens on the south sides. I know that these hillside inhabitants are often to be found hiking up the mountains out their doors.

The church tower solemnly rings out the hours, with real bells. Listening, with my window open to the cold breeze, I can hear the bell swing in my direction and then swing away. The strong gothic steeple repeats the motif of the peaked roof, and sends the eyes upward. On the crest of the hill stands the frontier of the forest. It is not a strong line in actuality, but it looks like one from here. The spruces and pines are still deep green, but the taller beech trees, larches, and poplars form a bright yellow edge.

Behind these autumn trees the mountainside proper springs upwards. The lower slopes are still sprinkled with yellow larch, but these peter out as the elevation increases. The hillside is steep, and the changes in ecosystems are easily visible. When the fog burned off yesterday, there was a line of snow across the slope which could have been drawn with a ruler. It was almost the exact elevation as the last of the larches. Above that line the trees were frosted luminscently, and the peak a harsh white unity. Today, the snow has melted from the trees and south aspects. Once again, I can see the fading green of the steep high pastures where cows give their milk in summer. On the rock fields too steep for stock, I can see the game trails of the chamois and ibex. They are just faint seams, reminders that the wilderness is up there, hard to get to, hard to see--but there, none the less.

The peak itself is not especially impressive. It is really just a knob where the range bends back away to the West. But still, I wish to climb up there. To visit that spot where a monument has been erected to the savior, pointing, like all the other object outside my window, up. Today a clear blue sky stretches above the cross, last night the cold bright stars swung slowly past. "Himmel" is the German word for both sky and heaven.

While I can see only one mountain from my window, such mountains loom over the city in almost every direction. I have been asked if I think they close in the view. I couldn't help but laugh. These mountains are the veiw. There towering forms a reminder of the smallness of individuals, the pettiness of human pride. They are Creation. They can't help but pull the viewer in, up, away from oneself. For me, they make this city livable. The gravel erosion fields help me accept the decay of the buildings; the organic order and simplicity of the peaks helps me accept the disorder and waste of the urban life.

In an effort to bring this entire view a little closer, I have a simple collection of objects from these same mountains. Pine cones, spruce cones, beech leaves, acorns, chestnuts, beechnuts, walnuts, and stones rest on my wide windowsill. These are beautiful fragments of creation which no human can reproduce. These symmetries, colors, and intricacies remind me to be humble. They remind me to work hard, to love, and to take part in this Creation which surrounds me. They help me look back down, after following the view out my window upwards once more. They are a part of my prayers.

Der Inn

The river Inn falls through this town. It is quick, almost surprisingly so. The flow is wide, the current strong. A chestnut dropped from a bridge is far downstream by time it slowly floats to the surface again. The banks have been walled, and the bed almost paved. Still the sharp beaked dippers, in tiny white shirt fronts, bob out of sight only to surface and shiver water off their backs. The water reflects the moods of the mountains. Its glacial opacity is green on cloudy days, powder blue on clear days after rain or snow, glazed sky blue after a week of sun. Tourists stand on the bridges and photograph the scarp of stone to the north, the pyramid peaks to the south. The river bends gently in the city, making a slow turn as if leaning against a loved one in a corner bench in one of the cafes. Buses, taxis, bicycles, walkers walk back and forth. The river does not mind if they do not notice the color today. Someday, they will.

Boots and Dust

On Sept. 19, I walked onto a machine which would carry me a third of the distance around the globe in a day. My boots were still covered in the dust of a three mile, 6,000 foot climb up Idaho’s tallest mountain four days earlier. That journey had also taken a day.

In the first hour of the flight, I leaned back in my seat, trying to carefully see out the window past the old woman beside me. “Do you want to switch seats? I have flown this stretch so often I know the view by heart, there isn’t much to see,” she politely offered. I declined; there was too much smoke in the lower altitudes to make out the peaks of the Lost River Range. I chatted with my neighbour for a few minutes. She was enthusiastic about my teaching job and encouraged me to write. Her children had also been encouraged to follow their passions, she was flying to Minnesota to visit her musician son and watch him perform. She told me that she did not want to retire, and that she loved her job. Instead of retiring, she had demoted herself. She had been the manager of a shoe store. Now she was back to simply helping customers, which she loved most.

The world outside slipped by with imperceptible speed. The tiny portholes of the airplane carefully screened out interaction with the thin and chilling tempo outside. Looking at my boots, I found myself wishing this journey impossible.

Twenty hours later, after four hours sitting in what signs claimed to be Minneapolis, another four hours with Rembrandt light streaming through the windows of Amsterdam’s generic airport, I stepped out onto the windswept tarmac of Hamburg. Twenty five hours of sitting. I had been propelled across incomprehensible distance by combusting kerosene, a distillation of several thousand year old sunlight. The distance also seemed somehow an abstraction. Try as I might, I could not really link the time I had travelled and the miles I had covered.

I have read that the proper speed to take in ones surroundings is a walking pace. Hiking up Mt. Borah, I could vouch for this. The stones under my feet had been seen, smelled, felt. Their sharp irregularities had reminded me how old my boots were getting, and of Loon Lake, Imogene, Mt. Cramer, Cascade Head, and Der Watzmann where the scuffs had been etched, where the spring had been trod out of the soles. The motion had been personal. The pines had slowly grown more twisted, more stunted. The sun had risen, strengthened, warmed, heated, slipped back down the other side of the sky and sunk away toward home before us. Even after the peak of the mountain, once again stepping into the car to take us home, the distance was tangible. We wound through river valleys, followed the contours etched by weather and tectonics and the seasons. The scarp from an earthquake in 1984 made a long line at the edge of the Lost River Valley. The cotton woods in their first flush of autumn yellow flanked the Salmon River out of Challis. Opening the windows, the cool smell of pine needles and pitch was sharp in the car past Kirkum, with just the faintest hint of sulphur from the hotsprings across the river.

All summer I had lived without even a car. I had worked driving a pizza truck, but cycled my way up the Boise Bench to daily get to work. I was by no means the fastest driver there. In fact, not having a car, I became nervous whenever I drove on the freeway. The speed began to frighten me. The constant rush wore me down. I always drove with the windows open so as to maintain contact with the world. To be in the free air, pushing myself along on the bike I had built was a much more satisfactory way to navigate the city. I enjoyed seeing the tomato plants along my route daily droop with the weight of the coming harvest, and smiled at their caretakers when they were out. The July sun had darkened my arms and hands. I was in the city, and I inhabited it when on my bike. I said thank you to construction flaggers as I pedalled past, and they said you’re welcome. I nodded to the Somalian children who I always saw riding around the neighbourhood of the pizza place. The young Albertsons night clerk at Vista and Overland stopped carding me, and probably knew my name since I stopped to pick up a beer so often on the way home from work.

Then these airports and airplanes. Two hundred people in a gadget which shears spacetime as neatly as a time machine. No interaction with the outside world except that tiny porthole which allows one to see so far that almost nothing is visible. The distance travelled cannot be held in the mind, only in the hand, represented on map which is one twentyfivemillionth the actual space. We all sit, and are as disconnected from each other as from the earth over which we hurtle. I don’t recall the shoesaleswoman’s name. She doesn’t care what the landscape outside looks like. She has seen it before, but she can’t notice or care about its subtle changes. I don’t remember what she looks like. I remember I ate vegetarian curry since I didn’t trust the airplane chicken. I remember saying “bon appetite” to the Spaniards next to me on the flight over the Atlantic. Those were the only words exchanged. I remember being constantly stressed while on the plane, constantly on the verge of panic while travelling. I could not afford to be late anywhere, couldn’t leave my belongings for a moment. These are not quite memories I will treasure for the rest of my life.

Once, travel was a journey. Goethe took weeks to travel to Italy from Germany, and the famous man walked for good portions. My great grandparents came on ships that crossed the Atlantic in ten days, not ten hours. They could have smelled the clear sea breeze, watched gulls, fog, and endless horizons stretching out to enforce the distance in the mind. They would have been bored by the distance, and rightfully so. There would have been dances, and walks on deck, and letters written. Fellow passengers to meet, the children could have played about the ship rather than being the wailing curse of the plane. The passengers would have known how far removed they were from their starting point. There would be no such thing as jet lag. There weren’t even time zones before the advent of rail travel. Now travel is confusion, an abstraction of a measurable thing.

Perhaps it is too much to ask, but I wish travel could slow down again. We should demote ourselves like my momentary friend on the plane. We think we have to get to our destinations quickly because time is money. Time is not money. Time is life. And life disconnected from anything but the abstractions of a world framed and insulated by windows is a poverty stricken one.

I know I will not be able to walk home. I know I won’t be able to take a ship. But I will walk to the tops of mountains from my front door. I will take the slow trains here in Europe. The ones which stop at every station. And I will open my windows and put my face into the wind and learn the names of its smells.

And my boots will be dusty again.

Please Read This Article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Night Bus to Boise

The riders grant a chuckle to cows outstanding in their field
the first time. sullen resentment after every stop.
by pendleton all the driver’s uniformed cheer
is gone with the caffeine.

The front of the bus calls out denver into our future.
bits of hobo romance are hung up in the litany of stops:
portland to hoodriver, the dalles, stanfield (transfer to walla walla)
pendleton, la grande, baker city, ontario, nampa, boise.

I will get off in boise, midmorning, to leave the night breathed air
but the bus and others will continue, shipped dozing across the land
to twin falls, burely, ogden, salt lake,
evanston, rock springs, laramie, fort collins, and denver

the frail old woman across the aisle is bound for tennessee.
she does not get off for cigarettes,
perhaps afraid to be left.
we both know the driver hopes to abandon us.

we can be anyone on a bus, plus those breaks to filter cigarettes
into the bloodstream
no baggage search
so, moving america stares into the windows

faster than a stagecoach, but still no real food
nothing real at all that we want to acknowledge
feeling all the while someone has gone back
on a vague promise

only blackest night outside.
we do not trust anyone least of all when
our lost eyes meet themselves
only for a moment in the reflection.

Thoughts from a vagabond on a farm.

My apologies for going two months with no productivity.  Such slacking would get anyone but a writer fired.  Luckily, no one has hired me as writer on any basis other than a by-the-word rate. I will do my best to keep more posts coming, so check back weekly.

 

So after these months of silence, here is a bit of musing into the void of the internet:

 

I spent the last week living on a farm.  It is a modest farm, mostly hay, with a few goats, chickens and turkeys.  A large garden dominates the hillside between the farm houses. There are multiple farm houses because three families went in together to buy the property, and their unassuming homes form a neighborly cluster around the garden.  Sociably gathered into a corner of the farmstead, they resemble the pastured goats they overlook.   These are not the first families on this land, of course―great black walnut trees tower over the buildings, their crowns spreading high into the soft Oregon sky. Even from the upper homes, the grand trees are imposing.  These, and feral, unpruned plums and apples along the fencerows are legacies from the original homesteaders. They came West from the poverty of Tennessee and Kentucky and might have wept upon reaching so fine a valley.  Even the uncultivated forest offers good living.  Elderberries, wild apples, roses, huckleberries, and evergreen blackberries are sweets ready to be taken.  Nettles, miner's lettuce, marsh mallow, dandelions, and other greens are easy to find near the flowing water.  The acorn mast would have been rich feed for hogs.  Black tail deer wear paths into the undergrowth, and smaller rabbit tracks are visible.  This is a land of abundant life.

Perhaps it is this abundant life which makes the country life so appealing.  Its proximity was enough of a draw for the three families on the farm.  It was enough to occupy me happily enough to barely track the passing of days.  The time from sunrise to stargazing was full, every day. Never in a rush, we nonetheless filled out time.  We awoke at dawn to feed the chickens and turkeys, to milk the goats and turn them out to pasture.  As I turned over in bed every night, I could hear the mischievous banter of coyotes.  The farm was on the margin of cultivation, the edge of the woods.  This meant it allowed me to interact with the real.  I learned which gully provided the best thermals; every morning Swainson’s hawks and turkey vultures rose with the days heat.  I ate meals harvested with my own hands. I did not exchange currency for a table, I built one.

I call these things “the real” because the problems of a farm are authentic. A laying hen is not an abstraction.  The questions which must be dealt with daily have life and death answers.  A goat, forgotten about for a day or two, could easily expire.  Untended gardens fill up with weeds, go to seed, or wither for lack of water.  Poison oak cannot be explained away, or repealed, or vetoed.  Laziness leads to failure.  All these lessons are reasons Aimee and Silas came here to raise their children, Ukiah and Metolius.  It is why the three families pooled their assets and invested in something worth more than its assessed value.  They are responsible for their own lives; they understand what living is.

They also understand that welcoming others is the best way to share what they love.  They happily invited not only Michael, their new tenant on the farm, but Rachel and myself to dinner.  We dined in the open air, with the children trying to make jokes along with the rest of us.  The dogs were curled up at our feet, and when the three recent college graduates mentioned researching something for fun we got mocked.  “You guys will never get invited to parties!” Silas cracked. “But it is what we have been trained to do for 16 years!” Michael replied.  And of course, being on a farm with a swimming pond, we are the ones throwing the parties.

The night before I left Michael and I crept up to the pond in the dark with some friends still at Linfield.  The stars were visible in the pond, outlined against the tops of the oaks.  Shooting stars left trails in the sky, as we lay on our back in the pleasantly sun warmed water.  Life on a farm is tough.  Crops fail. Prices fluctuate.  Questions of stewardship of the land are never ending.  The work day is sun up to sun down at best.  But stars, the low calls of owls, and midnight dips with friends are enough happiness to stay fixed in a memory for a lifetime.

May the country life never be overthrown by our cities, for it gives us a view of our orienting stars.

A boy sits on the curb

Here is a short poem I wrote today.

A boy sits on the curb

A boy sits on the curb
in the heat that is slowly settling out with the day

released by the evening sky
like mud stirred in streams while catching pollywogs.

The pores of the trees are opening, breathing out
a long cool sigh, inhabited by the boy, who sits unthinking.

The boy is waiting for something, a motorcycle or a dog,
to go past and smile—

he pulls his knees close to his chest
as the linden over him withholds what it has seen.

The magpies dip across the street, graceful,
looking for nestlings to eat.

That morning the boy mistook
a stranger for his mother;

panicked but holding back the tears
He finally found her

extracting a package of ground beef
the points of her heels keeping her feet away from the floor.

Now on the hearth of thoroughfare
the heated pavement shimmers.

With his house behind him
he listens to the treefrogs who still sing for one another.

Big Country

Here is an essay of mine to get things started. I am currently working on getting this published. As a shameless plug: Brian Doyle liked it (I would use a blurb from him, but that is just TOO presumptuous. I have to write more first.) So here it is:

Big Country

From both sides, sagebrush elbows in on the frozen track and sparkles in the lurching headlights. My father drives, bulked up, same as me; flannel and wool against the cold. He reaches down to turn on the AM radio. You never know where you can get a signal. We don’t even get enough to hear the ads meant to torture the sleepy truckers, and he switches it back off. The suburban ruins the lattice of new ice on a puddle, until at the turn-off my father kills the ignition. The cold stiff stars prick out again. Outside I pull my collar closer and stuff my bandana down to seal the seam of shirt and neck. We load our guns, snapping the cartridges into place. I want to put my gloves on against the cold of the metal and the dawn. The brass shells capture what light there is, angle it into a long highlight, finally bending on the copper bullets where they are seated in the jackets. I feel the slight shift in weight, the deadly grit which pours as I tilt the shells, snapping them into the magazine.

The dawn is engaged in complex diplomacy; in the West still complicit with the earth, in the East a sharp contrast. There are no clouds, only fading stars and a brilliant planet standing on an inverted plumb line up from the division of the black ridge. This is it; how hunting begins.

The Salmon River makes its way in steep country. It is melodramatically known as the “River of No Return,” because of the big country it flows over and past. On that first day we walked ourselves warm in the rain up to the first ridge. My father led, as he always had. From the times I first had tagged along, nine and ten years old, he had been out front, climbing these steep hills, straight up, picking out trails between the willows and sagebrush up to the firs. I still followed, but now he led not to urge me forward, but to hide his tiring. My blood drummed in my ears, but I could hear that his breath was shorter.

We paused halfway to the low clouds, tried to vanish next to a gnarled fir. Looking out across the hillside below us, up the valley, we saw the pattern of sage and earth and grass; willowbreaks in the bottoms where the moraines of the valley met the hillsides proper. We sat and watched this valley, capped off by cloud. We strained to be anything but notable.

The hillside sagebrush below multiplied into camouflage more effective and eye confusing than anything a hunter wears. Somewhere in this view, I knew, there were deer. The countryside was large enough, I could see far enough, that in the circle of my vision, there must be a deer, probably even a buck. I had seen their scat, their tracks. But sign simply meant they were out there. No one could actually follow a deer through open country like this. The deer move with ease, untiring; smelling and hearing a clumsy man from a safe distance. They sit tight, unmoving and invisible. So we simply sought to improve our odds. We walked steep hills all day long. We relied on luck, fate and our feet. Just praying with steps to be granted a view of a buck. I willed myself to notice one, projecting a buck into my view. As I swept my attention downhill, two white patches detached themselves from the pattern of scrubby growth, then one more. Unannounced, just like that.

“There” I said, the single word rasping against the top of my throat. My father quickly brought up his rifle. I knew they were does, but he still computed the distance. My first year carrying a gun, I shot a doe. The law makes it easy on kids, gives them a doe tag so they won’t be skunked. These does weren’t far off. I wouldn’t shoot does now. My father sat in a classic position, his forehead high over the scope, his elbows propped on his knees. His whole posture defined by the line of the scope and barrel, pointed out toward those three deer. He relaxed, unstuck from the gun, and lowered it. He looked out to where the deer came even with us as they headed up and away. “It wouldn’t even be fair if their asses weren’t white,” he whispered. Slowly even those white signals faded back into the hillside.

As we walked back that evening, we chatted, no longer concerned with finding deer. I asked about my rifle, which he had been working to restore. It was a good rifle, an old thirty-ought-six, and he told me about sanding the stock, refinishing it, filling the gap of a floating barrel with glass bedding. We had sighted it in on the drive up. My marksmanship hadn’t declined too much in the long interval since my last hunting trip.

Back in the tent, we fried potatoes and sausages. My father did all the cooking, and cleaning. It wasn’t because he thought I couldn’t. It just needed to be done and he never thought of not doing it. We ate in relative silence, anticipating the next days hunt, waiting for an end to the rain.

By eleven the next day we reached the underside of the clouds, having started late. The rain turned to snow, and we met a harsh wind which never dipped to the valley floor. So late, the chance of seeing deer was slim, until dusk. We both shivered, doing our best to notice any motion. Every bare crooked branch could be an antler. Pausing for lunch on the last ridge on our way back down, we watched the road below us. “You never see other hunters on the hillsides,” my father said, motioning with his sandwich to the big white pickup, a mile off. “You can’t find deer where there aren’t any.” He looked away from the truck, up the valley to the true mountains, miles distant. The clouds clung to the snow-whitened rock, sheets slowly shredding; the clouds would break soon. He shifted on his cold rock seat and rubbed his hands warm.

That evening, as we scouted for the next day, I stopped next to a tall sage. I can’t say why I paused, maybe for the sun uphill on the sympathetic aspens. Looking down into the sagebrush, I saw a plump cottontail. He sat, pulsating rapidly, not a yard from my boot. I smiled.

“Dad,” I called to my father, just a few strides off, “There’s a rabbit under this bush”

“How close?”

“I could grab him.”

“Try it.”

The rabbit’s eyes glistened pure black, his coat the exact color of the sage bark, sprinkled thickly salt and pepper like the beard of an old rancher. His only motion was his rapid breath, the tiny twitches of his nose. I reached down slowly to him. He vanished. I grinned, and looking up at my father. He laughed once, and turned to walk back to camp.

Today the day broke clear. We leave no footprints in the frozen ground, but see frozen tracks and scat. The sky smells metallic, frosty. We head for a knob we saw yesterday. It’s a short hill, a small round point which sits above a seep-toppled aspen grove, and below a rimrock ridge. It offers a wide view of plenty of ground. It’s the coldest point of the day, before the sun has touched the hillside and when the deer are keen on breakfast. The trail is steep. We are hard pressed to quiet our breathing as we sit.

The heat of my face fogs my binoculars. Dropping them to my chest, I blur my vision to look only for movement. In the silence, every heartbeat must carry. The sky is finally blue, only the planet, dimmed to a chip of white, is left of the stars.

“There.”

I snap my head to my father, look up to where his binoculars point. There, tiny in the depressed joint of two ridges, stands a forked horn in silhouette against the pale sky. I slowly raise my rifle. The deer is too far for a shot. My father, whispers, barely audible even to my pricked ears, “There’re more.” The buck turns, and heads up the ridge in perfect outline. The ridge leads toward us. Behind him are several does, of various sizes, and finally, a larger buck. Also a forked horn, but broad in the chest, tall. He stands for a moment at the ridge, looking to the sun. We freeze. The deer move behind the ridge, not timid but alert.

“What should we do?” I ask.

“Let’s try to head them off.”

“I think there’s a trail that leads to the right. They were headed that way.”

“Sure. Let’s come out on the ridge above them,”

As quietly as possible we rise, and start off. Every dried rattle of arrowroot is a trap, a klaxon to the huge ears of those cautious mule deer. We beat the odds to find them, such small animals in such a huge world, and now they will bolt at any misstep, change direction on the other side of the ridge, stop and head back the way they came. They are ours to lose.

I look up to see the trefoil shape of a doe’s head and ears. I stop, sit, propping my leg in the boughs of the sagebrush. I cautiously shoulder my rifle. My father is already crouched behind me. It is light enough to see features, the sun just overshooting the ridge.

Through the scope, everything is flat. The doe swivels her ears back and forth, independent of each other. She takes a tentative step forward. I gauge the distance. My father looks through his scope as well; he is crouched just uphill, one foot still in the game trail. The doe moves onto the flat top of the cliff. She bends, grazes. Two more appear, smaller, yearlings. Their small chests in the scope don’t quite fill the narrow hairs. A young forked horn steps into view. He’s half obscured by the does. There’s no clear shot, and I’m not sure I want one. I saw the bigger buck on the ridge. This must be the same bunch of deer; simply come round the hill faster than expected. I train the rifle on the visible buck. Aim for the shoulder, where neck begins: no drop to account for this close.

My heart is racing. I try my best to hold the rifle steady, but the deer in the crosshairs jump and waver. The buck moves clear of the doe. I hold the sights on him, and start to slowly squeeze against the trigger. My father is antsy. I can tell he doesn’t like how long I am taking, doesn’t think it wise to wait for the bigger buck; I have a shot on this one. It might not even be the same group. I see the points of another set of antlers. I relax my grip. Down to the right, farther out on the ridge of stone, not where the other deer appeared but at a hip in the cliff, the larger head of another buck comes into view. He takes another step forward.

Two years ago my father shot a big old six point. The bullet broke his back. He had only his front legs and still tried to run. I wasn’t there, only heard the stories from my father. The image haunts me. I feel all those times as a boy the gun in my small hands terrified me with potential, when I would think with horror that I could point it to the back of the man in front of me and yank the trigger and end his life. I feel the ducks and doves and quail and whistlepigs who were on the wrong end of a gun and the doe from my first year with a license who fell after my third shot didn’t miss. Above me, the sky is cold and blue. Everything but the very center of my crosshairs and the shoulder of the buck swim out of focus and into unseen nothing.

“You better shoot,” my dad hisses.

I don’t breathe. I add pressure every time the cross swings over the place were neck becomes shoulder. He stands still, looking at me. I can’t tell if he knows what he is looking at. I exhale, hold steady on the trigger. I breathe, shiver, sight, squeeze. The gun jumps into me. A crash rolls back off the far side of the valley. In the scope the deer looses his footing, falls to the ground. The sun warms the side of my face.

“But it sure would be quite a life out here, on one of these ranches,” my father remarks. We are on the way down the country road, just after hitting pavement at the first ranch. Behind us Castle Peak is snowcapped in a sky made bluer by the fall cottonwoods. The smell of pine smoke and mule deer has worked into my clothing. It is the first thing he has said in the half hour drive so far, but he took it up like it was a reply to my thoughts.

“Hard though,” I replied. I thought of the pear tree in my front yard, of the lush watered lawn, of our property far too constrained by neighbors to contain a barn.

“Hard. But you would get to live out your whole life up here.”

I look at the sunken stubbly cheeks beneath his glasses. He is lean, leaner than me, more weathered. I’m not going to be far behind. I looked at the creases on his hands, stained by the same dark deer’s blood which is on my pants, under my nails. He had told me I would gut the deer, and he was only going to show me how. I took the knife for the first few cuts, from penis down to anus, then up to the breastbone. I started, but he had taken over, excited to demonstrate how to avoid piercing the membrane that keeps the viscera together. He had finished out the job, explaining as he went, forgetting I was to learn by doing. I don’t think he noticed my indulgent smile, or maybe accounted it to the early end of the hunt. I helped to pull the guts out, taken as always a bit by surprise at their heat, their size, their monotone confusion. We searched out the heart to keep in a ziploc bag, to be fried at home tonight with onions. The rest we left in a pile for the coyotes and eagles, maybe even wolves these days. We dragged the deer down to the truck in turns. It wasn’t hard, the heft of the buck sliding smoothly over the brush and down the loose gravel hillsides. I did most of the hauling.

As we ride out, over the washboard, past Wickiup Creek and Johnson Creek, I remember all the venison I’ve eaten. I thought of the backstrap, soon to be grilled. As fresh and organic and connected as food can be. I remember the ride in, how the conversation had slowly moved from my future and career, to past outings, to my father’s youthful hunts, to tasks at hand as we set up camp. I think about the 1,000 miles the salmon swim; from here to where I was going to school in the green sliver of coastal Oregon. I think of my father. I think of the beauty in the back of the truck, dead on my account.

The climax came earlier than I had expected. I missed it, actually. The moment of the gunshot barely existed. It was only in the dead deer that it was proven. We couldn’t even find the bullet hole, although we saw the damage to the lungs while cleaning the deer. I wasn’t sure if I had been focused on the crosshairs when the gun went off. In my memory, the only thing I could see in that tunnel vision split second was the deer. Standing, as noble and indifferent as the granite peaks, staring at me. Taking in my vest and gun and cap, wondering what I was about. Then he fell. He died, a piece of that countryside distilled, gathered up over the past few years, the snow, the wind, the sage, the dust. I was responsible. On his first encounter with man, with me, he had died. I wasn’t going to let him become some bleached and scattered pile of unseen bones. His antlers, now in the back of the truck, resting near the guns, would hang on my wall. His life would be remembered in those proud bones, his death honored. I would share his meat with friends and family; tell his story as part of mine. Before we left, we drove up the valley a bit more. At the end of the road, I walked to the top of a knoll to take a meager photo. I looked up at the peaks distant in the deep wilderness and breathed in their winds. The rest of the deer in the valley ought to stay on the ridges. They should wait. I thanked the road for stopping where it did. I turned to my father, we headed for home.

“I can name every hunt, relate the story of every animal I have killed,” my father says quietly, an hour later, as we reach the highway. “When those old geezers sit around jawing about their hunting trips, I know why. It’s what they can remember. It’s how they know.”