the pup, and when I turned it down, he said he didn’t blame me, and went out to commandeer a seat for me, regally, in a blue pickup truck that stopped to buy gas. The two men in it were brown lean small-townsmen headed out to a deer lease, and made room cheerfully for me and the pup. They were talking about how they’d packed the eggs and whether the milk would keep without ice and such matters, the talk of women-tended men magnifying the maleness of a three or four-day expedition away from their women. I’d talkedthat way myself, often, but listened now feeling different from them. They let me out at the bridge, and good wishes flew both ways through the air.
Thrashing … The armed night watchman at the pit, where the only level ground near the bridge lay, said it was all right if I camped there, but that I’d better make a noise if I came up around the machinery. The canoe, though, was on the other side of the river. Somehow I bulled it across in the dark, sloshed about in water and mud extracting an austere minimum of gear, and made camp by the light of the gasoline lantern tied to a willow branch. I was glad to be by myself again. There was no driftwood but only dry willow sticks, which make no coals; I scorched the little T bone a bit and ate it with store bread and tomatoes. The passenger found his neckbones too fresh and carried them off one by one, as I gave them to him, to bury each in a different spot for ripening; nor could I tell him that he was unlikely to be around at the time of their perfection to profit from his toil.…
He was an affable little brute, impractical but comic and good to have with me, philosophical under scolding and the occasional sleepy kicks he got when he wriggled too much in the bottom of the sleeping bag at night. In a few days he had developed more than in weeks in town, giving up his abject station at my heels to run about the woods on our shore excursions, learning to evade the cold by staying in the tent or by hugging the fire, sitting like a figurehead on the food box in the bow as we slid down the river in the long bright afternoons. At the ser sta gro he had been a help; elsewhere among countrymen he was as likely to be a drag, but I was glad I’d brought him.
Nekkebone, nekkebone, kept running obsessively through my head as I watched him dig. It was from Chaucer or somewhere; someone had smitten someone else and cleaved his head all the way vnto the nekkebone.…
Traffic roared with irregular steadiness across the bridge. Each car or truck that crossed rattled a loose bolt somewhere toward its center.
Near that bridge an old fellow used to live who was known generally, probably because somebody had read Mark Twain, as Indian Joe. He spent the latter end of his life scrambling up and down hills all through that country with a witching rod in his hands; he believed in buried Spanish gold. Unfortunately for Joe, the gold didn’t believe in him; he died there as poor as ever, though I imagine he’d had a better time than many a more practical seeker has in country clubs.
The Brazos nurtures a few lonely ones like that, some of them pretty wild-eyed. They live on willow islands in driftwood shacks, and in holes among the high rocks, neighbors to the rattler. One of them near Palo Pinto used to sell reptiles to schools and laboratories. You hear about them more than you see them, though they probably see you as you pass. When landowners know they’re there, they seem usually to tolerate them; some widowed or bachelor landowners get a bit that way themselves. In hard times there were more; now, with jobs easy to come by, the hermits who remain are the real ones.
We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the muskof their
Thrashing … The armed night watchman at the pit, where the only level ground near the bridge lay, said it was all right if I camped there, but that I’d better make a noise if I came up around the machinery. The canoe, though, was on the other side of the river. Somehow I bulled it across in the dark, sloshed about in water and mud extracting an austere minimum of gear, and made camp by the light of the gasoline lantern tied to a willow branch. I was glad to be by myself again. There was no driftwood but only dry willow sticks, which make no coals; I scorched the little T bone a bit and ate it with store bread and tomatoes. The passenger found his neckbones too fresh and carried them off one by one, as I gave them to him, to bury each in a different spot for ripening; nor could I tell him that he was unlikely to be around at the time of their perfection to profit from his toil.…
He was an affable little brute, impractical but comic and good to have with me, philosophical under scolding and the occasional sleepy kicks he got when he wriggled too much in the bottom of the sleeping bag at night. In a few days he had developed more than in weeks in town, giving up his abject station at my heels to run about the woods on our shore excursions, learning to evade the cold by staying in the tent or by hugging the fire, sitting like a figurehead on the food box in the bow as we slid down the river in the long bright afternoons. At the ser sta gro he had been a help; elsewhere among countrymen he was as likely to be a drag, but I was glad I’d brought him.
Nekkebone, nekkebone, kept running obsessively through my head as I watched him dig. It was from Chaucer or somewhere; someone had smitten someone else and cleaved his head all the way vnto the nekkebone.…
Traffic roared with irregular steadiness across the bridge. Each car or truck that crossed rattled a loose bolt somewhere toward its center.
Near that bridge an old fellow used to live who was known generally, probably because somebody had read Mark Twain, as Indian Joe. He spent the latter end of his life scrambling up and down hills all through that country with a witching rod in his hands; he believed in buried Spanish gold. Unfortunately for Joe, the gold didn’t believe in him; he died there as poor as ever, though I imagine he’d had a better time than many a more practical seeker has in country clubs.
The Brazos nurtures a few lonely ones like that, some of them pretty wild-eyed. They live on willow islands in driftwood shacks, and in holes among the high rocks, neighbors to the rattler. One of them near Palo Pinto used to sell reptiles to schools and laboratories. You hear about them more than you see them, though they probably see you as you pass. When landowners know they’re there, they seem usually to tolerate them; some widowed or bachelor landowners get a bit that way themselves. In hard times there were more; now, with jobs easy to come by, the hermits who remain are the real ones.
We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to. A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the muskof their
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