In the morning there was snow at the higher elevations, a fairyland dust on the peaks. He had bound up his feet with the crokersack and now he simply wrapped the blanket about his shoulders and went down along the ridge, a hermetic figure, already gaunted and sunken at the eyes, a week’s beard. Going shrouded in his blanket through the forest beswirled about by cold gray mist, gray weather, cold day, moss the color of stone. The wind sharp in the dry bores of his nostrils. Down through the pale bare bones of a birch forest where the clawshaped leaves he trod held little ferns of ice.
Below him ravens rode up like things of wire and crepe weightless on the updrafts. They rocked and wheeled and slid away over the high vast emptiness with lost windmuted croaks.
Suttree in the woods was surprised to find small flowers still. He fell into silent studies over the delicate loomwork in the moss. Annular forms of lichens fiery green that sprawled across the stones like tiny jade volcanoes. The scalloped fungus that ledged old rotted logs, flangeous mammary growths with a visceral consistency and pale indianpipes in pulpy clusters among the debris of humus and rich decay and mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits where under toads are reckoned to siesta. Or elves, he said. In breeks of kingscord, shirts paned up of silk tailings, no color like the rest. A curious light lay in the forest. He was squatting in the rich and murky earth, the blanket about his shoulders. He wondered could you eat the mushrooms, would you die, do you care. He broke one in his hands, frangible, mauvebrown and kidneycolored. He’d forgotten he was hungry.
He came down an old logging road past the ruins of a CCC camp and swung through the woods toward a stone bridge beyond the sere or barren trees. The road crossed above. The river path went through the low stone arch along a bar of silt where blackened turds lay by pale wet clots of tissuepaper.
When they were building the highway through the mountains a horseman came this way along the river, the gravel peppering the water behind the horse’s heels and the horse lined out lean and flat and the rider wide-eyed with the reins clutched. Two boys fishing from the bridge watched him clatter down and pass beneath. They crossed to the other side of the bridge to see him go but the horse was downriver with the stirrups kicking out loose and it ran riderless out on the gravel bar and into the river in an explosion of steam. A pale breadth of buckskin flank turning in the cold green pool.
The rider did not appear. They found him dangling by his skull from a steel rod that jutted from the new masonry, swinging slightly, his hands at his sides and his eyes slightly crossed as if he would see what was the nature of this thing that had skewered his brains.
Suttree went up the narrow valley and deeper into the mountains. Over old dry riverbeds of watershapen stones that lay in the floor of the wood. His beard grew long and his clothes fell from him like the leaves. At these high altitudes the trees were stunted spruce and dark and twisted and nothing moved save he and the wind and the ravens. The spruce trees stood black and bereaved of dimension in the shadow of the high cloven draws, against the sky processional and nunlike ascending in the dusk.
He’d taken to sleeping more and the walking made him dizzy. He’d watch the fire for hours, the curious incandescent world of settling embers, small orange grottoes and the way the wood looked molten there or half translucent. He had begun to become accompanied.
First in dreams and then in states half wakeful. One day in the full light of autumn noon he saw an elvish apparition come from the woods and go down the trail before him half ajog and worried of aspect. Suttree sat in the moss and rested. The woods looked too green for the season. Before two days more had gone he hardly knew if he dreamt or not. Lying on a gravel bar with the tips of his fingers in the icy water he could see his face above the sandy creek floor, a shifting visage hard by its own dark shadow. He stretched himself and bowed his lips and sucked from the passing water. Taste of iron and moss and a silken weight on his tongue. A newt, small, olive, paintspattered, arrowed off downside a rock toward the bubbled green of the deeper pool. The water sang in his head like wine. He sat up. A green and reeling wall of laurel and the stark trees rising. Articulating in the slight lift of the forest wind some arboreal mute’s alphabet. Pins of light near blue were coming off the stones. Suttree felt a deep and chilling lassitude go by nape and shoulderblades. He slumped and crossed his wrists in his lap. He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking his bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. His fingers clutched up wet handfuls from the bar, polished lozenges of slate, small cold and mascled granite teardrops. He let them fall through his fingers in a smooth clatter. He could feel the oilless turning of the earth beneath him and the cup of water lay in his stomach as cold as when he drank it.