Beartooth

by Callan Wink

The smell of a bear, Thad thought, had the flavor of nightmare about it. Putrefying flesh, fresh shit, all held together with something cloying and sweet, like smashed huckleberries just starting to ferment.

All it would take was one Sierra Club member working on his life list with a Sibley’s and a pair of binoculars and they’d be completely screwed.

he could smell the bearskin heating up under the tarp strapped to the pack frame. It was like hiking with a festering compost pile on his back, everything overripe and hot with the fever of decomposition.

He’d stashed a bag of elk jerky in the truck, and they ripped and chewed the salty meat until their jaws hurt, washing it down with the beer, belching and yawning and stretching their arms and backs.

If he never had to go to town, Hazen would be just fine, Thad figured. Hell, during some era not too far past, Hazen would have probably been happier and more well-adjusted than Thad. He could have trapped, lived in the woods, got royally drunk once a year at some sort of mountain-man rendezvous, and spent the next year working off his hangover, alone in the mountains, skinning beaver and talking to himself.

Dry socks seemed like a small thing until the fourth or fifth day of waking up in the mud to put on wet socks before cramming his feet back into sodden boots.

“You ever think about how the world could end sometime when you’re out in the backcountry and you’d never know? New York City could have been taken out by a bomb. We might be the only people in the country that don’t know about it.”

The Scot had killed. Two years ago, the Scot had shot a sixteen-year-old boy four times in the back in his living room. Everyone in town knew it, and he knew everyone in town knew it, and that knowledge seemed to nourish his existence.

The envelope was next to him on the seat, and he put his hand on it to feel the thickness. There was the roof, and the truck would probably need new tires this winter, and their propane tank was near empty. Those were just the basics. There were hospital bills too. Debt, a creature that sometimes seemed to open its mouth to him. A great swallowing maw. He drummed his fingers on the bank envelope while he ran the figures—adding and then subtracting, subtracting, subtracting. That’s how it always seemed to go.

But what could a man do but breathe deep, shoulder the burden? If it had weighed on their father, he’d never showed it. Maybe you got used to it, like carrying a heavy pack. Maybe it was something you felt strange without when it was gone.

Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so. And then, not long after Thad and Hazen could do a passable job reading the book to her, she left.

Their father kept them tired. If he had a parental philosophy, it was that exhaustion made for good behavior.

He’d stand and wave his arms around as if gathering the peaks and ponderosas and the great leaning chunks of sheared-off granite boulders to him. All of this can be your home if you’re comfortable in here. He’d make his arms move in slowly so it was just his hand encompassing a little circle in the middle of his chest. Right here is where you control your world.

Thad could remember his brother’s laugh, ecstatic, slightly terrified, the thundering awareness that comes instantly to all boys when they realize for the first time that the way of their father is not always the best way.

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 less fortunate would pull themselves out, staggering and bawling through the mud, flesh peeling off in great blistering swaths, and wander away from their kind, where eventually packs of wolves or solitary grizzlies would finally drag them to the ground.

Coffee and eggs and then work. Dreams didn’t have the power to exist in this world, and so they lacked the strength to effect outcomes. A dream solution could only fix a dream problem, and Thad’s problems—seemingly increasing in number every day—were of a more tangible kind.

At her age the balance must shift, the weight of memory gathering mass until each waking day was more of a waking dream haunted by the shades of people you’d known who were a long time gone.

Down in the valley it wasn’t spring; it was mud season. Their driveway froze every night into hard, frost-rimmed ruts but by noon was greasy and soft as melted chocolate.

“I made the bag myself out of elk hide. The drones are carved bog oak, probably one hundred years old. It’s a fine instrument. Not one for the faint of heart. Anyone can play the guitar or the piano or trumpet, but the great highland pipes are a man’s instrument. Give it a try.”

In the Scot’s hands, his coffee mug looked like an espresso cup. His gun strapped to his side looked like a toy. From Thad’s perspective, it was like he made everything he touched, or simply stood beside, look out of scale, like he was the size a man should be but he had somehow found himself in a dollhouse world, and had made an ironic mastery of it.

The girl was clearing the table. She had the cups and cream and sugar on a tray. She looked at Hazen, then at her father. She gave a short shake of her head and then turned and went into the house.

There was a grizzly print. Thad knelt and put his hand over it. Even with his fingers splayed, he was unable to span the width of the track.

Thad breathed in deeply of this wind coming up from the south, born of a land that harbored no people, just rocks and snow and trees and the twisting braids of rivers.

He hefted the rack and skull and thought about how fine a line it was between being in the prime of life and being a pile of bones so picked over that there was no longer enough left to feed a worm.

The fire cast its flickering light on the canyon walls, and the shadows in the crevasses and crags appeared like glyphs, fantastic animals and humanoid forms with alien proportions.

The roar of water was ever-present and all-encompassing, and in a strange way it was now closer to absolute silence than noise.

Thad hadn’t ever really prayed. They’d never gone to church, and if someone had asked him about his beliefs in God he would have had a hard time articulating them. Thad had a general idea, and it came down to particles. No matter on earth could ever be truly destroyed or created, only changed. He remembered that from science class. Where consciousness came from he wasn’t sure except that in the end it was nothing more than a byproduct of the unique arrangement of molecules. And if this was the case, then other arrangements of molecules—trees, grass, rocks—had something like a consciousness that was inherent in them, and all these things were connected, because at some point all matter was part of the same piece.

All there is was all there ever was. No more, no less. Time didn’t exist, and God was everything, including humans, and since this was the case, why worship?

Wearing oneself out was not a testament to a man’s capacity for work—it was a symptom of his ignorance. Or, in a seemingly contradictory situation, laziness.

Sometimes the man working the hardest, the guy who constantly “wears himself out,” is the laziest, unwilling to take the time on the front end to do things the right way.

He’d been working hard, true, but no amount of expended effort can make fruitful the worker who toils aimlessly.

He could hear the rub of the rubber on the canyon wall, hear the suck and pull of water coming and receding through the raft’s self-bailing floor. It sounded to him like the breathing of an elk, shot through the lungs and gasping wetly as it knelt to its final bed in the red-soaked grass.

“I thought you might die in the canyon,” he said. “I was trying to figure out what I’d do.” “Yeah? What was your plan?” “I thought that if you died, I would just keep floating. Dump you and the antlers and go all the way.” “All the way where?” “Down the Yellowstone. To the Missouri. The Mississippi. All the way to the Gulf.” “Sorry to disappoint you. Next time I’ll die and you can be Huck Finn.”

Some men avoid discussions of religion; some men tune out when things turn to sports, or cars, or hunting, or politics. For their father, it was women. Except for on the Fourth of July, which for some reason was the one time a year he would ever even acknowledge that there were these other members of the human race with certain characteristics that could be appealing in the right light.

“When you skip rocks, sometimes they fly out straight and skip almost continuously, really close together on the water’s surface, bang, bang, bang, like that. But sometimes you get ones that skip only once and then go really far in the air before plunking down. The two rocks have traveled the same distance. The end result is the same. Sometimes you get a rock that won’t skip at all, just kerploosh, right there at your feet. See what I mean?”

He sometimes wished he had a picture of his brother, standing there in front of his first car. Grinning like an idiot, double-thumbs-up happy, with puke on his shirt.

“What kind of man is your brother?” “He’s good at some things, bad at other things. I don’t know. It sometimes seems like the things that he’s good at don’t tend to be things that will get you ahead in life, in this day and age. If that makes sense.”

There was a clear line of snot coming from his nose, and he spit and wiped at his face with his sleeve and spit again. There were tears, and he was coughing, tears and the snot was flowing, and he was damn near laughing because it had been so long he was doing a bad job of crying.

I think that everything in the universe started as a single perfectly smooth thing that somehow broke apart. Everything that has happened since is just the pieces bouncing off one another in space. It’s random, but occasionally broken pieces find themselves sticking together, and if this occurs an infinite number of times, don’t you think that at some point everything will be one big smooth piece again?”

There was a reason this fish had been caught to near extinction in many places. An innate gullibility. Maybe not gullibility, just an inability to fathom deceit.

If you’re wondering whether I’m nervous to have something like this, the answer is no. It’s not that I discredit this man’s superstitions; in fact I think a curse can be a real thing, but it only works if you believe in it, if that makes sense. A curse is nothing more than an evil placebo.

In one of the last conversations Thad had with his father, before his death, his father had told him that he wasn’t much scared of what was coming next. He said that, as far as he knew, 100 percent of the folks who died preferred to stay that way. Death had a perfect record.

He said that life can pass you by but having a family is how you make positive the passage of time, how you add resonance to your years.