we got, chef?”
“Elk liver’n onions.”
“Elk liver? Where from?”
“I shot him as he was coming right through camp. Must’ve been running from you guys.” Curt pointed a thumb toward the kitchen tent. “There’s liver and heart in that pail, and four quarters hanging from the crossbar behind the tent.”
“We hire you to find us elk,” Steve half-laughed, “and you shoot them instead?”
“What was I going to do? Tie him down till you got here?”
“What you shoot him with?” Zack broke in.
Curt patted his thigh. “Ruger.”
“Anyway there’s plenty more elk out there,” Zack said.
“That’s not the point,” Steve tailed off, as if not sure what the point was. “Anyway, I’m not leaving tomorrow just because of a little snow.”
“If we have to we have to.” Curt grinned. “Unless you want to stay up here without a tent or food or sleeping bags or horses.”
“Hell, Curt, how many seasons you’ve guided us up here? You know we’re not afraid of a little bad weather.”
Curt walked back to the cook tent whacking snow off the low branches, not answering.
Is it true, Zack wondered, that every snowflake is unique? A multi-infinite paradigm, an endlessly varying geometry? How could there be so infinitely many?
Steve turned on him. “What you tell him about the plane for?”
Zack drained his Jack Daniels. “It could be an emergency, maybe that pilot didn’t get to the highway.”
“You said he was fine.”
“I said his tracks looked like he was fine.”
“And now we’ve got Curt wanting to go down? We paid him for the whole trip.”
Zack glanced at the fast-falling snow, blinking as it hit his eyes. “Not his fault if this keeps up. Four years now we’ve hunted with him, he’s always been fair.”
As a football announcer Zack had a bye week every year, when the team didn’t have a game and he could get away for ten days. He and Steve had always hired Curt, who picked them up at Bozeman airport, drove them up here and had camp ready. Any meat they shot was packed on horses down to Curt’s truck and driven to a game butcher in Bozeman. Two weeks later it was shipped, frozen, to Steve in New York and Zack in LA. Elk they had killed high in the wilds of Montana now fed to rich friends in a huge city, on a table set with silver, crystal and fine Bordeaux.
But this year felt different. It wasn’t just the foolishness about the cocaine. Steve seemed tense, less reachable, worried about something Zack couldn’t decode. Steve had made him a fortune when he broke into the NFL, and since then they’d always been close; now Zack found himself almost nervous around him, but didn’t know why.
“TO THE CHEYENNE,” Curt said, “Bear is mother or father, sister or brother. We – what’s your word – we revere Bear. And Bear takes care of us. Even Griz. We tell each other stories.” He jostled the fire with a scrub oak branch and laid it on the flames. “True stories.”
They’d finished the elk liver, onions and pan-fried potatoes and two bags of chocolate chip cookies and had opened another bottle of Jack. Curt brushed new snow off his shoulders and leaned toward Steve and Zack. “Guess how come Bear has no tail.”
“Hell, yes,” Zack said, remembering where he was. “How come?”
“One winter day Bear was fishing in a hole in the ice when Fox came by. Fox asked him if he was having any luck, and Bear said no. So Fox said, ‘Stick your long tail down through that hole in the ice and you’ll surely catch a fish.’ So Bear stuck his tail down through the hole, and Fox went off, saying ‘Don’t pull your tail out till I tell you.’
“Bear sat there a long time, till finally Fox called him to pull his tail out. But now the ice had completely frozen around his tail, and it broke off when he pulled it out …”
“Ouch,” Steve said.
“So that’s how it happened,” Zack laughed.
“That’s how the ancestors tell it,” Curt said. “But speaking of bears, I’ve had a bear lick my ear, a bear eat out of my hand, I’ve had a bear cub sitting in my kitchen sink …”
“What’d you do?”
“Opened the door and let him out. The one who licked my ear was when I was sleeping, out in the woods somewhere, but that woke me up. I yelled at him and he ran off. The one who ate out of my hand – it was a buffalo rib – I called him Boston. For the Boston Bruins, you know … And I think he took that rib from my hand out of kindness, not wanting to hurt my feelings by refusing.”
“In LA,” Zack said, “we don’t have bears.”
“That’s because you killed them all … You even got a grizzly on the California state flag.” For a moment Curt said nothing more, then, “Friend of mine once was chased by a griz, it got him down, clawing his backpack, the pain getting worse and worse, then the bear suddenly took off. My friend rolled over, realized his backpack was on fire, the bear had lit a box of safety matches when he clawed it …”
“Holy shit,” Steve laughed, still high on the coke.
Zack thought of the grizzly today ripping the elk leg apart, how when he walked the mountain seemed to tremble. “He meant me no harm, that griz. He just sniffed me and went away. He wanted the elk.”
“He recognized your spirit. That you’re a good man. That’s why he didn’t kill you.” Curt huddled over the fire with his cup of Jack, his shoulders touching Zack’s and Steve’s, the fast-falling snow blanketing them, “Just think, how many thousands of years, we humans, in dark caves, in the cold, the fear of the bear coming in …”
Zack smiled, seeing Curt as he was, entirely without subterfuge or bullshit. Slim, tall and muscular in his white-tanned elk vest, long black ponytail, high hard cheeks and wide black eyes, an elkhorn knife at his belt and an eagle-feathered white Stetson on his head, impervious to the biting cold, unafraid of grizzlies … Yet human too, with a wife, a ranch, a truck that didn’t run right.
They’d always been close, Curt more friend than guide. Someone you care about beyond normal human connections. Who had your back, and out of respect and gratitude you had his.
Maybe it was the woods, the wilderness. Hunting. Made you closer in the old way. He glanced at Steve, grinned. Steve telling another of his funny stories. Closer to him too.
TREADMILL
WHILE CURT FED his horses Steve and Zack scrubbed the iron skillet in which Curt had cooked the elk liver and onions and the tin pail in which he’d boiled the potatoes. They washed the plates and silverware and dumped them in boiling water so nobody came down with the shits, and rinsed their coffee cups and turned them upside down so snow wouldn’t freeze inside them.
They
