-
Black Bear on Gold Hill
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BlackBearonGoldHill A long the Little Naches River in the Washington Cascades, my little boys and I were fishing for the cutthroat trout that dimpled the surface. It was early June, the wasps and mosquitoes few, summer’s cauldron not yet scalding. Beside that river a driver had gotten his big truck stuck. His spinning tires left a gouge where water collected. In the truck-tire puddle, a salamander larva floated, a “mud puppy” as I had heard my father term it, a creature that resembled an extinct Dimetrodon, chamois orange on its belly, dusky brown above. Fantastic gills protruded from its neckline, a stiff Elizabethan collar. My boys dropped their fishing rods and crept to the puddle’s edge. In that high mountain water the creature hung, suspended between the bottom muck and surface slime. It resembled a relic encased in ancient amber, a crystal solidified from salts, a freak of a child whose swimming skills had failed it when it tried the dead-man float. The kids gave a collective shudder. Chase wanted to toss a rock, to make a splash, to bring it within reach. “Find a bug and try to feed it,” I said instead. “Yeah!” they chorused , and the scrambling after grubs and worms beneath logs and stones began. I let out a breath, lounged against a tree, whistled some old tune and watched. Insects twinkled in the sun’s late slant. Petals of Indian paintbrush darkly flamed. The purple firs across the river began to merge with their own shadows. The arrival of this salamander, as E. B. White wrote of a dragonfly in Maine, “convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years.” In this same alpine meadow, my father and one of his friends had shot with their pistols into a puddle much like this one. They had aimed for the salamander larvae. They had fired and fired again, 12 Black Bear on Gold Hill delighting like boys when the splash and spray came, squinting as the water deflected the bullets. Their slugs drove through the shallow pond. They flung bubbles underwater and sent up plumes of silt. I remember, too, that whisky fumes had mingled with the gun smoke. On the hills above the puddle, torn earth showed black from impromptu hill climbs on motorcycles and races over ruts. The men had taken turns on the dirt bike, ripping raw the meadow and the hills. Fourteen years old, wild about internal combustion, I had revved that motorcycle right along with them. But that was in another lifetime, and now both men are dead. On a quieter trip to that same campground on the Little Naches River, my father and I had driven in late one night and roused a resting herd of elk that bedded in the meadow. The bulls rose first, widelegged , and faced us. In our glare their eyes reflected back our shining like shook foil. When they all had thundered into the trees, I leapt from the truck and ran to the place where they had lain. The air hung heavy with the musk that lingered there. I palmed the meadow grass the elk had matted down then lifted it to my face to sniff. By this time my children had trapped bugs in a cup and were pitching them to the salamander, which had yet to move from the aqua incognita, the middle ground between the muck and slime. Dusk already was making it hard to see. Time to gather up our fishing gear and thread a path through the meadow back to camp. There was food in the ice chest cooked and ready to eat. As we left the newt behind, I thought to share some photographs I had brought along, dozens of snaps of my father, whom they had never met. A couple of the photos, I said to build suspense, came from this campground. Back at camp we spread the album beneath a propane lantern’s glow. Both boys sharpened elbows to crowd in close. Adhesive tabs held corners of the photos as if in frames. By bending the photo edges, we could slip them from the tabs, pass them hand to hand, and examine the inscriptions in a cursive hand on back. The first photo showed five men slouched in front of a cabin, hats dipped, hiding their eyes, pistols sloping from holsters; it...