In Another Country

He was nearly finished now. With the axe he drew deep crosshatched furrows in the bed of the fire, and, shimmying the axe head under the heavy wedges of earth and damp ash, carefully turned the ground over. A mist of cinders rose and fell in the axe's wake; the large flakes speckled his trousers as they settled, soon coating his legs halfway up the shins with a thick clinging powder. When he had plowed the ashes under, he began to knock down the walls of his fireplace, uprooting the pillars of collected granite blocks and splinters, the axe a lever to tilt each column and bring it down, a row of stones that overlapped here and there, almost as neatly as toppled dominoes. Working there in the shadow, he could see his breath flash strangely blue in the chill from the uncovered earth. He began to feel the pulse in his temples and his throat; twin bands clamped around his cheekbones with a cold metallic pressure. He left a side upright and stuck his axe in the ground. Straightening, he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Fiery globes rushed against his eyelids, and he pressed with his fingertips, holding them in; drawing long and narrow as though hammered to flames, they receded finally, just their tips still aglow, then dimming, then out. As he raised his head, warmth flowed, trickling through his neck and shoulders; he kept his eyes shut for a few seconds, listening intently, rapt in the sweep of the returning blood. Then he swatted the cinders from his legs; some had already worked their way into the fabric, though, and made gritty blotches, a rasping cold where the khaki swung against his skin. Bunching the cloth into ridges and rubbing the folds together, he tried to scour these patches out, but managed only to wipe away some bits of ash already loose, and smudged the rest of the mess or ground it still deeper. He scraped the axe head clean on the edge of a stone, sheathed the axe, and tucked it into the sling sewn to his rucksack. Except for the fishing tackle he still needed, the rest of his gear was packed.

He had decided, this last morning, not to leave right after breakfast as he had planned earlier, but to try his luck once more. There was no hurry; he would get back in his own time. He had arrived late the fourth day, and had had four good days since, better than he had expected, or hoped, rather. Now, as penalty for that excessively stoic preparedness, he was going to have to lug back all the leftover canned rations of chili and corn and baked beans and black beans and pinto beans; it was all the sort of stuff he used to love as a kid, but was a lifetime supply in civilized circumstances. Although he had complained all the way in about how heavy the pack was, and had looked forward to an easy load on the way back, he could not bring himself to complain now; it had all turned out too well. He had had everything that he could have hoped for, including a fine catch of pan-sized native brook trout every day.

Today he was not going to work the broad shallows above the upper falls again, though, nor head upstream toward the rapids where he had taken the best fish yesterday; instead he would make his way down the hillside between the two waterfalls and fish its lower slope, a chain of pools whose final loop uncoiled, a ribbon of white water, to the floor of a granite-walled canyon. Usually by early June the channel down there at the bottom had narrowed to reveal a ledge of rock shavings along either side, but this year the runoff from a second spring melt, after an April blizzard, had kept the gorge swollen shut. He wanted to go down there and have another look at that stretch. If the weather held, the rocks would be uncovered in another week, maybe even sooner, and he...