WOLF
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
CHILDREN’S LITURATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems
After Ikkyū & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
WOLF
Copyright © 1971 by Jim Harrison
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TO
TOM McGUANE
and
In Memoriam, MISSY 1966-1971
When you wake up, with the remains of a paradise half-seen in dreams hanging down over you like the hair on someone who's been drowned . . .
—JULIO CORTAZAR, Hopscotch
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When the dog barks or growls her warning in the night I question whether it will be a stray cat, a skunk, a killer or a ghost. It occurred to me the other morning that people don't talk about death because even to the simplest of them death isn't very interesting. Of course this all changes when it draws near to the particular individual but until then death has the probability, the actuality of our moon shot to a zebra. There must be reasons why I seem to closet funerals and weddings and love affairs together: mortal accidents, simply the given on which a shabby structure may be subtracted or added. Even now the challenge of having risked a pomposity and perhaps won its opprobrium is a signal that a new shower of lint and sulphur should fall to further laminate the human condition in its habitual shield of filth. An obtuse paragraph is always toxic. But to get on with the story—I'm not going to talk about death. This is a memoir dealing mostly with the years 1956-1960 written from the vantage of the present—it is a false memoir at that and not even chronological and its author is a self-antiqued thirty-three, a juncture when literary souls always turn around and look backward. Most of the poisons have been injected, some self-inflicted; how does one weigh mental scar tissue? I'm sure a device will finally be invented but at this point in history we must settle for prose, and no matter how many fans they have, nature, love and bourbon have been proven failures as cancer cures. My name happens to be Swanson, neither a very true nor honorable name—not true because the name had been given my grandfather, a Swede, on Ellis Island: immigration officials had decided that too many Nordic immigrants possessed the same or similar names and it would be much simpler if they were changed totally or new ones found somewhere in the ancestry. Each entering soul was given a polite three minutes to think it over. Swanson it became though hardly the grandson or son of swan; my first is Carol, to be avoided as feminine, the second, Severin, is too arch and foreign, so I am insistently Swanson to myself and to anyone who cares to call me anything. And not honorable because no one in the short, rather known, history of my family has done anything worth taking note of—the births mostly took place in the home and the marriages were hurried private affairs often with the question of the legitimacy of a child imminent. My one grandfather was a failed farmer with over a half century given to a nearly arid sixty acres. He died without having managed the price of a tractor and left an unpaid mortgage to his heirs. The other grandfather was a retired lumberjack, troublemaker, farmer, lout, drunk. An aunt given to fripperies claims that a distant relative had graduated from Yale early in the nineteenth century but nobody believes her. My father was the first on either side of the familial fence to graduate from college; he became a government agriculturist during the Great Depression and died in a violent accident, by any fair estimation an unhappy man. In deference to the cult of star buffs, I was born a Sagittarian deep in the unusually nasty winter of 1937; my childhood was pleasant and completely unremarkable and will barely be touched upon again.
Anyway, here is the story, the fiction, the romance—"My frame was wrenched by a woeful agony which forced me to tell my tale,” someone said a long time ago. I've never seen a wolf—zoo beasts are not to be counted; they are ultimately no more interesting than dead carp, sullen, furtive, morose. Perhaps I'll never see a wolf. And I don't offer this little problem as central to anyone but myself.
WOLF
I
HURON MOUNTAINS
You could travel west out of Reed City, a small county seat in an unfertile valley with a small yellow brick courthouse and a plugged cannon on its lawn next to a marble slab with the names of the World War One and Two dead inscribed in gold and the not dead plainly inscribed with the suspicious neatness of cemetery script, those who served, farther west through fifty miles of pine barrens dotted with small farm settlements often of less than thirty people, or merely a grocery store and gas station adjoined by a shabby aluminum trailer or a basement house with the first and perhaps second stories awaiting more prosperous times, the stores themselves with little and aged stock—lunch meat, bologna pickled in a jar, Polish sausage, tinned foods covered with dust, plaquettes of fish lures, mosquito repellent in aerosol cans, live bait and a pop cooler outside the door—but not many of these—a narrow road through mixed conifers, cedar and jack pine, some stunted scrub oak, birch, and the short-lived poplar, a pulp tree usually living less than twenty years and clotting the woods floor with its rotting trunks and branches, and west through the low pelvic mysteries of swamps divided invisibly from the air by interlocking creeks and small rivers, made unbearable in spring and summer by mosquitoes and black flies, swamps dank with brackish water and pools of green slime, small knolls of fern, bog marshes of sphagnum, spongelike and tortuous to the human foot and bordered by impenetrable tamarack thickets: in short a land with no appreciable history and
a continuously vile climate, lumbered off for a hundred years with few traces of the grand white pine which once covered it, an occasional charred almost petrified stump four feet in diameter, evidence of trees which rose nearly two hundred feet and covered the northern half of the state and the Upper Peninsula, razed with truly insolent completeness by the lumber barons after the Civil War with all the money going to the cities of the south—Saginaw, Lansing, Detroit—and east to Boston and New York; and the houses, even the large farmhouses on reasonably good land, sloppily built, ramshackle and craftless compared to Massachusetts or Vermont; west to Lake Michigan then to turn north along its coast to the Straits of Mackinac, cross the mammoth bridge, travel west another three hundred miles through the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula and then north again into the comparatively vast, the peopleless Huron Mountains.
I crawled out of the sleeping bag and dipped a cup of water from a small tin pail but the water had warmed and a breeze during the night had blown some ashes into it and they mixed there in the surface film with dead mosquitoes. I drew on my pants and boots and walked to the creek. Dew had soaked the grass and ferns, made the leaves limp under my feet; earth was pale green a half hour before the sun would come up and over and through the ridge of trees to the east. I knelt and drank from the creek, the water so cold the teeth ached. I closed the tent flaps, gathered my binoculars (which I would quickly lose) and a worthless .30-30 rifle with bad sights my father had owned, and took a compass reading which I knew would be inaccurate and pointless as the ground in the area was full of varying amounts of iron ore. But I fixed on a knoll a mile or so away and then on the supposed direction of the car several miles directly south by southwest and set out for a hike. Two hours later I was unfathomably lost.
There is a brief time when first lost that you are sure you will be lost forever. Your heart flutters and you become winded with little walking and everything you know or think you know about the woods is forgotten, or you aren't sure you ever knew enough in the beginning. The compass reads an impossible direction. The view from the treetop you reach with effort reveals only the tops of other trees, or if you follow a stream you know you are walking at least three times further than necessary as the stream winds and twists, makes heavy-growthed flats with hairpin bends and builds swampy areas that make walking very wet and the footing unsure, the mosquitoes clouding around your head as you move. It is first of all embarrassment mixed with a little terror; when the frantic pumping ceases and you regain your breath it is easy enough to turn around and retrace the path you've thrashed through the brush. The rare deaths that do occur are simply a matter of the lost waiting too long to turn around.
I lay along a tree trunk fallen half across the stream, its roots weakened by the undercut bank. I dozed for a while in the sun, then upon waking sighted the rifle from this prone position at a leaf, then at a large cropping of rocks downstream from the tree.
I had wanted to move farther upstream and set up camp on higher ground to get some breeze and to be less vulnerable to the bugs but I only found the tent in the middle of the evening. It was ten o'clock and still not quite dark when I ate my supper of boiled pinto beans and onions. I doused the entire plateful with red pepper sauce and lay back against a tree thinking how much I wanted a drink, a large water glass filled with warm whiskey, or a succession of doubles with beer used as a chaser. I thought back to the Kettle of Fish bar on Macdougal Street where I first began drinking in earnest. Everyone there seemed twice my age (I was eighteen) and I could get dizzy on four glasses of ale. Eighty cents. But habits are of interest only to the habitual-fat men talk about their diets for hours without boredom, shedding imaginary pounds. I took a long drink of water to wash the fire from my throat and looked at my watch in the firelight. Stopped again; I slipped the watch off noticing the strip of white skin beneath it on the wrist somehow not related to the rest of my body. A friend had a pachuco cross carved beneath his watchband. I flipped this seven-dollar special into the fire thinking idly that in the heat the hands might whirl backwards or in reverse of those old movie montages where a calendar's pages are flipped and trains crisscross the nation from corner of screen to corner of screen, from triumph to triumph with a star's name growing ever larger on the billboards and marquees. I rubbed mosquito dope onto my hands and face and neck and crawled into the sleeping bag.
We drove down a gravel road bordered on both sides with Lombardy poplars which had begun to die with leaves gone on the topmost branches. My father fiddled with the radio then said no ballgame today it's Monday. We turned into a driveway and moved jouncing over ruts to a farmhouse which from the road had been concealed in a grove of elm and maple trees. When we stopped two dogs rushed out from under the porch as if to devour the car to get at us. My father got out and said come along but I stayed in the car, in part not to get my new shoes dirty which since we left town I had been rubbing busily against the back of my pantleg for a shine. He left and the dogs didn't bother him. They looked like they were from the same litter—half collie and half shepherd—I had had a similar dog a few years before, Penny, but she had bitten the mailman and we had to give her to a farmer who I learned later shot her for killing chickens. I heard laughter and turned in the car to see in the far corner of the shaded yard three girls playing with a swing. There was an elm tree and from a lower branch a rope was suspended with a tire attached to it; they were taking turns swinging, and the oldest had to lift the smallest who was about five up into the tire which she straddled, a leg on either side. The little one had lost three fingers on one hand and had some lilacs between the thumb and forefinger, holding the swing with the other hand. The lilacs were growing along a ditch on the far side of the house. It was May and they were blooming white and purple in great clumps and their heavy scent mixed with the smell of wild mint from the ditch. The house was covered with brown imitation brick siding, nearly a trademark for the poor, with a cement porch darkened with tall honeysuckle bushes. The oldest girl who looked about twelve got into the swing and pulled herself higher and higher, the little one holding her ears as if something were going to explode. She straddled the swing and her dress fluttered higher with each pass. I looked down at my shoes again then played with the radio dial. I looked back at her and I could see her legs and hips all the way up to her panties and waist. I felt cloudy and giggly and had an urge to go over and talk to them. But then my father returned from the barn and shook hands with a man and we left.
I awoke no later than midnight and the fire was out what with only pine to burn, a nearly heatless wood compared to beech or maple. I thought I heard something and I reached for the rifle which lay along the sleeping bag. I got up and started a fire and decided to make coffee and stay up all night rather than be attacked by nameless beasts all of which were in my head and were due, I'm sure, to my brain drying out. “There stands the glass that will ease all my pain,” sang Webb Pierce. It would begin to get light before four A.M. I'v always been immoderately clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs everyone sighs about, a glut of clocks and my thin neck twisting to their perfect circles, around and around and around. I remembered working in an office in Boston and during the second week there I looked up at the clock on the wall and it was two-thirty instead of the expected four-thirty. I began weeping real salt tears (partly the five doubles for lunch no doubt). A clock-torn child of twenty-seven with tears rolling down his plump cheeks onto his shirt collar, the shirt unbuttoned because it was too small, taken from a dead father's dresser drawer.
The creek roared and tumbled past boulders where I dipped the coffeepot, the noise concealing the movements of the gryphon on the verge of leaping and tearing out my throat. The pink-elephant bit for d.t.’s is bullshit. I was thinking of sauterne and California. It took almost a month to hitch home and I had gone there for no reason anyway, or as Tom Joad had said, “There's something going on out there in the West.” Certa
inly is. In San Francisco in a deserted building called the Hanging Gardens by those who slept there we had split a hundred peyote buttons four ways, small cacti which after peeling remind one of gelatinous rotten green peppers. I chewed up an overdose of twenty buttons raw, one after another as if they were some sort of miraculous food then vomited out a window repeatedly for hours. When my mind finally refocused my bedroll was gone. And I walked for what seemed like a year down to Hosmer to catch the labor bus for the bean fields outside of San Jose. A strange form of poison. Not to be recommended, at least not in such large doses. The experience isn't verbally transferable—I've never read a record that came close. Years afterward a small part of my brain still felt the effects.
I drank several cups of coffee looking off into the moonless cloudy dark beyond the fire. As long as you have to die anyway it may as well be between a grizzly's jaws but they're a thousand miles farther west. In the peyote trance the naked chorus girls foolishly summoned up were peeled and beet-red with snatches an inky and oily black, hard as basalt. The old joke of a woman strangling a rat between her legs. In bars all over the country they are beaver pie poontang pussy quiff cunt shag clam and so on. That thirty-eight-year-old woman in Detroit with violently teased hair and a beer-fed roll of fat around her middle, red mouth like a war wound winks at you in the mirror above the bottles and you wink back with your blind eye and buy her a drink, schnapps on the rocks, and you light her cigarette and look at her fingers which have claws that remind you of a leopard. She has an ankle bracelet announcing BOB in silver. She pouts and babytalks about the movies and whatever happened to Randolph Scott and she says she is a cosmotologist. She knows the cosmos. A home permanent. A Toni. Dressing hair & girl talk. You go into the toilet and look at yourself in the mirror and think that if you were a real American, maybe a marine or a paratrooper or a truckdriver, you would screw her. But you're not so you hover over the urinal and by now your cock has almost shrunk back in your body in reverse lust and you think of excuses. She probably has syph! Or she hasn't showered in a week, she's an old lizard skin, or if she had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck in her she would look like a porcupine, or she's simply too fat. But it doesn't work so you come out of the toilet and she's following your movement in the mirror as you bolt through the door and into the street, feeling somehow not very virile but safe, thinking it would have been like fucking a vacuum cleaner, thinking of cool monasteries in the country with birds singing sweetly outside the windows and the Mother Superior kneeling before you after vespers. No nuns in monasteries. Or at least a cheerleader after a high school football game sincere about love with a cedar hope chest begun, some homemade bleached muslin pillow cases folded in the bottom with his and hers needleworked in mauve. And as she makes love with no interest she talks of the funny experiment in chemistry class that was so stinky. Naked from waist to bobbysocks.