First published in Five Points Vol. 19 No. 3, Winter 2019
It is the same, every morning: J.D. wakes in the stark cold, rattles the logs in the wood stove, ladles water into the kettle to boil. Mist rises through the pines. It is the end of long winter, when snow gives way to rain. It is J.D.’s fifth year on the mountain.
In the pale dawn light he walks to the river, the curled buds of infant ferns peeking through the litterfall. Everything radiates dew. He finds three trout in his trap. One is already floating, its clouded eye wheeled upward. He crouches on the bank and slits its stomach with his knife, lets the entrails loop into the water. A nice fat one. A good breakfast. Soon it will sizzle in the pan and J.D. will oil his gun and go out to the place where the elk bellow, to shoot a bull to salt and hang.
Just beyond J.D.’s vision, something flashes between the trees. He raises his head, looks for movement. An elk? A bear? The snow has melted; the grizzlies are waking. They are hungry this year, so hungry that J.D. found one at the door of his food cache in midwinter, wide awake in the windblown snow, scrabbling against the steel. He was hungry himself. He shot it.
A scent comes to him on the wind, mud and musk and animal. Slowly, moving only his hand, J.D. slips the gutted fish back into the water of the trap so its smell will not travel. He lets his bloodied fingers trail in the eddies. He hears only the rush of the snowfed river, the wind swaying the crowns of the pines. There is a muffled sound from the forest: a thump, then quiet. He waits for a long time.
When he stands he can see no creature, just woods and rivershore. At the cabin he finds half a footprint in the mud, the thick rounded pads of a grizzly bear.
– – –
Tonight J.D. hooks the battery up to the shortwave radio. It hums into life and the cabin fills with the smell of burning dust. He uses it a couple times a season to order supplies or browse the wavelengths for news, but every now and then he twists open a jar of moonshine and slowly glides the dial until he hears a voice, echoed in static across repeaters. A security guard on night shift in Juneau, a long haul trucker crossing endless Dakota plains, a fishing boat captain out there somewhere on the freezing sea. J.D. sits hunchbacked in the dull glow of the dial, sipping, listening to these voices speak into the void. Who do they hope will answer? He does not pick up his microphone. He has nothing to say.
When he wakes it is raining. He hears it before he opens his eyes, a soft drumming on the tarred roof, the muted kind of rain that envelops the mountain for seasons and makes him forget that there are worlds without it. It will creep into his bones; it will fuzz the boards of the cabin with moss; it will swell the river and soften the earth. J.D. pulls on his boots and they are already damp.
After breakfast J.D. takes his rifle up the ridge, sinking footprints into the sodden ground. Around him everything is waking. Soon there will be fresh nettles, tender fiddleheads, ramps– green things to chew on, a little less sinew. He comes to the boulder at the crest of the ridge. Two winters ago, right here, he shot the largest bull elk he’d ever seen. For a long time its ribcage laid splayed in the forest, slowly darkening, but now it is gone to the wild.
J.D. squats, his back against the boulder. He sits for a long time, thinking nothing, drops of rain sliding down the sides of his hood. He watches fog roll over distant peaks, flattening them into the featureless sky. He waits. He could wait forever. The rain has released the earth’s sleeping smells, long hidden over winter: the tang of pine needles, the crisp bite of petrichor, the deep layered musk of the soil. He hears rustling in the underbrush: grouse or ptarmigan, maybe. He hears a distant elk bugling, the sound refracted off of the cliff face below. He will sit all day, because what else is there? He hunts, eats, sleeps. Chops firewood. Shores up the walls of the underground food cache, steel door, bear-proof. Carves a notch in the cabin wall, saying: I have been here for another day. He will shoot an elk and sizzle its thick heart in the frying pan and maybe tomorrow spend some time fishing, knowing there is meat for a while.
There is a sound and J.D.’s head snaps up. Something big is in the woods, close. Somehow it’s crept up on him. He makes a slow turn on his heels, trying to gauge its position, his rifle pointed. He creeps around the side of the boulder but sees nothing. He kneels and cocks the hammer and raises the rifle to his chin, scoping the land, listening so intently that the hum of his own blood threatens to mislead him. He hears it: a snuffle, a thump. Bear again. He can smell it now, the stink of the den clinging to its fur. A grunt. A rushing sound. J.D. spins to see the beast, lunging towards him, teeth and claws and massive head, and he fires his rifle once, twice, but the beast does not even flinch, and then it knocks him down so hard his vision flares white. It is on him, a thousand pounds of hungry bear. Not yet clawing. J.D. thrashes, tries to free himself, but every limb is pinned. Fur and yawning chasm and blackwater eyes–
But suddenly it looks like a woman, wrapped in bearskin, naked, dirt streaked across her cheeks. J.D. wrestles frantically against the matted fur. Did he not just feel the hot breath of the animal, its spittle sprayed across his cheeks? Did he not look into those huge and empty eyes? He grabs an arm. It is a woman. He stares at her. She pins him down, impossibly strong, thin face haloed by tangled hair. For a second he thinks cavewoman, but then she opens her mouth.
“I have seen you here before,” she says.
She has an unplaceable accent, cautiously forming her words like she is tasting unknown food. Her fingernails cut into J.D.’s arms. Her bare breasts dangle above him. He sees that the bearskin is tied around her neck with a worn loop of fiber, her pulse thrumming visibly beneath it. A woman. J.D. cannot understand.
“There was a bear,” is all he can say.
The woman arches her shoulders to flick her cape, as if to say here’s your bear. The motion sends a rush of adrenaline coursing through J.D.’s veins. This time he is able to scramble out from beneath her. He fumbles for his gun, gets to his feet, holds it ready at his side. The woman stands from a crouch, muscles undulating. J.D. cannot help but stare at her brown breasts, the curled patch of hair at the joining of her thighs. He has not known a woman in years.
“The hell is going on?” J.D. asks, gesturing widely with his rifle. “Who are you?”
“Ula,” says the woman, and takes a step forward.
– – –
He offers her clothes, but she will have none. He offers to cook, but she will not eat. She refuses to go inside the cabin. She crosses her arms and shakes her head, her tousled hair flicking like a horse’s mane. She cannot abide the walls. J.D. leans against the woodpile, rubbing his hand on the worn right knee of his jeans, thinking: Is this some kind of trick? Have I finally gone insane? But Ula is here as solid as anything, surrounded by the scent of pine boughs and wet moss, raising her chin to sniff the air. The wind ruffles the fur of the bearskin, deep brown-red with odd pale shoulders. She is not interested in his questions. Is she a native? A hermit? Some kind of woodswoman? Where is her home? She gives no answers, only shrugs. Her aura of indifference is palpable. J.D. finds his mind clouded, his heart beating hard in a way it never does when he hunts.
“Why have you come?” he asks.
“Does it matter? I am here.”
It feels strange to be having a conversation, even if Ula barely holds up her end. The sound of J.D.’s own voice startles him. It is hoarser than he remembered. He speaks only a few times a year: to order supplies on the radio, to talk with the pilot when he comes to deliver them, and sometimes to himself in the deep of night, to keep his vocal cords from rusting. Ula does not seem used to her voice either. She is looking at him now in a way that unsettles him, like an animal sizing up its prey.
“I know what you want,” she says.
“And what is that?”
She walks up to him, slowly, and tears off the top button of his shirt.
She is right. This is what he wants.
– – –
Spring spreads across the mountain, raising fields of wildflowers, drawing buds from bare cottonwood boughs. J.D. and Ula have sex beside the woodpile. They rut in the ferns. J.D. sheds his boots and flannel, but Ula never unties her bearskin. She is always on top, and the cloak falls around them, enveloping them. She leaves him sore, groggy, like he’s just woken from a hard sleep on the ground. J.D. has stopped trying to ask questions.
She emerges from the forest two or three times a week, at random times of day, and stays for hours. Sometimes she takes charge of him and sometimes she lingers around his periphery, sitting silently beside him as he fishes, trailing him up the ridge on the hunt. She watches him chop firewood. She sneaks up on a ptarmigan and plucks it right from where it sits, snaps its neck in a single motion. She snatches trout from the river with her hands. But she will not eat with him, even the meat she kills, even when he brings the cooked food outside. She will not approach his cabin. In the evenings she disappears back into the forest and J.D. is alone again. It feels different, now, to be alone. Sometimes, when the wolves howl at night, J.D. remembers lying with his wife in their old apartment in the great steaming city and listening to the train whistles echo across the river. It is like a rush of cold air from a window opened suddenly, a dizzying expansion of the world. It leaves a lingering uneasiness, like something has been shaken loose inside him. He finds it harder to sleep.
J.D. and Ula stand on the ridge one afternoon in the drizzling rain and watch an elk move across the valley, through a green field studded with lupine blooms. He has shot three snowshoe hares and their bodies hang on a string across his back. J.D. wants to roast one, invite Ula into the cabin, have her on the floor in the warmth of the firelight– in the usual way that a man has a woman, not the animal way they roll in the dirt. He tells her this. She snorts and tugs one of the hares from his shoulder. She tears into it with her teeth. Like a strange dream she stands there, face smeared, blood dripping down her chin and onto her breasts, the hare’s limp body swinging in her hands.
“No cabin,” says Ula, and tosses the body to the ground.
– – –
He learns her body like exploring a new land: calloused feet, taut shoulders, a slight swell of stomach, the small brown tufts of hair beneath her arms. None of it comes to him easily. Their sex feels sometimes like fighting, like she is drawing something forcefully from him. Is this what she wants, why she found him? Sometimes when she is gone J.D. finds himself wondering if she is just the dream of a dying man, if he has eaten the wrong plant or been overtaken by parasites or perhaps finally felled by the workings of his body, his own cells growing monstrous, but when she is here she is nothing but real. He can smell her, hear her breathe, run his finger across her dirty soles to make her laugh. He can feel the soft place inside of her when they roll together in the ferns. Sometimes he stares at her silhouette when she is not looking. Under all this strangeness, is she not a woman, her body the same as any other? Is she not capable of bearing a child? He tries to imagine it, but the imagery is animal. He watches the way that she carries herself. Surely it is possible. What kind of creature would a child of Ula’s be: tangle-haired, clear-eyed, fearless? Would she show it the mountain’s secrets? Or would she chew strange herbs until she made herself bleed, hidden away in some mossy furrow? He finds himself holding Ula a little more gently, following a little more closely when she bounds ahead of him up the ridge.
She watches him sometimes from the treeline with the intense emotionless stare of an animal, when he is hauling water from the river or wiping sweat from his forehead as he splits firewood. He did not come here to engage with other people, but he can’t say he minds her presence, either. She is the most interesting thing that has happened on this mountain in a very long time. He finds himself wondering where Ula was when he was building this cabin, when he was sleeping in a tent in the bug-swarmed summer and wondering if he’d made a terrible choice. Maybe she was watching him. Maybe she was living another life somewhere, like J.D. once did himself.
The last time he felt this kind of thrill, a mix of dread and exhilaration, was when lightning struck and the valley burned. He was still young on the mountain. He sat on the ledge of the cabin’s doorway and watched the black smoke rise, wondering if the clearing was enough of a firebreak, wondering if all his sweat had been for nothing. The logs of the walls still smelled of pine sap. The stove was barely dusted with soot. His boots were still forming to the curves of his feet. He wondered if anyone would ever know he was here if the fire licked the flesh from his bones. But the flames never reached up the hillside; they burned for three days until a torrential rain quenched them. J.D. found pockets of embers for weeks, smoldering secretly under fallen black boughs. Each time, he thought: this is the world, now. This is its danger.
– – –
Late one summer day they walk downhill to the swath of burned forest, a few acres of infant white spruce and paper birch poking up among the blackened trunks. Through skeleton boughs J.D. watches an eagle traverse the clouded sky. Ula crouches beside a downed, rotten tree with tiny red insects swarming its wounds. “Here,” she says.
Poking up from dry needles and soot-caked bark is a clump of morels, huge and luminous. Ula squeezes a wrinkled cap and plucks one from its bed. She rolls it between her fingers. J.D. offers her the bucket but instead of dropping it in she pops it in her mouth and crunches.
“You gotta cook ‘em first,” says J.D. “They’ll make you sick.”
Ula laughs and eats another. J.D. kneels beside her and begins to gather. When they have exhausted this patch they search for others, their labyrinthine heads hidden under sloughed bark, bursting from the bodies of trees. There is no one else here to harvest this abundance. They fill the bucket and head back in the sinking light, and when they pass into the live pines it seems almost night for the thickness of the canopy. Ula moves with purpose, gaining ground as J.D. picks his way across the roots and rocks. When they break through the trees and into the clearing where the cabin sits, J.D. can see that she is restless. She has that distant gaze about her. He puts the bucket of morels on the ground.
“You hungry?” he asks.
Ula looks the cabin, then out at the treeline. She shakes her head.
“We’ll cook ‘em up right here. Make a fire.”
“I ate,” says Ula.
“Not enough. Stay for dinner. We’ll fry ‘em in lard. You’ll see.”
Ula looks angry for a moment, but it soon fades into blank countenance. J.D. gets his shovel and digs out a few inches of loam in the center of the clearing and stacks kindling inside it, arranges rocks to make a stand. He strikes his firestarter until sparks catch and crackle. Ula watches without comment.
“I’ll be right back,” says J.D. “Stay here.”
He gathers what he needs from the cabin in a hurry, half-expecting her to be gone when he comes back out, but she is still there, warily eyeing the fire. J.D. sets thick logs on the flames. He sits down in the dirt and scoops a creamy chunk of lard from its tin and drops it in a cast-iron pan, sets it atop the rocks, waits for it to sizzle. He does not bother to slice the morels; Ula will like them as they are. He drops them by handfuls into the pan, where they skitter and steam, their savory aroma mixing with the smell of the smoke. Ula takes a step backwards, arms crossed.
When the morels are golden brown he lifts the pan from the fire with a wadded rag and pushes them onto two plates, evenly divided. He hands Ula’s to her. She holds it to her face and sniffs it. J.D. picks up a morel with his fingers, its heat burning him just a bit through his callouses. Ula crouches, sniffs the plate again.
“It won’t hurt you,” says J.D.
“I like them the way they grow.”
“You’ll like ‘em this way too. Promise.”
Cautiously Ula picks one up, turning it between her fingers. They sit in the twilight at the edge of the wilderness, the fire crackling, the loons keening, shadows flickering across their skin. J.D. reaches for Ula, a slow fluid move like a part of the night. He grazes her thigh. She looks at him, her mouth open just a sliver, perfect white teeth showing through.
“Stay tonight,” he says.
She shakes her head.
“We can sleep out here, by the fire.”
“No fire,” says Ula.
“I’ll put it out, then.” J.D. takes a morel from Ula’s plate, still steaming in the cooling air. “These are the best thing you’ll ever eat,” he says, and slips it between her lips.
Ula jumps up, knocking J.D. with her arm, her teeth grazing his fingers. Her plate falls, meal scattered. She spits out the morel. Her eyes are wide, panicked. She veers off and dashes towards the treeline in that deerlike way of hers, and then she is gone. Her morels litter the ground. The wind picks up, rustling the trees, whisking embers into the sky. There is no woman now, no bearskin. Just J.D. alone in the gathering dark with blood dripping from his hand.
– – –
She does not return the next morning, or the morning after. J.D. waits with words in his throat: I thought you’d like ‘em. I’m sorry. You know, most people cook their food, but he keeps revising himself, trying to pin down his particular sin. He keeps watch for her in the clearing, by the river, atop the boulder on the ridge. She must move through here to hunt and gather water, but he sees no trace of her. At night he listens for human sound, but hears only the plaintive coyotes. He begins to grow angry and mournful in turn, feelings he thought he’d shed years ago when he left the city with just his clothes and hiking gear and the number for a wholesale supply company in Juneau and the desire to never love another human, never hear another train, never flick a switch again to flood his home with unearned light. His old life seems closer, like it was not some pitiful stranger’s.
He has still not seen Ula after three weeks. It is full, riotous summer, all things greener than had seemed possible to imagine when winter had bled the land dry. The sun is high, veiled with clouds, and the days begin nearly as soon as they end. The salmon choke the river as they struggle upstream and J.D. sometimes sees grizzlies wading, but he does not see Ula in her billowing bearskin. Maybe it was a dream after all. He begins again to forget the pattern of speech, the prickle on his skin when another human is beside him. Maybe he is that mad old hermit that people always speak of when they speak of the wilderness. Why would a man leave all the modern comforts of life, move out to a cabin at the edge of the world? Who would want that for themselves?
J.D. begins to wander further than he ever has, sometimes away from the cabin for days, with just his pack and bedroll and cans of salt pork that must be strung up in the trees at night. He camps by the edge of a glittering lake, pitch black and reflecting the stars. He scuttles down a ravine to the base of a glacier-fed river, so clear he can see perfectly the patchwork of stones five feet below. He wears out the folds on his topo map. He hikes due west and when he stops and sniffs the air and the crisp rotting scent of the ocean comes back to him he knows that he is near.
On the shore it is windy and terns wheel across the sun. Cold waves lap the rocks. J.D. puts his pack down and sits on it, a dull ache beginning in the arches of his feet. He stares out at the shadows of distant islands. He wonders what it would be like to live down here, where salt eats through everything, where wind and water round off all edges. Where it is so easy to see the breadth of the world.
A white spray bursts from the water far offshore, a whale blowing as it moves beneath the surface. If he waits long enough, J.D. knows, he will see it fling its massive body from the sea and cleanly arc the air. It will do this, yet another inscrutable beast, whether he is watching it or not. He lies back and shuts his eyes against the sun.
– – –
She is gone. That is all. Summer moves across the mountain, leaving harvests in its wake– rose hips and ligonberries, chanterelles and boletes– and then it is autumn. J.D. falls back into his old ways. He turns on the radio, silently searches the wavelengths. He chops firewood for the long winter ahead. He hunts and salts and stores the meat away in the food cache, padlocks the sunken steel door. But behind it all is the same vague sense of longing that plagued him when he first came to the mountain, buried like a tick in the flesh of his heart. He swings the axe a little harder. He walks a little faster when he climbs up the ridge.
Soon it will snow and the yard will be crosshatched with animal tracks. The days will grow short and the cycle will repeat, like it will repeat until the end of days, when J.D.’s heart will seize in his sleep or he will slip while hunting or he will be mauled by beasts and separated by scavengers, eyes to the crows and soft thighs to the coyotes, ribs left to sink into the soil.
He hoards and cleans and shores up for winter, which he can smell growing nearer in the wind. He wraps himself in layers. The first flakes of snow come, backlit mirages in the twilight. Soon the land is mutely shrouded. He is up the ridge in the twilight one evening, out too late, following fresh elk tracks, when he comes through a patch of spruce to see two bear cubs, nosing in the snow. J.D. brings his rifle up and instinctively scans the treeline for their angry mother. It is late in the year, and the cubs are so small. He’s never seen them this small in November. Thick flakes fall in fields of static across the landscape and it is hard to see clearly. He should have turned back hours ago.
He begins to retreat when he hears something behind him and spins to see her, looming, rearing up onto her hind legs: a huge she-bear with a winter-thick coat. He aims his rifle, cocks the hammer, stares at her. Pale stippled shoulders, like he’s never seen before on a living bear. She stands massive on hind legs. J.D.’s finger grazes the trigger. The simple sight of those pale shoulders rings a desperate bell in his heart. The beast throws its head back and growls. Everything is centered right in this clearing, on bear and man and tender cubs, and J.D. cannot pull the trigger to save himself. Maybe this is how it ends.