I hold firmly to my grandparents’ land and the land of the grandparents before them. A sentinel. Guardian. Benefactor. Transmitter of underground broadcasts. I breathe the sky above, drink the water beneath, hold firm to the ways of the mountain, old and strong. Always watching, always listening for the takers.
The slick backs of circling ravens flicker in the afternoon’s faint sun, hovering silently above the man approaching the notch. The underground network confers, he entered the woods fifty miles east at Cumberland Head. His name, I learn, is Avon Dowd, and he wears red wool head to heel. A knapsack, rifle and wooden tripod dangle from his shoulders, sturdy as a mantle. Field glasses in a loop from under his long, blonde hair. Young of the wilderness, he hikes Lion Mountain alone. Young of the wilderness, he stands before me.
I welcome him as those before, offering rest, shelter, faired ground. It’s the way of the woods. And like those who rest in unmarked graves beneath me, I will decide whether he, too, will join in their slumber.
His durability convincing but not intimidating. He skids his boot along the detritus and roughly plots a blueprint within the small clearing. Collecting dead branches, in three hours’ time, he’s built a crude bivy in which to spread a blanket, no more, no less. A fire is lit for warmth and to keep predators at bay. He stuffs a cotton sack with balsam fir to lay his head, its scent somniferous. When the sun ebbs behind the mountain, the sky above the canopy purple, blue; underneath, black as ore. His nocturns he prays aloud and believes praying to the creator will protect him from perishing in the Adirondack winter. But I’ve seen teams, tribes, detachments, consumed by this cruel mountain.
I tend closely those first few nights. Is it no wonder the barkeaters who fed on the very skin off our backs reciprocated? Take only what you need and take no more. The way of the woods. We lived in harmony for centuries. But I know Avon is waiting. He is waiting for his taker people.
At first light, he hefts his gear and surveys the base of the mountain. I watch and listen and confer. Returning in the evening, he sits by a campfire, opens his satchel, and from it, retrieves a small leather-bound notebook that smells of turpentine. He scratches at the pulp sheet with a stub of leaded wood he finds on that day’s walk. He reads aloud what he writes, and I listen.
Late autumn wanes, and the cold sweeps across the Chateaugay and up onto Lion Mountain. The perfume of pine and maple is hushed beneath the season’s early frost. Avon works on a trapper’s tilt of thirty-seven white pines from the surrounding stand, more numerous than the stars in the night sky. No window, just one sturdy door to halt bear, cat, wolf… The cabin is low-slung and stout, its roof sloped front to back to withstand the burden of winter snow. Twenty-eight small pines harvested for a woodshed and the fuel that will last a month. Sets traps. Shoots deer. Talks to himself. I listen. Always listen.
Two days before the winter solstice, the snow comes heavy from the lakes and the road to Standish impassable by horse and wagon until the Budding Moon. There is time to decide still. I huddle with the others close over the tilt as smoke trickles upward from the riverstone fireplace. Pay no fear of the sparks. The same firm needles that grip the snow and keep from burying Avon alive douse loose cinders billowing into the reaches.
The blizzard lasts six days, and on the seventh, Avon emerges with his gear strapped to his back and snowshoes to his feet. Tracks are soon covered by wind drifts as he resumes his routine of surveying a perimeter, driving markers into our flesh at odd corners. At dusk, the man sleeps fast; but before the sun rises again, Avon closes camp, loads up, and snowshoes seven miles west to Standish. I stop listening where the road bisects the woods. He returns seven nights later under a full moon and coydogs squealing close behind. Avon has his own dog and sled, packed with provisions and pelts. A second sled follows, and when they arrive at camp, the new man, Pierce, he is called, thrusts his torch into a drift, retrieves a bottle from a leather pouch, and staggers through the knee-high snow.
With a crude spade, Avon clears the snowdrifts blocking entry into the cabin while Pierce builds a large fire in an open pit. They lay up their provisions and soon the familiar smoke rises again, hanging like a marine layer beneath the bows and branches.
“Even in the dark, I see what you’re saying.” The monoliths tower some two hundred feet above. “They’ve got to be two centuries old!”
Our years are uncountable. From every stem comes a new stem, first seeded after the great ice heaved into the earth and buckled the ancient bedrock into the High Peaks. Avon leans in the doorway. “Virgin stand. My father told me, but I admit, I didn’t believe him.”
“Aren’t many left, stands like these.”
“No, timbered out in the Nineties, most of them.”
Pierce warms himself before the fire, passing the bottle back and forth while Avon skewers two hares over the coals. He’s skinned them, but the singed fur from the feet is acrid. The dogs squeal with hunger.
“Tomorrow, I’ll show you the entire tract. Thousands of acres. Like striking gold.”
“Good. As soon as the road clears, I’ll send for the teamsters to pull them out.”
The men talk like this for some time. Making plans, planning profits. When the moon sets behind the evergreen spires and the dogs are fed and dug in asleep in the snow, Avon retires.
Pierce is perhaps a year or two older than his partner and more robust, still boyish in the cheeks, but a broad beard the color of autumn conceals his jaw.
“I’m apt to finish this bottle alone.”
He dims an oil lantern looped to a branch and stares into the embers. Pulls at the bottle twice more and tosses it into a sack. A moment later, he approaches and places his ungloved hand against me, fingering the deep contours. Different from the new trees – rough, crass, pocked… He eventually relieves himself on me, and I groan against the east wind.
Pierce staggers toward the cabin drunk, but instead of unlatching the door and going inside, he unsheathes a double-bit ax, slings it over his shoulder, and staggers back toward me like a sailor proving his mettle. We confer. He spits into his mitten, and I hear the dull thud and feel the cold steel shock of the tempered blade resonate through me, though only a thin layer of bark is stripped. The dogs wake up in their dens but remain unstirred. The second cut is more skilled, gashing my side and alarming the others. On the third strike, we confer one last time. From the upper boll, I let go of a bannered limb, old and wet, and when the elbow lands, the cracking of bone and skull is hushed under deep snow. No trace remains of Pierce, nor will there be even after the vernal equinox. Interred now beneath the frozen earth, rooted among us, branch becomes soil, bone becomes clay, and spring’s rushes, like floral blankets, to cover the slumbering in the loam.
Snow falls heavily throughout the night and into the next morning. Even the campfire is buried under two feet of powder. The clearing looks as if no one has ever set foot there. The sun’s brilliant rays sparkle, and each crystal reflects a cornflower blue sky.
The others heal me, and in time, I will heal.
Time is all we have.
The man pushes open the door against the new snow, and the dogs emerge from their buried dens.
“Pierce!”
But there is no answer here.
Just the snap of sap. Icy gusts. Unkindness of ravens.
Christopher Kostyn Passante is completing an MFA at Drexel University. He holds degrees from Clarion, Wesley, and Plattsburgh State universities, is an Orion Environmental Writers’ alumnus, and Tobias Wolff Award finalist. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, and draws inspiration from walks among the Alleghenies with his wily Australian shepherds.
