Long curve of that blade, beveled to an edge too slight to know. Milky thickness beyond the bevel, metal polished so smooth it might have been liquid, pewter gray, associated with the mercury running through the veins of this mountain, similar satiny surface and unfathomable weight beneath.
A trick of my grandfather’s to distract. Each of us lost, over and over.
The knife suddenly gone below the table, sheathed. And then he shifted his great bulk, swung his legs over the bench, and wandered off returned to nothing at all, a heap of flannel and wool.
My father had already started the truck. Sitting in the cab with Tom. Last hunt. The two staring ahead past the stream and waterwheels into the hillside, waiting.
The buck waiting also, slow revolution of blue-green galaxies at the back of those eyes, beyond annihilation. The rip my grandfather had opened might pull all things toward it but those eyes. Impulse and source.
This camp no refuge. It was not possible for us to carve out any place of our own. I understand that now. The stream and ferns and trees no barrier against the open meadow beyond or the mountain above, no separation.
My grandfather grabbed his.308 and stuffed into the cab, the truck dipping on that side, hanging tilted, and I waited until his door was closed, then passed and climbed the bumper.
My father backed and turned and we rumbled onto the road again, and I didn’t know where we were headed. A hunt an evasion, an attempt to stall everything else.
The air ten degrees hotter the moment we left the trees. The sun bright off the top of the cab, and I was squinting. Usually the afternoon hunt was later, when the sun was lower. Everything off balance this trip. My father and I were supposed to have taken a nap, but all my father wanted now was movement.
Each tree trapped in its own heavy shadow, pinned down. Every open area blasted and washed out in white. Grasshoppers flung like small rocks heated until they popped. Dragonflies cruising on solar wings.
I tried to look for bucks, but a buck here would be no more than a mirage. Shadow form stamped into the white and then fading almost instantly. Thrum of cicadas overwhelming, rubbing at the air and dissolving shape, making it nearly impossible to see.
White manzanita, each bush of it a thousand velvety mirrors, arrayed on both sides of the road, hung separate from the earth, winking among green manzanita with leaves almost as bright. Their only intent confusion. The road lost somewhere in that maze.
We fell into the draw below the reservoir, and the leaves of the wild grape had all fused into one brightness, hot mantle of a lantern flung and grown. Shade then, and my eyes with no time to adjust before we emerged in light again, and we passed the road to bear wallow. My father driving us on.
No blue to this sky. All blue burned away. Heat waves risen over the blackened arms of fallen ponderosa pines, melting in waves amid dry brown sedge. Thick clumps of it on all sides, resisting erasure, spiking through the melt. The road before us a memory of water, dry now but rutted with scabs grown inward.
Falling downward always, this road the beginning of what would become a canyon, our stamp left on the earth. And my father took the next turnoff, a little-used track overgrown with thistle purple and green amid the brown, a road leading to the burn, the lowest section of the ranch where a wildfire had swept through and laid waste to all. A place where the ground itself was red and black as if still on fire and might cave away beneath you as you walked. False diamonds there, clear shards and chips as thick as your finger lying everywhere on the surface, as if all might be given, formed under pressure in some earlier time and now simply offered up.
23
FORKED RIDGES BRACED AGAINST THE VALLEY BELOW, Satan’s hoof, leverage for his rise. We stood at the top of that fork, the four of us at the edge, a place soundless except for the rise of air from that superheated ground, dark bare surface armored in exposed black rock.
Charred skeletons of every tree and bush twisting below us. Manzanita in blackened baskets reaching upward, oak branches burrowing sideways through the air, tips whitened, no green, no leaves. All seeming to writhe, still in motion. We stood at the tip of the flame, both slopes curling inward orange and red like the surface of the sun drawn upward. Immolation if it weren’t for time, and mirages still boiling.
Something red to that ground, small bits of red rock or something transformed, no vein of it or anything solid, and maybe it was only the red of the manzanita, some sheen to that even when dead or dormant, changing the light.
Snake, Tom said, and then I saw it, not twenty feet away downslope, coiled behind a dark stump of ruined buckbrush. Fat and slack, deflated against the ground, light brown diamonds all along it, rattles up but motionless, still considering, head levered just enough in the air to flick that tongue and smell.
At the end of a hunt, we would have shot it, but not the beginning. All deer would instantly be gone.
Fucker thinks he can take us, my father said. Not even sure we’re worth the effort.
Dry dull skin of the snake. Shadow so black, so sharp and thin along the borders he seemed separate from the ground, not touching. The flattening of him a lie, flattened against nothing. He might reappear anywhere along this slope. And I began to see the buckbrush beside him the same, shadowed at the surface and no roots below, the entire black slope a hard plate, impenetrable, and every object floating and shifting upon it.
No gravity here. Nothing to pull downward. An object might rise along the slope as well as fall. Hard to know which way we tilted. No direction, either, the sun directly above. A compass would only spin.
My grandfather stepped onto that slope and seemed to hang at right angles to it, moving fast, and the snake uncoiled, long slack rope fleeing without challenge or rattle or even much of a curve, flown almost in a straight panicked line, an S no more than memory, and the rough sound of its heavy body rubbing against the earth a memory also, dragging of scales already gone. It knew what to fear.
My grandfather’s boots now where the snake had lain, and he peered up at us looking for reaction, face buried in shadow beneath his cap, bulk erased by that enormous hunting jacket, rifle strapped over his shoulder. I stood there in full sweat in that heat, my entire body slick, and he made no sense to me.
The three of us against him, but there was nothing substantial in us. We were made of nothing.
You’re a crazy fuck, Tom finally said. I’ll give you that.
My grandfather expressionless, waiting, but waiting for what?
Just go on your hunt, my father said.
My grandfather become one of the burned trees, only another shape that might slide along the surface of that slope. What I saw was him biting a giant chunk out of rock and speaking at us in crushed bits of stone, but what happened was that he dropped to his knees, mouth open in a rough grunt of pain, then rolled over and sat facing downslope, taking the seat of the snake.
I was encased in poison oak now, red welts everywhere across my body on fire, a burning thing, layers of immolation: my skin, the boils and welts, my clothing, the superheated air. Even my sweat a kind of oil ignited.
I guess I’ll go down and flush out any bucks, Tom said. Since no one else seems ready to do anything.
Fair enough, my father said, and Tom went down that tilted slope and gave my grandfather wide berth. Footsteps that left no mark. A surface that could not be broken. Tom wearing camouflage green in a place where there was no green, and yet that place swallowed him anyway, dark green against black. Angling off to the right and the hillside growing as he became smaller. My father and I sat at the lip, uphill of my grandfather, keeping him in view.