The rest of my survey I made in darkness, by the light of stars. I had come on some isolated reservation, and its center was a cluster of buildings on the mountain overlooking this same lake: a lodge of two stories, and several smaller outbuildings, barns, stables, garages. Even in darkness I could tell that the buildings, like the little station house at the bottom of the trail, were uniformly of log construction.
My vantage point was from the land side, a rise in an enormous rolling meadow beside a tennis court fenced in wood and mesh. I did not try to move closer to see in detail what was in the light of the lodge windows, all ablaze everywhere, as if great crowds were inside. I knew there were no crowds. The wind amplified in gusts the strains of a dance band. When the song was over, it began again. It was a Victrola record of a tune I recognized, “Exactly Like You.”
The perverse effect of this music and the lighted windows was of a repellent and desolate isolation.
Now the wind came up stronger across the meadow, it was off the lake and carried the water’s chill. I looked up to the treetops of the wood behind me and saw them prancing and bucking in the way of a hard life of eminence. I was fixed by my own pride from going to the back door of this establishment and asking for a place to stay or a meal. I didn’t know if I had the stamina for a night on these grounds, but it was as if I was reflecting the clear arrogance of whoever owned this place and traveled to it by imperial railroad, for I was goddamned if I would ask him or them for anything.
I didn’t want her to see me like this!
I remember squatting behind the little tennis shack and keeping myself company with my cigarettes. I smoked one after another and made a community around their glow.
Now I’ll tell what I don’t remember. I don’t remember the sound they must have made, the uncanny sound as it separated itself from the wind in the trees, of group exertion, breath chuffing across twenty or thirty hanging tongues, yelps of murderous excitement. Was the moon out? I rose from my crouch seeing something like an earthwave coming toward me, as if the ground were advancing in a sort of rolling quaking upheaval. This gradually distinguished itself as the furred musculature of shoulders and chests and legs, and I think now I must have seen the face of the lead dog, flung into moonlight, its maddened red eyes like the tracers of those launched fangs. If I didn’t see it I’ve dreamed it a thousand times.
Goddamnit, if city boys knew any animals at all it was dogs. But these were like nothing I’d ever seen. Not that I had the leisure for contemplation. I held up my forearm and his teeth tore it like a piece of paper. Together we rammed into the side of the tennis shack. And then the others were up, tossing themselves at me in their fury but with great inefficiency, they turned on each other snarling for getting in each other’s way though they were effective enough to my pain and screaming terror. I was kicking at them and flinging them off going for the throat trying to tear my throat out, I was kicking and waving my arms and fists and howling like a dog myself and knowing that if I went down I faced something more than the end of my life — shit — the extenuated appreciation of its end, piecemeal, my life taken from me chunk by chunk drop by drop every nerve shrieking.
I think I can imagine some faint memory of the odor of those dogs, feel the closeness of their life, their wild heartbeat! I hear their snorts and the snaps of teeth on air, I remember the toothtumblers lock once the flesh is found, the quick release and regrip down to the bone.
I recall without difficulty the intimate apprehension of prey in the jaws of a maniac life beyond all appeal.
Somehow I was vaulted or inspired upward in some acrobatic backward tumble through the unframed shack window. I took one of the dogs with me, slamming it fixed in my wrist against the inner wall of the shack while the heads of the others appeared outside the window, a fountain of faces leaping and falling back in rage in frustration. But then one gripped the sill with its paws and began to pull itself up till its own weight would get it inside, I grabbed a tennis racquet hanging in its press and swung toward that head down on those paws. The dog fell out of sight and the other, who had come in with me, stunned loose from its slam against the wall, I now caught on the back with the racquet edge in its heavy press and broke its spine. They were not uniformed pedigreed hounds, they were every kind and make, and this one, a smaller mongrel, I lifted howling and threw to the others.
Things immediately got quiet. I heard the yelps and moans and grunts of appeasement, the soft sound of flesh being fanged. The small moonlit square of night I saw from the floor of the shack was peaceful with stars. Maybe I heard human voices, or the firing of a rifle or a gun, but I’m not sure. I lay there and as the blood flowed from me I lost consciousness.
10
Adirondacks.
Region first known for wilderness industries trapping hunting.
Earliest roads were logging trails out came the great trees
chained to sledges. In the winter blocks of ice were sawn
from the frozen lakes and carried in procession on funicular tracks
uphill to the railroad depots for shipment to the cities.
In early spring the tapping of the huge sugar maples
and the sap houses sweet blue smoke hanging over the green valleys.
In summer the natives grew small corn and picked wild berries
and grilled trout on open fires by the edge of rock rivers.
But one summer after the May flies painters and poets arrived
who paid money to sit in guide boats and to stand momentously
above the gorges of rushing streams.
The artists and poets patrons seeing and hearing their reports
bought vast tracts of the Adirondacks very cheaply
and began to build elaborate camps there thus inventing
the wilderness as luxury.
Loon Lake a high mountain retreat cratered as purely cold and
clear in the mountains as water cupped in your hands.
In the morning the old man, Bennett, gave them all woolen ponchos and took them for a speedboat ride on the lake. She sat up front between him and Tommy. Tommy put his arm around her but she preferred to lean forward in the lee of the windshield where she avoided the wind if not the cold space it left as it blew by.
The little flag in the stern flapped like a machine gun. In the back seat there was no protection at all and they were truly unhappy. The cigarette was whipped out of Buster’s mouth and taken in the air over the wake by a black-and-white bird, some sort of gull. She saw that, having turned to smile back at them, her knee just touching the old man’s pants leg, and Buster, looking startled, saw it too. It seemed to fall away into the sky; He faced her stupidly, his mouth still open and a piece of cigarette paper pasted on his lower lip.
She knew Bennett was showing off for her, rearing the mahogany speedboat through the waves as if it were Buck Jones’ Silver. The sky was very low and the tops of the hills around the lake were shrouded in clouds. The clouds drifted through the trees and she was startled by that intimacy. She thought clouds should stay up in the sky where they belonged.
They had come to the closed end of the lake. The old man throttled down and the boat settled flatter in the water. There were marshes here and dead striplings poking out of the water. He headed straight for the trees and she felt Tommy clench up until a notch appeared in the shoreline. They went into a channel at slow speed and rode serenely by a beaver lodge of wet dark sticks and mud. The old man pointed it out.