SOMEONE MUST SEE TO it that this story is told: you shouldn’t think this man just threw his life away.
When he was a boy there was nothing about him to remember. He looked like anything else—like the trees, like other people, like his dog. The dog was part coyote. Sometimes he would change places with his dog. For a week at a time he was the dog and the dog was himself, and it went by unnoticed. It was harder on the dog, but the boy encouraged him and he did well at it. The dog’s name was Leaves.
When the boy went to sleep in the hills he would become the wind or a bird flying overhead. It was, again, harder on the dog, running to keep up, but the dog knew the boy would be a man someday and would no longer want to be a bird or the wind, or even a half-breed dog like himself, but himself. Above all, the dog trusted in time.
This is what happened. The boy grew. Visions came to him. He began to see things. When he was eighteen he dreamed he should go up in the Crazy Mountains north of Big Timber to dream, and he went. He was careful from whom he took rides. Old cars. Old men only. He was old enough to be careful but not to know why.
The dreaming was four days. I do not know what came to him. He told no one. He spoke with no one. While he was up there the dog, Leaves, slept out on some rocks in the Sweetgrass River, where he would not be bothered, and fasted. I came at dawn and then at dusk to look. I could not tell from a distance if he was asleep or dead. Or about the dog. I would only know it was all right because each morning he was in a different position. The fourth morning—I remember this one the best, the sun like fire on the October trees, so many spider webs sunken under the load of dew, the wind in them, as though the trees were breathing—he was gone. I swam out to see about the dog. Wild iris petals there on the green moss. That was a good dog.
The man was back home in two days. He washed in the river near his home.
He got a job down there around Beatty and I didn’t see him for two or three years. The next time was in winter. It was the coldest one I had ever been in. Chickadees froze. The river froze all the way across. I never saw that before. I picked him up hitchhiking north. He had on dark cotton pants and a light jacket and lace shoes. With a brown canvas bag and a hat pulled down over his ears and his hands in his pockets. I pulled over right away. He looked sorry as hell.
I took him all the way up north, to my place. He had some antelope meat with him and we ate good. That was the best meat I ever had. We talked. He wanted to know what I was doing for work. I was cutting wood. He was going to go up to British Columbia, Nanaimo, in there, in spring to look for work. That night when we were going to bed I saw his back in the kerosene light. The muscles looked like water coming over his shoulders and going into the bed of his spine. I went over and hugged him.
I woke up the next morning when it was just getting light. I could not hear the sound of the river and the silence frightened me until I remembered. I heard chopping on the ice. I got dressed and went down. The earth was like rock that winter.
He had cut a hole a few feet across, black water boiling up, flowing out on the ice, freezing. He was standing in the hole naked with his head bowed and his arms straight up over his head with his hands open. He had cut his arms with a knife and the red blood was running down them, down his ribs, slowing in the cold, to the black water. I could see his body shaking, the muscles starting to go blue-gray over his bones, the color of the ice. He called out in a voice so strong I sat down as though his voice had hit me. I had never heard a cry like that, his arms down and his fists squeezed tight, his mouth, those large white teeth, his forehead knotted. The cry was like a bear, not a man sound, like something he was tearing away from inside himself.
The cry went up like a roar and fell away into a trickle, like creek water over rocks at the end of summer. He was bent over with his lips near the water. His fist opened. He put water to his lips four times, and washed the blood off. He leaped out of that hole like a salmon and ran off west, around the bend, gone into the trees, very high steps.
I went down to look at the blood on the gray-white ice.
He cut wood with me that winter. He worked hard. When the trillium bloomed and the varied thrushes came he went north.
I did not see him again for ten years. I was in North Dakota harvesting wheat, sleeping in the back of my truck (parked under cottonwoods for the cool air that ran down their trunks at night like water). One night I heard my name. He was by the tailgate.
“You got a good spot,” he said.
“Yeah. That you?”
“Sure.”
“How you doing?”
“Good. Talk in the morning.”
He sounded tired, like he’d been riding all day.
Next morning someone left, too much drinking, and he got that job, and so we worked three weeks together, clear up into Saskatchewan, before we turned around and drove home. When we came through Stanley Basin in Idaho we crossed over a little bridge where the Salmon River was only a foot deep, ten feet across. It came across a big meadow, out of some quaking aspen. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “I bet that’s good water.” We did. We camped up in those aspen and that was good water. It was sweet like a woman’s lips when you are in love and holding back.
We came home and he stayed with me that winter, too. I was getting old then and it was good he was around. In the spring he left. He told me a lot that winter, but I can’t say these things. When he spoke about them it was like the breeze when you are asleep in the woods: you listen hard, but it is not easy. It is not your language. He lived in the desert near antelope one year, by a lake where geese came in the spring. The antelope taught him to run. The geese did not teach him anything, he said, but it was good to be around them. The water in the lake was so clear when the geese floated they seemed to be suspended, twenty or twenty-five feet off the ground.
The morning he left the desert he took a knife and carefully scraped his whole body. He put some of these small pieces of skin in the water and scattered the rest over the sagebrush.
He went to work then in another town in Nevada somewhere, I forget, in a lumberyard and he was there for a long time, five or six years. He took time off a lot, went into the mountains for a few weeks, a place where he could see the sun come up and go down. Clean out everything bad that had built up.
When he left that place he went to Alaska, around Anchorage somewhere, but couldn’t find any work and ended up at Sitka fishing and then went to Matanuska Valley, working on a farm there. All that time he was alone. Once he came down to see me but I was gone. I knew it when I got home. I went down to the river and saw the place where he went into the water. The ground was soft around the rocks. I knew his feet. I am not a man of great power, but I took what I had and gave it to him that time, everything I had. “You keep going,” I said. I raised my hands over my head and stepped into the water and shouted it again, “You keep going!” My heart was pounding like a waterfall.
That time after he left he was gone almost ten years again. I had a dream he was living up on those salmon rivers in the north. I don’t know. Maybe it was a no-account dream. I knew he never went south.
Last time I saw him he came to my house in the fall. He came in quiet as air sitting in a canyon. We made dinner early and at dusk he went out and I followed him because I knew he wanted me to. He cut twigs from the ash and cottonwood and alder and I got undressed. He brushed my body with these bank-growing trees and said I had always been a good friend. He said this was his last time. We went swimming a little. There is a good current at that place. It is hard to swim.
Later we went up to the house and ate. He told me a story about an old woman who tried to keep two husbands and stories about a man who couldn’t sing but went around making people pay to hear him sing anyway. I laughed until I was tired out and went to bed.
I woke up suddenly, at the end of a dream. It was the same dream I had once before, about him climbing up a waterfall out of the sky. I went to look in his bed. He was gone. I got dressed and drove my truck to the falls below the willow flats where I killed my first deer many years ago. I ran into the trees, fighting the vine maple and deadfalls, running now as hard as I could for the river. The thunder of that falls was all around me and the ground shaking. I came out on the river, slipping on the black rocks glistening in the moonlight. I saw him all at once standing at the lip of the falls. I began to shiver in the damp cold, the mist stinging my face, moonlight on the water when I heard that bear-sounding cry and he was shaking up there at the top of the falls, silver like a salmon shaking, and that cry louder than the falls for a moment, and then swallowed and he was in the air, turning over and over, moonlight finding the silver-white of his sides and dark green back before he cut into the water, the sound lost in the roar.
I did not want to leave. Sunrise. I went up onto the willow flats where I could see the sky. I felt the sunlight going deep into my hair. Good fall day. Good day to go look for chinquapin nuts, but I sat down and fell asleep.
When I awoke it was late. I went back to my truck and drove home. On the way I was wondering if I felt strong enough to eat salmon.