Going to the Sun Read online

  “Oh, Marcus,” she laughed and dropped onto the comforter. “I don’t watch girls dress.”

  “Well you should. It’s a pretty sight.” She giggled and buried her head in the comforter.

  “Melissa!” It was Aunt Jerome again. “Have you packed?”

  “No,” she answered, “but here I come.” She snatched Marcus’s shirt, ran through the cold hall and jumped up on the kitchen table. Grabbing his trousers, Marcus yanked them on, then pursued and caught her. She squealed at the excitement of the chase.

  “Your pack is here,” said Aunt Jerome, hands on hips. “I brought it down from the barn for you. Now hurry, the pack-horse crew will be here soon. And one of them is Billy Fred.”

  With that news, Marcus quickly put on his shirt, socks, boots and coat. He helped himself to a glass of milk and four of Aunt Jerome’s blueberry muffins. He put on his backpack and went to help Melissa put on hers.

  The little wife that he felt he must protect and hold put her arms into her forty-pound pack, trussed it up and fastened the hip belt with a flip of her wrist. She stuffed an ice axe in her belt and said, “Ready.”

  He gaped at her. This was not the delicate girl of the bridge and the Eastern boarding school; this was a professional mountaineer, a girl of the rocks and tors. He whistled, raised his eyebrows and looked at Aunt Jerome.

  “I guess I don’t know her very well,” he said.

  “You don’t,” Melissa said and pushed him out of the door.

  Aunt Jerome followed them to the edge of the porch as the bells on the pack train sounded at the bridge. She embraced Melissa and handed her a worn book. “Here’s my old botany manual,” she said. “You’ll need it up there.” Melissa took it slowly.

  “This? You’re letting me have your botany manual? Oh, Aunt Jerome.” She hugged her and turned to Marcus. “We’ve spent many beautiful hours with this book,” she said. “Aunt Jerome taught me botany with this. Once she taught in a college.”

  “Hurry.” Aunt Jerome’s eyes misted and Marcus moved to embrace her. She shooed him off. “Follow the goats,” she said. “Their ledges will be free of snow at this time of year. You can camp in their warm hideouts.”

  The horse bells sounded at a switchback and Marcus clutched Melissa’s hand. They ran toward the barn where the trail to the backcountry began.

  The Jaw was clean of clouds and blazed like a white axe slash in the dark blue sky. The sun, unobstructed, burned through the high, thin air as if through a magnifying glass. The top of the world was crackling with sun sparks. Marcus pulled Melissa onto the trail and whooped. He was free, free in the mountains with a wife, a job, and a home on his back. The Jaw rumbled, the ice gleamed.

  “Are you scared?” he asked her as they walked side by side.

  “Not with you,” she answered. He thought he detected a note of sarcasm in her voice and looked in her face, but it was open and sincere. He dug his boots in and walked toward happiness and privacy.

  At the first bend, they came upon Ignatius, sitting under a krummholz of twisted firs. He arose and came toward them.

  “About the goats,” Ignatius began. “They are spiritual animals. They must be understood. The white man must help them. You and Melissa are godsent.” He folded his arms thoughtfully. “The cliffs and crags where the goats live are dangerous. If you need help, burn bear grass. It makes a strange yellow smoke that colors the sky. I will come.” He did not smile, but his eyes mellowed perceptibly. Then he unfolded a map. “The nanny herds are here,” he said, pointing to a glacial cirque. “These ledges are open now and the goats are feeding on them.”

  “Where are the billies?”

  “Going to the sun.”

  Marcus winced. Ignatius would not let Will die.

  The horse bells sounded in the corral and Ignatius turned to go. “Take this map,” he said. “I’ve added a few crags and chuttes that the geological survey maps don’t have. You’ll need to know them.”

  Their eyes met and Marcus smiled.

  “You are the one,” Ignatius said. “You are the one.”

  “The one for what?” Marcus asked suspiciously.

  “To free the wandering spirit to the sun.” He turned and walked down the snowy path. Marcus felt his skin creep.

  “What is he talking about?” he asked.

  “It’s his own personal belief that the goats hold the spirits of Blackfoot Indians. After death the Indians who dwell in the goats can romp and climb free in these beautiful mountains.

  “But sometimes,” she went on, “a white man enters a goat. Then you must pray to the goat to release the white man’s spirit to the sun.”

  “So that’s it,” Marcus said to himself. “That’s why he prayed that night.”

  “He also believes,” Melissa continued, “that some white spirits are so bad they can’t be prayed out of a goat. Then you must shoot the goat.”

  “That’s terrible,” Marcus said slowly. “That would be killing twice.”

  “It’s terrible to shoot a goat,” Melissa said, but Marcus did not hear her. His thoughts were on Will.

  For almost an hour Marcus and Melissa climbed up out of the cirque in which the Chalet sat. The path was high, well above eight thousand feet and still deep in snow. Marcus broke trail, breathing deeply with each step. He drew the sparse oxygen of the high, thin air into his lungs. They still had two thousand vertical feet to climb and many miles to go. Marcus was not as acclimated to the air and radiant light as Melissa. She had been at the Chalet for several weeks, so she moved more easily than he.

  At noon they reached the high pass that separated the Chalet glacial cirque from the Sky Lake cirque, a bowl-like valley of rock. The goats, according to Ignatius, were in the bowl beyond the lake, about six miles on. Although all three glaciers were still “alive,” with ice that crept and cut, they were all small—mere remnants of the Ice Age.

  Marcus climbed to the crest, then dropped onto a square block of mudstone and took off his pack. The sun was hot and most of the snow was gone from this southern exposure. Melissa sat down beside him and rested her head on his shoulder.

  “You’re quite a goat,” he said. “I thought I would be helping you like in the movies.”

  “Not me,” she said and closed her eyes. “I hate help.” He chuckled, put his arm around her, and for a moment she dozed.

  “Melissa!” Marcus whispered. “The goat!” She sat up and he rose to his feet. Old Gore stood on a ledge across an ice-scooped ravine. He held his head straight forward; his feet were clustered under him as if to spring into the sky.

  “Melissa,” he whispered reverently, “I am going to get him this fall. He will be your wedding present.” He instinctively touched his gun.

  “No, Marcus,” she gasped. “You can’t shoot him. He’s the king of the billies.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes, yes. I know lots of the goats. They come to the mineral cache near the Chalet in summer for salts. Old Gore is important. You can’t kill him!”

  Marcus frowned; Melissa’s voice was tense and emotional. He took her chin in his hands and looked into her eyes. They were glassy with alarm.

  “I also know Roman Nose,” she said. “He’s Old Gore’s friend. And I know Molly. She’s pregnant. She’ll be having her kid in early June.”

  “But Melissa,” Marcus said with great patience, “we must hunt these animals. There are no wolves and mountain lions to harvest them anymore. So we must.” He picked up his rifle. Melissa stared at it. The rosewood butt gleamed inside the case. It was inlaid with silver leaves, a costly, superior rifle. It was also lovingly cared for. The wood glowed with the dull polish of hand rubbing.

  “Don’t kill the goats,” she said softly.

  “You don’t understand,” he said and held her shoulders.

  “There’s a law, called Errington’s law of compensation. For every prey animal killed, another lives to replace it. If animals are not hunted, they starve to death or die of disease.”<
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  “I didn’t know that,” she said, brushing a little ice ball from her mitten.

  Marcus went on. “Man has to maintain the natural balance. He has to keep wild animals from over-breeding and eating themselves out of house and home.”

  “Oh,” she said. A snow crystal swirled onto her white lashes and as it melted it moistened her eye. “You mean that the goats will eat all the grass and die of starvation if we don’t hunt them?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “The hunter is part of nature. He’s part of the balance. A vital part.”

  Melissa was looking across his shoulder at the goat. The animal glanced at her, pawed the open ledge, sniffed and turned away. With methodical gait he walked sure-footedly down the steep ledge, never taking more than one foot off the ground at a time.

  “Marcus,” she said, “let’s go. We’ve got to follow Old Gore. He’s headed for his bedding spot.”

  She dug her ice axe into a rock crack above the trail and pulled herself up toward the goat. He watched her pick the course, amused that she was now leading him. Singing out her name, he swung his axe and followed. She led him up the steep slope to the ledge where the monarch of the goats had trod only moments ago. His footprints made clefts in the sparse soil almost as large as saucers.

  “Wow!” Marcus said. He took out a small notebook and wrote down: Old Gore.

  “He’ll have a book all to himself,” he said. “He’s mine and I must know everything he ever does. He will bring me fame and fortune.”

  “Don’t say that,” Melissa said. “He belongs to the mountain.”

  Marcus took the lead. Fervently he followed the footprints down the ledge and along the lake. There he lost them. He scanned and saw the goat disappear over the top of the cliff at Eight-Mile Pass. He marked it on Ignatius’s map and they took off.

  Marcus quickly learned that he was not as smart as Old Gore. The goat led Melissa and himself into a raging wind. She ducked behind him and had to hold onto his pack as they edged along a shelf of limestone. The wind ripped at their feet, sucking at them, buffeting them as if to knock them off the mountain.

  Eventually they got behind a peninsula of rock out of the wind. Their hands and feet were numb, their eyes full of ice-tears. Marcus looked at Ignatius’s map and decided to take a longer but more sheltered route. As it turned out, it was pitted with goat tracks, and Marcus wondered just who was the wiser animal, man or goat.

  Late in the afternoon they reached Eight-Mile Pass, a dip between the Jaw and a cliff. It was only a few hundred yards from the ledge where Old Gore had gone. They were tired, and collapsed on a boulder to rest and eat nuts and candy.

  Marcus studied the ledge. “I don’t see any greens where Old Gore disappeared,” he said, squinting at it. “Just snow and ice. But if Aunt Jerome says goat ledges are warm and cozy, let’s go see.”

  Refreshed, they picked up their packs, left the trail and climbed toward a snow-filled goat path. They passed clumps of ice-covered yew that meant “avalanche trail,” and came upon a windbreak of low, tortured alpine firs. There, out of danger, the goat trail began. It was marked with bits of wool pulled from passing beasts by the twigs, and it led into a tight mass of limbs, trunks and needles.

  Marcus wrestled his way down the trail, fighting gnarled trees and snow, until he came out on the ledge. It was as green as spring! No wind blew here and the view out over Sky Lake was forever—down over the hemlock forest to the Mission Mountains, on to Idaho, to the sea.

  “Holy God,” Marcus gasped in awe.

  Bluebells and spring beauties bloomed at his feet, and a variety of tough grasses sprang vigorously toward the sun. The ledge was about fifteen feet wide, then it dropped straight for two hundred feet to a slide above the lake. In the other direction lay an alpine meadow, still splotched with snow but also freckled with white lilies that bloomed in the cold slush. Beyond the meadow, like a great half-bowl, rose the gray wall of the lower Jaw cirque. It blocked the wind from the ledge and protected a small glacier that still worked high on the western side of the half-bowl. Streamers of ice shot down from the glacier, ice that would melt in July and become one of the many silver cascades that made the Mission Mountains famous.

  A grunt attracted Marcus and he looked under the windbreak. Four goats rested there, front feet tucked under them, ready to rise. They were chewing their cuds and staring at him out of black eyes placed high under their jutting horns. The black nostrils at the ends of their long noses gave them crucifix-like faces.

  “They’re not scared,” he said to Melissa.

  “No one’s hunted them for years. The snows were too deep until last year when Will came up here and poached one. They’re tame,” she answered. He thought about that, for it was wondrous to see a fearless animal.

  Melissa was down on her knees, picking grass flowers. Her pack was off, her botany book out.

  “While you count the goats,” she said, “I’ll find out what they eat—which plants, which flowers. Then we can look at the ledges and know if they are going to die of starvation because they’ve eaten themselves out of house and home.”

  Marcus knelt beside her.

  “Melissa,” he said. “That’s a good idea. We’ll know for sure which ones to hunt. Those that have been pushed into areas where there’s nothing to eat.” He picked up his pack and began to stroll the high ledge, singing a hunting song.

  “Let’s build our home,” he called as he searched for a level spot with a view straight over to Idaho.

  Melissa did not get up; instead she crept slowly on all fours. Presently she picked a nipped-off blade of grass and opened the botany book.

  “Do you like this spot?” Marcus asked. She did not answer. He unrolled the tent and rattled the stakes noisily. Melissa did not notice. Her gold-red head remained bent over the book. He cleared his throat pointedly. The pots and pans, he thought. They’ll interest her. She can make a kitchen and a cozy dining room. He took out his mess kit, then the little gas stove. He put them down with a bang. At last she looked up.

  “This is bluebunch wheatgrass,” she said. “Agropyron spicatum. It grows on ledges. It’s the major flowering species of the ledges. These goats seem to like it. Almost all of it is cropped around here. But look, Marcus.” Enthusiastically she pointed to a large bunch of the wheatgrass. “Only the newest blades have been snipped. The goats eat the fresh green blades and leave the old tough ones to go to seed.”

  Marcus got down on his knees. She was right. Each new blade had been selectively cut. “Hmm, they’re good farmers,” he said and walked thoughtfully back to the tent.

  Marcus selected a flat site and faced the tent toward the sunset. He staked down the sides and threw up the six-foot supports. The tent sagged, then billowed and became a four-walled home.

  As he worked Marcus marveled that Old Gore had led them to a truly warm spot, perhaps the warmest on the entire mountain. No winds touched here, and heat radiated off the bowl of rocks.

  Marcus stood back and admired his home. It was firm, smooth, and it matched the windbreak and green meadow. His eyes fell on the verdant garden and the cool white flowers.

  “Melissa,” he called. “The meadow is almost as beautiful as you. I’ll call it Melissa’s Meadow.”

  “Marcus.” She was still picking grass. “Are the goats in the windbreak nannies or billies?” Marcus spread their sleeping bags along the ten-foot wall, put down the mess kits and crept out to the goats.

  “I can’t tell—they’re all sitting down,” he said.

  She turned and smiled at him. “I forgot. Both nannies and billies have horns, so you can’t tell that way.

  “But I hope they’re all nannies so we can have four beautiful kids.” Now she saw the tent. Carefully she put down her grass and stared.

  “Our home!” she said. “Marcus, it’s beautiful. I’m the luckiest bride in the world—a house and a garden and a waterfall and a husband, right on top of the mountain.” She stepped inside and inspected th
e generous area.

  “Here’s your kitchen,” he said, gesturing to the pots and pans, “and...”

  “Where is the work table?” she asked.

  “You need a work table? Oh, of course.” He recalled having seen a large flat rock not far from the tent. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll build you a table.”

  He selected four small, neatly cleaved sandstones pressed flat by ancient oceans, and carried them to the kitchen side of the tent. Then he lifted the large rock, braced it on his thighs and hauled it into the tent. He put it in place.

  “There,” he said, dusting his hands. “Now you have a table. You can prepare our feasts.”

  Melissa brushed off the stone.

  “I’ll put the pressed plants here, and your notes there.” She pondered. “And there’s room for my botany book next to your notes.”

  “Hey,” Marcus said. “Don’t girls like to make homes?”

  “I guess so,” she answered and skipped out the door. He followed her to the edge of the cliff. Thoughtfully she gazed down across the lake to the forest and the distant valleys. Clouds were fingering their way up the mountain as the day came to an end. Below the protected ledge the wind whistled and screeched. Melissa took his hand.

  “Marcus,” she said, “when the kids are born...”

  “Kids?” He spoke softly.

  “Yes, when they are born, you’ll be able to learn everything about goats from birth to death. You’ll be famous and we’ll travel to cities to tell people to save the goats like Gordon Haber does for the wolves and George Schaller does for the lions. My father will be proud of us; he likes goats.”

  A nanny pawed the ground under the windbreak. Melissa turned and saw her circle, then lie down in her bed and softly chew her cud. Melissa got down on her hands and knees.

  “There’s a plant on her lip,” she said and crept to her.

  “A forb,” she called and ran to the tent for her book.

  Marcus rubbed his stomach. “It’s five o’clock,” he said, but Melissa worked on.

  “Aren’t you going to cook dinner?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” she answered.