"I'm coming for dinner," Odd said.
Daniel smiled.
They unsheathed their bowie knives and each of them gutted a beaver, tossing the offal aside for the ravens and wolves. If they were making a living they'd have been poor and disheartened, but because they were only boys in the service of becoming men they were thrilled, and they lashed the gutted beavers to the toboggan and turned down the same trail they'd cut on the way to the pond.
When they reached the Burnt Wood River and the Devil's Maw Odd finally spoke. "You think you can just decide to change?"
"Yes. Someways."
"I believe I can do it. I believe I will. No more chickenshit."
"Grandpap would tell you be careful."
"Be careful—"
Odd saw it first, heard or saw it, he couldn't say. Just under the Devil's Maw, about a hundred paces off the eastern shoreline of the river, from somewhere along the craggy cliff face came a plaintive cry just above Daniel's whistling and the river purling beneath the ice. The cliff was lit with the setting sun, blazing really, but for the dark re cesses of the shallow caves that dotted the river's edge. Daniel was well behind him, pulling the sled. The cry grew with each step until Odd found himself slowing, then finally stopping twenty paces short of a curious declivity in the rock. He looked back, saw Daniel still trailing.
He felt himself welling up, recognized the feeling as faintheartedness, and bit down. He walked to the opening in the stone and felt his heart running as there rose from the rocks a musky odor he'd never smelled before. He took a half step back and tried to place the scent but could not. The bawling had stopped. Now only a kind of whimper came from the rocks.
Years later, whenever he tried to reconcile the defining moments of his childhood with the man he had become, he thought of that moment on the precipice as a divine one, when he became, for better or worse, the person he would always be. He would recall with utter clarity Daniel's voice telling him no, would recall his dizziness and the imaginary hand he felt pushing him as he knelt and removed his snowshoes, as he took his shotgun from over his shoulder and laid it against the cliff wall, as he shifted his bowie knife hanging from his belt to the small of his back. It would be strange to think about in later years, the way he knelt on the rocks without thinking, the way he crawled to the sound from the cave, the way he could never have done it again, how he had acted on the most animal level, curious in a way he'd never be again, not even the first time he made love with Rebekah. Strange to think there were moments when you could live completely outside your mind, stranger still to think how seldom those moments came to pass.
He crawled closer to the sound, to the cave, and then slithered into it. He noticed first the warmth and then caught the smell, rank now, whereas from above it had only been faint and musky. Taken together, the warmth and stink made his already swirling mind swirl more.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and what it held. In that time he felt and heard the chthonian rhythms: the coursing waters, the earth's beating heart, his own pulse heavy in his head, the bears' slow, slow breath. They were two, a sleeping sow and her yearling, awake with the warm day. It must have been the yearling's cry he'd heard, for the cub's small white eyes were on him, wide and in a frenzy, its murmur grown to a full yell. A desperate yell.
And there was no way to explain what Odd did next. He reached his hand across the distance between them and touched the sleeping sow's shoulder. She was the source of all the warmth in the world, and that warmth was his now, too. For a moment he left his hand there, leaning closer and closer toward the bears as though drawn by some magnetic force. The yearling's screaming had become everything with the warmth. Everything until the sow woke as though from a warning dream. She rolled over and in a single motion came up at his face with her right forepaw. She swiped the side of his head with such force that he was thrown back into the light of day, a bleeding hole where his left eye had been.
Daniel was upon him, his shotgun raised to his shoulder while Odd scrambled up, screaming, his unmittened hand plugging the hole in his face. The bears were both screaming now, the earth rumbling. Daniel hurried Odd onto the sled, shouting, "Let's go, let's go, let's go!" as he pulled the lead ropes of the toboggan with one hand even as he kept his shotgun ready. He told Odd to hold on. To hold on tight. And he ran with the sled behind him, ran away from the sound in the earth, his best friend half blind.
VII.
(August 1920)
He had spent a month watching the white pine not dry fast enough, the pitch bleeding like icicles dripping from an eaves trough.