Tiger Country

Only a Mountain-1

ONLY A MOUNTAIN

“Virtue and the wild share no common universe.”

----James Hamilton Paterson

“I became intoxicated by their company, and was hard put to keep up, pretending that I, too, had always lived dangerously.”

----Sybille Bedford

Born in the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, Nick Sharpe had always wanted a life that was not mundane. He had grown up in a dreamy small town in the cranberry counties south of Boston, spending endless solitary happy hours amidst the old natural history books hidden in the neo-medieval library, a strange building designed by H. H. Richardson and donated to the town by its plutocrats, a bunch of shovel manufacturers turned to squires and scholars by time and money.

Mostly he disliked other kids, preferring books, dead explorers, frogs, snakes, birds of prey, and his dog. He kept a raccoon, a kestrel, and a Cooper’s hawk, though his parents drew the line at a Blue Hills rattlesnake. Unlike his romantic idols—Beebe, Roosevelt, Finch-Hatton (he read Out of Africa at eleven despite the disapproval of the librarian)—he had no inherited fortune, though at first he did not realize that they did. Nor did he have any interest in making money. He did know that only the life of an artist or a scientist was likely to provide him with travel, adventure, and access to wild things, things he craved with a deep unaccountable longing that had everything to do with the shadowed vaults of the library and the woods, and nothing at all to do with his family. His father was an unhappily stable Boston businessman, a golfer and martini drinker; his mother a 1950’s homemaker of Swiss-Italian and lace-curtain Irish descent, whose not so secret hope was that he would become a Jesuit.

He had a little of his father’s caution, though he would never admit it. He was a skilled careless sketcher and painter, but he opted for biology at Harvard over art, despite a scholarship at the Museum School that tugged at him. He was married at nineteen to a rich girl. He thought she shared his passion because she talked well, and because she drank and danced and loved to go birding on Plum Island when they took acid. It was 1969.

He and Carole drank and gave parties and went to school. It seemed in retrospect that was how they spent all of the seventies and a good bit of the eighties. They never considered children; Carole very seriously said that they were their own kids. She wrote poetry and sculpted large vague bronzes. Nick moved through phases. For a while his passion was ornithology. He watched nesting terns off the elbow of Cape Cod, secretly and nobly executing herring gulls with his 20-bore double gun, to protect the terns’ eggs. He did a stretch of sorting pickled fish from Bermuda for the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He collected invertebrates from the mucky floor of Boston Harbor, and built a huge refrigerated salt water aquarium for his living room which he decorated with bryozoan-encrusted Budweiser bottles found in the same places that he caught his specimens. Carole considered it too deliberately whimsical but everybody would stare into it when they got drunk.

He somehow acquired a taste for nice stuff. If anyone asked he would have admitted to, no, bragged, that the life of a mildly intellectual yuppie connoisseur fitted him like his English-cut suits. And then, about the time he installed two color phases of tree vipers from the Yucatan in the living room by the tank, Carole left him for her, their, accountant, a soft vague man who played tennis and had one eyebrow running the width of his forehead. He cared about security, and money, and her, unlike Nick who dreamed of mountains and junipers and jeweled snakes and Victorian shotguns more than he did of their future.

Three weeks after she left, Carole died driving her vintage MG into a patch of black ice in upstate New York, in the company of an old friend of hers he didn’t know existed. Suddenly he was bereft, rootless, and rich. It was to his credit that he did not also consider himself lucky, especially since he had finally had the wit to realize that he had been trapped. He cried sincerely at the funeral, but, in a sort of emotional double vision, he felt as free as a secret agent. He was twenty-seven years old, and ready to do something; he was terrified that he would die before anything real happened, and was not sure it had, yet.

The only question was what. He did not want to talk to anyone who had known their lives. He sold everything he owned but two pieces of art—a Rodin sketch, and a terrifying Bruce Kurland oil of zombie sea ducks—plus a couple of shotguns, a tent, his hiking clothes and (in case he changed his mind) his best English suit and shoes. He rented a car and drove into the sunset, not so much as slowing down until he reached the plains. Somewhere west of Miles City, Montana, he stopped and stood beside the road in the enormous empty dawn, naming the things he could see: meadowlark, juniper, arroyo, barbed wire fence, white faced cow, West. A magpie started the world again, rowing past, trailing a shining ribbon of tail. When he regained the car, his face was wet with a different kind of tears.

But Montana, as spoiled by people like him as New England had been, was no answer. All his friends went to Yellowstone, Paradise Valley, and the Bighorn to fish. They tended to regard Montana as a backdrop for casting nymphs while dressed in the right clothes. He himself had once flown to Bozeman, rented a boat on a spring creek south of Livingston, caught and released forty “decent” fish, and ended the day eating something called Navajo Shiitake: grilled mushrooms over what looked like chips of blue cardboard, served by a smiling surfer with an earring. The conversation had run toward the necessity of getting rid of ranchers, who despoiled the streambanks. Although he could recall no objections to any of this at the time, something about the memory made him turn sharply left before the mountains, down past the Indian reservations and coal mines, toward Sheridan, Wyoming. Wyoming mesmerized but failed to hold him. Endless stretches of sage and grass and dry streambed were populated only by drifting white specks that resolved into antelope, flaring marsh hawks and, once, a great black eagle that stood at the side of the road like a proud child. He felt as though he were driving in the sky. Colorado’s front range was an endless suburb of traffic, precisely spaced state troopers, and too many radio stations. He didn’t slow down until he dropped over Raton Pass into New Mexico.

Raton was a funky old mining town hidden in a crack in the mountains with no tourists and a preponderance of Italian names in the phone book. He spent an idle evening in a bar, enjoying himself. He was thinking about New Mexico: Ernest Thompson Seton, rough riders, Aldo Leopold, grizzlies, Apaches.

He asked the bartender for a road map, with a vague recollection of place names from Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. The southwestern quarter of the state had plenty of place names, but almost no roads. His finger traced a roadless square; thumb and index finger held against the scale of miles, then bounced along the roads, north and south. There was a piece as big as Connecticut down there with no lines through it. Luna, a name from Leopold, on the west; Kelly and Santa Rita on the east.

“What’s that area there called?”

“Not much. The Gila, I guess. I got a brother-in-law who goes hunting down there.”

The Gila. A vision came to his mind then for a moment, from nowhere: blue mountains, lion-colored plains, big animals. He wandered through the door into a cold black night full of stars. Six hours after sunrise, he ascended a series of switchbacks out of the Rio Grande Valley, to top out in the land of his vision.

Six months later Nick met his new best friend, on a cold blue fall morning after the flowers had died but while the aspens still made gold impressionist slashes against the slate of the mountains. He had hoped his dreamed-for life of action would just naturally evolve from being in such a fine place. First, he reactivated his old falconry permit and bought a huge restless gyrfalcon from a breeder in Sheridan. He found some work painting birds for a neotropical specialist at the university, rented a four-room house that had once belonged to a ranch foreman, and painted the inside a stark white, deciding to wait until meaningful possessions suggested themselves.

They didn’t. Life soon came to consist of drinking Black Jack and beer in and out of the Stockman’s Saddle Saloon. His substitute for action became falconry. Every day, he flew his silver gyrfalcon Cara on the Plains of St. Augustine, where there was no game, only the ravens that were both illegal and, in Nick’s mind, immoral, to kill.

He had had a hangover that day, but thought breathing cold air and seeing horizons might go a ways toward curing it. He climbed a rise west of dirt-road 70 until he could see the Datils rising twenty miles away across the old dry lake bed, a Tibetan flat seven thousand feet above sea level. A line of chalk-white radio telescopes in the distance were the only man-made features in the landscape; the bartender at the Saddle called them “Golf-tees of the Gods.”

He unhooded the hawk and stood with his head bowed until she ruffled her feathers, filled her wings, and floated her three and a half pounds off his fist as lightly as a dandelion seed. She turned down wind, then began to beat her wings, rowing for the horizon like a slow-motion movie suddenly snapping into real time. Although she looked as though she were running away, he knew better. Soon the hawk was a swallow-sized silhouette two thousand feet above, beating forward into the wind, sliding back down, beating forward again.

She knew as well as he did that there was no game; this was basically jogging on a track. He had a wicker crate of pigeons in the truck. Real athletic training for falcons demanded real pigeons, Belgian racing homers so fast even a jet-propelled arctic gyr felt challenged, missed, climbed higher and tried harder. Nick had not been able to summon up the concentration to build a sky-racer’s stable; the basket contained mere fodder, fat grain-fed commons from a farm in the Bosque. Releasing them under Cara was like feeding lab rats to pythons; still, she had to be served. He groped blindly in the basket, pulled one out, looked it over one last time for signs of disease, bowled it aloft, yelling “HAAAH!”

Cara dropped instantly as though shot, then began to beat her wings as she flew head- first toward the ground, corkscrewing, accelerating past gravity. A hundred feet above the ground, she turned her suicidal plunge at right angles and hit the bird like a baseball bat. Feathers trailed out over fifty feet of air as the pigeon crashed to earth with all the grace of a ruptured pillow. But instead of claiming her kill, Cara was heading up in a curve, out toward the Datils, where a pair of ravens was climbing toward a mutual battle front above the plain, croaking and circling.

Shit. Not only did he not want to kill a raven—he considered them as intelligent as he was and believed in spite of his skepticism that to kill one could bring on some obscure doom—but they were good enough fliers to take her the sixty mile length of the plain before she won or gave up. They could pull her into the mountains and make him chase electronic blips from her miniature leg-mounted transmitter for a week. They could even make him lose her forever. But not this time. In a moment one raven seemed to slide off even as the other rose. The falcon in turn abandoned her climb to peel off after the first. They dipped and flared and menaced, black and white shadows mirroring each other’s every move, then fell out of the sky together like stones, into a little grove of juniper back near the road. When they didn’t rise, he hopped into the truck and gunned it over the washboard, vibrating to the edge on every curve. He skidded to a stop as his dust caught up to him, and saw a black Suburban with mirrored windows parked between two of the neatly spaced trees. As he climbed out, the occupant rolled down the window and raised a hand. “They’re right in front of you. God damn. I’ve wanted to see that all my life. Can I buy you a drink?”