The Dog Stars by Peter Heller Page B

a pool and Jasper lies over my feet. Does that when he’s not feeling well. Morning now, the graysuffused with color. Barely. We rest until the sun filters straight through the trees with, I swear, a slight jangle as of loose banjo strings. The creek responding, a burble and lip.
    Last fall I saw elk tracks. One set that wended down from the dark spruce, printed themselves in the silt where the creek ran in summer, and were lost again on the smooth dusty stones of the gravel bar. One. A large cow. A ghost. They, all of them, supposed to be gone.
    A shriek. Kingfisher. Sometimes a kingfisher keeps us company. Lilts upstream ahead of us. The dipping flight reminds me of telephone wires weighted with ice, the same arc again and again and again. He perches on a dead limb over the creek, screams, flies again. Telling us, it seems, to keep up. For miles. Maybe lonely, shorn of company. Sometimes a dipper bobbing the stones at water’s edge. Maybe once a year we see an osprey.
    We like the birds, huh Jasp?
    He opens his eyes a sec, doesn’t lift his head off my boot. If I say another thing, I know him well enough: he’ll lift his head to look at me to check if there is some subject that truly concerns him, that maybe I am asking for some consideration and he will hold the gaze on my face until he figures out what it is, or if it is nothing, so I don’t say another word. Let him rest.
    We rouse ourselves and climb. The ascent steep here, twisting up into the first bulwark of the hills.
    We cross the old state highway at midday. Don’t even touch the broken macadam, walk the big corrugated culvert beneath it, drynow since a flood washed the revenant and sent the creek around. Hollow in there. I think of Jonah and the belly of the whale. Used to shout and sing inside it to hear my compounding echo but don’t anymore.
    Jasper didn’t like it.
    We cross the highway and continue up the creek. I wait for Jasper to catch up. He looks stiff in the hips, his breath short, panting. First long walk this year, he is probably out of shape like I am, carrying a little winter fat.

    Two wolves. Two sets of tracks in and out of the fine mud at the very edge of the water, moving fast. Catches Jasper’s attention. For a minute. Hackles rise but he quickly loses interest. Seems preoccupied with keeping up as if the walking is taking all his attention.

    At what might be two, I decide to give us both a break. We are in no hurry. We are still some miles below where I saw the tracks but that means nothing.
    Could be anywhere up here, huh, Jasper?
    I pull the rod case out of the sled so he knows he is officially off duty.

    A shallow run above a short rocky drop, just riffles. A fallen tree sieves the stream. Not quite canyon yet, but the big dark trees stillliving, the blue spruce and Norway, the doug fir, lean in close, their limbs strung with Spanish moss that tilts and moves in the wind. The moss I wonder how old. It is dry and light to the touch, almost crumbly, but in the trees it moves like sad pennants.
    I assemble and string the rod and Jasper lies on a flat rock and watches me. It is the only one sunstruck and he watches me in a patch of warmer light, his own shadow thrown on the cobbles conforming to the round stones like thin water. The stalks of last year’s mullein stand on the bar like lightless candles. In the same sunlight I can see a hatch of tiny midges almost a mist.
    I take off boots and pants, slip on the light, sticky soled sneakers I’ve used for years. When the rubber wears out I’ve got more. On the last trip to the parking lot at the box store I took five pairs my size. Not as light, but workable. Three years maybe a set so that should last me until until. I can’t imagine. The pictures don’t cohere in my head. To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting. We’ll keep track of this little rill. Of tying on fresh tippet and the tufty fly, and we’ll blow on it for luck. Of