Beartooth

by Callan Wink

He could hear the subdued roar of the water constricted by the soaring cliff walls. Above this canyon lay another, and another after that, more tortured whitewater and cliff walls and fallen boulders. The canyon names were themselves ominous: Hellroaring, Black, and Grand. The river drained out cold and green from country that few visited and no one called home. Places where the earth’s crust was so thin it was like a scab over a molten wound. The air sulfurous, great gouts of steam rising, the very ground pulsing with the Vulcan pressure seething below. Great herds of elk and bison wandered the high plain here, taking shelter in the lee side of sculptured drifts of wind-packed snow, wallowing in the sulfurous mud at the edge of hotpots that at their center took on the otherworldly aquamarine and ocher and carmine hues of the algae that thrived somehow in their superheated cores.

He had always had this idea that as you aged and became a man, you became more concerned with doing things the right way. As a child, you leave your bike lying in the yard, as a teenager your room is a mess and there is a pile of smelly fishing gear in the back of your truck, but, at some undetermined point, all this is left behind for a new way of living. Responsible manhood. A knife-sharpening, gear-cleaning, firewood-stacking, roof-fixing, money-stockpiling existence.

He made another pot of coffee, and when it was done brewing the kitchen was quiet. He was alone there, and he figured that was how it would be for a long while. He realized for the first time that acute aloneness has something of a presence. His lonely was dark as a shadow, and it sat there drinking coffee with him, a silent companion.