Cold Mountain (43 page)

2004-3-6

页码，181/232

When he was finished eating, the woman sent him on his way. He walked into the dark until new star patterns arose, and then he made a fire-less bivouac alongside a thin creek. He tramped out a sleeping place in the tall dead grass and rolled up in his blanket and slept hard.

Then, for several wet days following, he walked as long as he could and slept in the haunts of birds.

One night he found lodging in a log pigeonnier and the birds ignored him except when he rolled over, and then they all stirred and made watery gurgling sounds and settled back in. The next night he slept on the dry square of ground under a steepled dovecote, a structure suggestive of a temple devoted to a tiny null god. He had to sleep balled up, for if he stretched out, either his feet or his head would catch the drip from the steep hip roof. Another night he slept in an abandoned chicken house, and he spread his ground cloth over the floor, which was thick with chalky old chicken shit that gritted under him when he moved and smelled like the dusty remainders of ancient deadmen.

When he woke sometime long before dawn and could not get back to sleep, he dug in his pack and found a stub of candle and lit it. He unrolled the Bartram and held it to the yellow light and riffled through the pages until his eyes fell on a passage that caught his attention. It was this:
The mountainous wilderness which I had lately traversed appeared regularly undulated as the great
ocean after a tempest; the undulations gradually depressing, yet perfectly regular, as the squama of
fish, or imbrications of tile on a roof: the nearest ground to me of a perfect full green; next more
glaucous; and lastly almost blue as the ether with which the most distant curve of the horizon
seemed to be blended. My imagination thus wholly engaged in the contemplation of this magnificent
landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound, I was almost insensible or regardless of the
charming objects more within my reach.

A picture of the land Bartram detailed leapt dimensional into Inman's mind. Mountains and valleys on and on forever. A gnarled and taliped and snaggy landscape where man might be seen as an afterthought. Inman had many times looked across the view Bartram described. It was the border country stretching endlessly north and west from the slope of Cold Mountain. Inman knew it well.

He had walked its contours in detail, had felt all its seasons and registered its colors and smelled its smells. Bartram was only a traveler and knew but the one season of his visit and the weather that happened to fall in a matter of days. But to Inman's mind the land stood not as he'd seen it and known it for all his life, but as Bartram had summed it up. The peaks now stood higher, the vales deeper than they did in truth. Inman imagined the fading rows of ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks, and he built the contours of them and he colored them, each a shade paler and bluer until, when he had finally reached the invented ridgeline where it faded into sky, he was asleep.

The next day found Inman angling down to the southwest, footslogging an old cart path through the mountains. A brisk day with all the leaves dead and on the ground. He was not even aware of what county he was in. Bloody

Madison, perhaps. He came to a sign and on one side it read TOBO55M and on the other TOAV65M. All he could figure was that it would be a fair walk to whatever towns were meant.

He rounded a bend and came to a small pool, a kind of spring, the rocks around it green with sphagnum. The spring bottom was covered with rotting oak and poplar leaves and the water was amber like a weak steeping of them, a tea. Inman bent to dip his canteen. Wind blew up and he heard a strange tock and click, a sound like an attempt at music using only dry sticks as instruments. He looked off into the poolside woods toward the sound and discovered an odd sight. Inman found himself viewing a trio of hanging skeletons swaying in the breeze and tapping into each other.

The canteen glugged full. Inman stood and stoppered it and walked to the bones. They hung in a row from the lower limb of a big hemlock. Not even hung with rope, just plaited strips of bark from hickory saplings. The pelvis and leg bones of one had fallen to the ground and lay in a heap, with the toes of one foot sticking up. On one of the complete skeletons, the plaits had stretched so much that file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，182/232

the man's toes reached the ground. Inman swept the leaves away, thinking to find a tamped patch in the dirt where the man had danced around and packed the earth in his dying. His hair had fallen off the skull and lay among the leaves about his toe bones. Blond. All the bones so white, teeth in the slack jaws yellow. Inman ran his hand down the arm bones of the man that had half fallen away.

They had a grain to them. The bones of legs and feet in a pile as kindling for a fire. He couldn't cut himself down, Inman thought, but if he'll be patient, it will happen.

Some days later, Inman climbed all morning not really knowing where he was. Mists moved ahead of him like deer through the trees. And then for the afternoon he walked a ridgeline trail that rolled between balsam highlands and little gladed gaps where stood beech groves and the tail ends of cove hardwoods as they reached the highest places where they could live. As he walked he began to suspect that he knew roughly where he was. It was an old passway, that much was clear. He passed a rock cairn that the Cherokee in times long past were in the habit of building along the way to signify something, though whether way marker or memorial or holy place was now unknowable. Inman picked up a fresh rock and dropped it on the pile in passing as commemoration of some old upward yearning.

Late in the day he found himself on a rocky scarp bordered by heath bald, a thick tangle of waist-high azalea and laurel and myrtle growing right to the bare rock of the ledge. The trail emptied onto it as if travelers had made a custom of stopping to admire the view. Then the way reentered the forest through a faint passage in the azalea not forty feet from where he had emerged.

The sun was falling, and Inman reckoned he would again make a bivouac without benefit of fire or water. In the space near the edge of the scarp, he scraped together what little duff there was to soften a sleeping place. He ate parched corn from his palm and stretched out in his bedding to sleep, wishing there were a bigger moon in the sky to light the prospect before him.

He was awakened at first grey dawn by the sound of walking in the heath. He sat up and set the LeMat's on full cock and leveled it at the sound. In a minute a black sow bear poked her head through the leaves not twenty feet from where Inman sat. She stood, tan muzzle up, neck stretched long, sniffing the breeze and blinking her little eyes.

She did not like what she smelled. She shuffled forward and grunted. A single cub not much bigger than a man's head climbed a little way up the trunk of a young Fraser fir behind her. Inman knew that with her poor sight she could smell him but not see him in the faint light. She was in fact so near that even with his man's poor nose he could take her scent. Wet dog and something deeper.

The bear twice whoofed out air from nose and mouth and moved forward tentatively. Inman shifted about and stood, and the bear pricked up her ears. She blinked and stretched her neck again and sniffed and moved another step forward.

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding, for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot one, though he had killed and eaten many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. The decision came as a result of a series of dreams he had over the period of a week in the muddy trenches of Petersburg. In the first of the dreams he had started as a man. He was sick and drank tea from bearberry leaves as tonic, and gradually he became transformed into a black bear. During the nights the bear visions rode him, Inman roamed the green dream mountains alone and four-legged, avoiding all of his own kind and of other kinds, He rooted in the ground for pale grubs and tore at bee trees for honey and ate huckleberries by the bushful and was happy and strong.

In that manner of life, he thought, there might be a lesson in how to wage peace and heal the wounds of war into white scars.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，183/232

In the final dream, though, he was shot by hunters after a long chase. He was strung from a tree by a rope about his neck and skinned, and he watched the process as from above. His dripping red carcass was as he knew an actual bear's to be after skinning: that is to say, manlike, thinner than one would expect, the structure of paws beneath the fur long like a man's hand. With that killing, the dreams had run their course, and he awoke that last morning feeling bear was an animal of particular import to him, one he might observe and learn from, and that it would be on the order of a sin for him to kill one no matter what the expense, for there was something in bear that spoke to him of hope.

Still, he did not much favor his current position, backed up against the brow of the rocky ledge, the heath knotted up before him, and the sow nervous with a cub born out of season. In his favor was this: he knew a bear was much more likely to run than attack, that she might at most make a false charge, rushing forward fifteen feet or so, bouncing as she came on her front legs and snorting out air. The purpose would be to scare him off, not to hurt him. But he had nowhere to run. He wanted her to know where he was, so he spoke to her, saying, I've no aim to trouble you. I'll walk on from here and never be back. I'm just asking for clear passage. He spoke calm and straight and he wanted his voice to carry respect.

The bear sniffed more. She shifted from foot to foot, rocked from side to side. Inman slowly rolled up his bedding and slipped on his sacks.

—I'll be going, he said.

He moved two steps and the bear false-charged.

Inman could figure in his mind as it happened that none of the measurements would work out. Like a problem of carpentry where none of the dimensions match up. He had only three feet to back up. She had all the momentum of her bulk and only ten feet ahead of her before the lip of the cliff.

Inman took a step to the side and the bear rushed by him and plunged over the high ledge that she never saw in the gloom. He could smell her strong as she went by. Wet dog, black dirt.

He looked over and saw her break open on the rocks far below like a great red blossom in the dawn light. Black pelt scraps littering the rocks.

Shit, he thought. Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle.

The cub in the fir bawled out in its anguish. It was not even yet a weanling and would wither and die without a mother. It would wail away for days until it starved or was eaten by wolf or panther.

Inman walked to the tree and looked into the little bear's face. It blinked its black eyes at him and opened its mouth and cried like a human baby.

To his credit, Inman could imagine reaching up and grabbing the cub by the scruff of its neck and saying, We're kin. Then taking his knapsack off and thrusting the cub in with only its head sticking out. Then putting the pack back on and walking away, the bear looking about from this new perspective as bright-eyed as a papoose. Give it to Ada as a pet. Or if she turned him away, he might raise it to be a part-tame bear, and when full grown it might stop by his hermit cabin on Cold Mountain now and again for company. Bring its wife and children so that in years to come Inman could have an animal family if no other. That would be one way this dead bear calamity might be rectified.

What Inman did, though, was all he could do. He picked up the LeMat's and shot the cub in the head and watched it pause as its grip on the tree failed and it fell to ground.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，184/232

So as not to waste the meat, Inman built a fire and skinned out the cub and cut it in pieces and parboiled it. He laid the black pelt out on a rock and it was no bigger than a coon's. While the bear cooked he sat and waited at the scarp as morning came on. The mists broke and he could see mountains and rivers ranked to the earth's far verge. Shadows slid down the slopes of the nearest line of ridges, falling into the valley as if draining into a vast pool of dark under the ground. Rags of cloud hung in the valleys below Inman's feet, but in all that vista there was not a rooftop or plume of smoke or cleared field to mark a place where man had settled. You could look out across that folded landscape and every sense you had told only that this was all the world there was.

The wind sweeping up the mountain carried away the smell of the bear boiling and left only the odor of wet stone. Inman could see west for scores of miles. Crest and scarp and crag, stacked and grey, to the long horizon. Cataloochee, the Cherokee word was. Meaning waves of mountains in fading rows.

And this day the waves could hardly be differed from the raw winter sky. Both were barred and marbled with the same shades of grey only, so the outlook stretched high and low like a great slab of streaked meat. Inman himself could not have been better dressed to conceal himself amid this world, for all he wore was grey and black and dirty white.

Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growingjoy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the leap of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast prospect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.

As he studied on it, he recognized the line of every far ridge and valley to be more than remembered.

They seemed long ago scribed indelible on his corneas with a sharp instrument. He looked out at this highland and knew the names of places and things. He said them aloud: Little Beartail Ridge, Wagon Road Gap, Ripshin, Hunger Creek, Clawhammer Knob, Rocky Face. Not a mountain or watercourse lacked denomination. Not bird or bush anonymous. His place.

He rocked his head from side to side, and it felt balanced anew on his neck stem. He entertained the notion that he stood unfamiliarly plumb to the horizon. For a moment it seemed thinkable that he might not always feel cored out. Surely off in that knotty country there was room for a man to vanish. He could walk and the wind would blow the yellow leaves across his footsteps and he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large.

Inman sat and admired his country until the bear pieces were cooked, and then he dredged them in flour and fried them up in the last lard from the twisted paper the woman had given him days before.

He ate sitting at the cliff top. He had not eaten bear of such youth before, and though the meat was less black and greasy than that of older bear, it still tasted nevertheless like sin. He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.