Free Goat Mountain by David Vann Page B

could ever be said. We had almost no language.
    Dry clothes, my father said. In the truck.
    So I went to the truck and found his clothing and a towel and came back to help him strip as he sat at the table. His jacket and shirt off first, and he looked pale and thin in the lantern light, jaundiced by the wicks and their yellow glow. Only hints of pink. I rubbed the towel over his back and down his arms and he sat with his chin against his chest, like the dead man, just not hanging upside down. But the two of them cold and pale and slumped and waiting, and I thought of them both as victims of my grandfather, as if the dead man had met his end from my grandfather, not from me.
    My father put his arm around and I helped him stand and push off his wet jeans and baggy white underwear. Hairy and goose-bumped, and he sat back down and dried himself with the towel, slowly, and I helped him put his feet into dry wool socks and brown Carhartt pants and his boots and we forgot underwear but he said it didn’t matter. I helped him stand again and he got the pants hitched up and buttoned. Then a white T-shirt and an older jacket that smelled of smoke and blood and oil. Dark green cloth that felt like oiled canvas and bore stains everywhere in great shapes like a frieze of all that had happened to us, and in a way this was true, because here were the blood and guts of unnumbered deer and fish and geese and everything else, and our history was somewhere in all that we had killed, and it was a history, certainly, without words, a history that could be told only in shapes with more direct corollaries.

8
    T HE SKY FROM BLACK TO DEEP BLUE, THE DARK HULKS OF the trees standing above us now, the lantern extinguished. Gathering our last things, my pockets filled with .30-.30 shells. The stars erasing. We would be late for this hunt, not yet in position at first light.
    I waited in the bed of the pickup, one foot cold and soaked. Shivering in the cold, but the sun was coming soon and the day would be hot. The light a kind of trick, in each moment a different blue, washing out slowly. It was hard to say what blue was.
    Even the sack could have been blue, and the body inside it. Hanging from that pole, still waiting. A patient dead man. And I wondered whether we would ever move him. We might not. He might just hang there forever.
    Tom already waiting in the cab, and then my father walked over, stiff and slow, still cold, and finally my grandfather rose from his mattress and had somehow changed into dry clothing also, but he no longer had boots. Soft shoes instead, leather moccasins. And his head bare. The hat with earflaps soaked or gone. White hair in short tufts on either side of his head, the wide baldness between. Speckled skin, and slack, like a great white toad. Mouth too small and eyes too small, but otherwise recognizable. He climbed in, the pickup lurching and recovering, and then we drove out.
    This land gone pale, all color drained. Shadow and distance only rumored, soon to be. Etchings of lines, of tree trunks vertical and fallen, of ridge and cloud and road and no distinguishing between them, only lines carved into the same flat plane. The light not a light of this world but more a temperature, a coldness through which we could see. And our movement along that road felt without orientation, as if we could be turned on our side and not know it.
    And then none of that was true. The hillside became real, a great solidity extending, and the trees stood vertically and the road was cut into the earth, and the sky above was in its own separate plane and all had been made again and the previous light was only memory and not even that.
    We passed beyond the area of the imaginary buck, beyond the waste of deadfall and poison oak, and I could feel it rising already along my face and neck and hands, my skin growing and itching. A distraction, always annoying, something that had to be ignored. What I was looking for was my first buck, and I would