Pretending to be fire-gazing, he raises his eyes. She’s in her sleeping bag, sitting up, watching the night sky same as iPooch. Not saying a word, or looking as if she wants to. Just draining the cup sip by sip, making no face at the burn.

  Damn! Lou thinks. Even handles her whiskey. I forgot this craziness where every tiny thing about a person makes you wanna bow to what they are.

  She sets aside the cup, removes and folds her jacket to serve as pillow.

  Almost the instant her head touches the jacket, she’s asleep.

  Lou Roy pours another cup. Rolls a smoke. Settles in.

  That face. That wild hair.

  RISA WAKES IN the night to the feel of iPooch fitting herself against the back of her sleeping bag. Fourteen billion stars. Lou Roy’s quiet snoring. She remembers his intro of the kelpie: “Kale tells me he’s saving up big to buy some new-fangled computer comin’ out next year. Wave of the future, he says. Called a iMac. What the hell kind of future is that? I ask him, then have me an idea. I drive to the pound, find this little cow dog cost me nothin’, drive up to Kale’s, an’ tell him, ‘Meet iPooch, boss. She’s got my back on all o’ this iShit.’”

  Feeling Risa’s stifled giggle, iPooch’s tail whumps the ground four times. The whumps feel like a request. Risa replies by thumping the ground in front of her four times. iPooch hops over her, walks three tight circles round the spot Risa thumped, then lies on it. Risa invites her to settle, but iPooch keeps sniffing the night air and scanning the sky. At sunset she tracked the flights of ducks, magpies flocking to roost, a pterodactyl-sized heron. Now she tracks a shooting star. Sky-aware, this canine. Rare. Risa strokes her body. Black hair of a fine sleekness. No real fur at all. “You got any siblings at the pound?”

  Whump, whump, whump.

  Risa checks Lou Roy. Kind of a soothing snore, and she loves what the fire does to his face, tanned and gullied from a long life outside. She’s well aware of his crush. By the positioning of the firewood she knows he kept building up the fire to create light by which to see her till fatigue coldcocked him. Poor old guy. Perpetaitors will be violated. But he kept his feelings to himself. Rode them like a well-trained horse. Kept his dignity. Protected hers.

  The night has turned cold. She eyes the grocery bags flickering in the light, the last handfuls inside. Sees no reason for her earlier hesitation.

  Quietly unzipping her sleeping bag, she takes her feet. iPooch stands too. Risa is touched, as she slips on her boots, to think the dog is coming to the river with her. iPooch then curls up on the warmed place her body left on the opened bag. Risa grins. “Smart girl.”

  Whump, whump, whump.

  She steps down to a white sandbar glowing faintly under a sliver of moon, sits down next to the flow, reaches into the innermost of the triple bags, takes the last of the ashes into her hands, clenches her hands closed. She lies by the flow, on her back this time. Mountains looming so close. October sky so clear each star’s conflagration feels intimate despite the impossible reach. Light-years and light speed come to rest on the river’s shimmering skin, creating pinpoints so countless they truly do make a wavery milk.

  She trembles with…cold? intensity? immensity?

  In her shirt pocket: this very meadow, so lovingly mapped by her father’s dying hand.

  In her hands: the last remnants of his body.

  In her head: some kind of heat-lightning from the day’s run-in with the Unseen.

  Gratitude approaches the zenith that erases. She stifles a sob as vidṛiti, the cleft, begins to open once again. The vault of night rains down, but gently. The bliss brims over, spills onto sand, shimmers in the mica flecks. Stars of heaven, stars on water, stars seen eyes shut. The same and the same and the same.

  “Father,” she whispers. “True Father. Thank You for touching me the way the stars touch this dark water. Thank You for allowing the Elkmoon to birth her own kind of quavery stars.”

  HALF WAKING TO tend the long night’s fire, Lou Roy sees iPooch asleep on Lore’s empty bedroll. He sits bolt upright. Listens. Hears a sound by the river. Words? A sob? Sounds so private he knows not to interfere. But he peeks—and startles:

  The young woman, Stella McKeig’s great-granddaughter, lies flat on her back at water’s edge staring straight up into night sky, digging her fingers into the sand beneath her as if to hold herself to Earth…

  EYES ON THE vault, she furrows the molecules into the Earth with blind fingers as her eyes sew her handiwork to shimmering sky. Silence singing mountains true. Prayer no longer possible. Only prayer’s answer possible. Every small and great thing, herself included, so present, so broken open, there’s only a great openness with which to behold it all.

  “No goodbyes, now or ever.

  “Just these born and burning stars, held.

  “This born and burning Earth, held.

  “My born and burned Elkmoon father, home again. Held.”

  XXI. First Beguine Audience with a Pope

  (Glory Meadow, October 9, 1997)

  “In the mountains” means the blossoming of the entire world.

  —Eihei Dōgen

  HAVING FORDED ITS first river, the Crimson Exploiter looked proud of itself, parked on crushed grass between two incomparably more indigenous-looking Elkmoon vehicles: Kale the Pope’s ’94 Ford F-250 and Lou Roy’s rust-splotched yellow ’75 Chevy Cheyenne.

  The three vehicles’ respective owners are sitting round a campfire in plastic chairs Kale has brought, stuffed on elk steak, foil-wrapped fire-roasted potatoes, a tomato and mozzarella salad Lou Roy merely eyed askance, and a store-bought apple pie he inhaled. Among the other supplies Kale has delivered, the notable item at present is a bottle of George Dickel, a Tennessee whiskey that Risa, as a Kentucky bourbon purist, secretly finds unpalatable, but on this night gamely endures.

  The cowboys, several small tin cups into it now, turn to a tried-and-true drinking topic. “Erosion,” Lou Roy calls it.

  “Herdin’ cattle on an ATV may seem a small thing,” he tells Risa. “So does punchin’ plastic ID tags into calf ears. What you don’t see is what’s gone missing. The love between man an’ horse. Gone. A spring brandin’ an’ castratin’ party where the families an’ friends raised the calves get dirty gettin’ it done, then eat, drink an’ laugh till they can’t move. Gone. Efficient stuff, erosion. Pretty soon we won’t need to rope, herd, ride, work, or eat at all ’cause ranchin’ will of eroded away and plastic ID tags’ll be danglin’ from our ears.”

  “How about we change the subject, Lou?” the Pope suggests.

  “Not till you promise the West we were born in won’t of washed away before I next bring erosion up. And not even you, my Harvard friend, can make that promise.”

  Kale gives his big white Stetson a shake. “I know what he means, Risa. I was born an optimist, so a lot of changes strike me as improvements at first. Subarus instead of F-150s? I think: Safer family vehicles. More espresso shops than bars? Maybe a better kind of drinking problem. More boutiques than hock shops? Well, one serves the shopping addicts, the other the gambling addicts. But more developers than ranchers? More realtors than ticks? And now, NorBanCo’s plan to triple the valley’s population by luring a bunch of Brokeback country-clubbers onto the land your dad, Lou Roy, and I grew up on, turning us, say the ads, into the colorful yokels of their shopping town? That’s not even erosion. That’s us being sent into exile though we’ve stayed right here at home.

  “And another thing that troubles me, Risa. Before NorBanCo even arrived, when the Elkmoon Valley Bank was buying out family ranches, Lou and I fought as hard and long as we could. But quite a few locals who could have held on, didn’t. The educated, mostly. In college they’d learned a few of the horrors of westward expansion. Since the land had belonged to the tribes, they decided, as non-Indians, they had no lasting claim to it. So off to the cities they moved, letting their land, neighbors, and legacy go for funny money to bankers who then handed it all over to NorBanCo. What kind of favor is it to the tribes to cash out your land and home to entities with no human name at all? Entities with no respect for the way the tribes lived? I can’t enter my corporate boss’s office without grabbing the face of a Sitting Bull door knocker. You know why his tribe loved Sitting Bull? He was so fearless, so resourceful, so sure the Earth would provide that over and over he gave everything he had to his people. Make a door knocker out of a leader like that and install greed-driven ignorance in his place and what chance does your valley have? It seems to me, to wrap this sorry sermon up, that every place with anything right about it goes to hell soon as it falls into the hands of these multinationals. The one way to preserve and defend a place’s rightness is to inhabit it, intimate, knowledgable, and vigilant as can be. An absentee board of cash-kissers has never done that and never will. It makes me sick, what we’ve come to. I feel I failed the land, failed the tribes who lived here forever, failed most of the best things I’ve ever known.”

  Lou Roy’s dirty black Stetson shakes in disagreement. “I seen how hard you fought, Kale, an’ how hard you still fight. It ain’t you. It’s erosion. The West is washin’ off to some point on the compass that idn’t West at all, an’ the people pourin’ in never even arrive. They appear to, but look closer. They’re standin’ on E City corners peckin’ at gizmos that bounce their brain off a satellite, shoppin’ for shit in every city but E City, a neighbor an’ friend to no one. Brokeback Ranch my famous ass. There’s not a rancher on all their acres. What the Elkmoon’s got goin’ is an invasion of gizmo peckers, an’ that’s all it’s got.”

  “If Lou Roy and I could cork it a minute,” Kale puts in, “I’d be interested to know what you think of where this country’s headed, Risa.”

  She smiles. “So you want my sorry sermon?”

  “I do, actually. I really do.”

  “Well, I know what you both mean. But it’s hard to feel frustrated when I just spent two of the best days of my life in this meadow with these incredible mountains hovering overhead, feeling my father and some kind of God the Mother hovering overhead too. Asking myself why these days and nights feel so perfect, what Lou says rings true. Without devices and broadcasts, what is is the broadcast. And what is is a wonder! I spent a long time today just watching caddis fly larva crawl off the river bottom onto dry rocks, leave the sand and pine needle sleeping bags they’d built with their own special glue, and transform themselves into big orange insects that open their wings, fly up into the air to find mates, then air-drop their eggs on the water to become next year’s October caddis flies if a trout doesn’t eat them. For the suspense, the mystery, the transformations, caddis flies rival human drama. I watched a northern harrier, gliding low over the grass, do the craziest midair flip, reverse direction as it dropped to the ground, then up it flew again, calm as could be, with a vole in its talons. I watched a giant flock of cedar waxwings circling this enormous meadow all afternoon, turning this way and that as if the hundreds of them shared the same one mind—and that’s the mind I pray to stay inside of. Everything intricate and real and connected to everything else. Everything alive needing to eat, so sure, there’s a lot of death. Each trout rise all day ended the life of a cool little mayfly my dad called a blue-winged olive. But the birthing is endless. And the carcasses and kills make the beauty bittersweet. Which is the flavor of what’s real. Flavor of paradox, dark chocolate, good coffee, mortal life. Flavor of John of the Cross saying, ‘Moaning is connected with hope.’ I’m well aware that, while the harrier was doing its gold-medal-worthy backflip and killing its vole my car radio could’ve told me an earthquake just killed four hundred people in a fresh-shattered country, and a shooting rampage left eighteen dead in a devastated city, and a madman abducted three kids playing on a trampoline and abused and killed them and horrified millions. But there’s no doubt in my mind that we weren’t created to connect ourselves nonstop, via gizmo-pecking, to every horror suffered by the six billion of us instead of attending to what is, right here where we are. Like, today a flock of white-crowned sparrows landed in a weed patch near me, and while the rest began to feed, one intrepid fledgling left them to hop right up to me. As we were studying each other—this white-crowned three-inch-tall flying person and me—we were standing inside a blue, green, gold, and at sunset crimson orb of life. And if you ask me, the endless unnatural-death-list we call ‘the news’ did not shoot that gorgeous orb full of holes or abduct, rape, and kill it. If you ask me, being in tune with trout rises, harrier grace, caddis transfigurations, white-crown friendliness, hawk kills, deer carcasses, and the ashes of those we love gives human and animal suffering the bittersweet dignity of a great old blues tune. Which was my dad’s favorite music. So it’s little wonder he and Stella worshipped this place. I doubt I answered your question, Kale, but setting my dad’s molecules free last night, then seeing what I’d released him into all day, has my heart full to brimming, and that’s the only sermon in me right now.”

  Lou Roy eyes Risa shyly, then stands to feed the fire.

  “I love hearing what the day gave you,” Kale says. “And I hate it when I can’t stand by the same appreciation. The feeling that bucks me off is how, if my parents’ dying hadn’t been so costly, I wouldn’t have lost their ranch. So if you don’t mind me asking—though only if you don’t mind—I wonder how losing his ranch, then his Grandma Stella, set with Dave.”

  Risa takes a sip of whiskey and gazes into the brightening flames. “In the end I loved my father to pieces. But Dave himself would tell you, losing the ranch, then Stella, broke his compass. He became a man lost in deep woods. He had all kinds of talent and smarts but stayed in a no-brainer bank job for life, amusing himself with stupid affairs galore and two even stupider marriages. Three years ago, though, something happened. A lot of people in midlife realize they’ve wasted their life and wish they could change it, but very few actually dump the habits and social circles that prevent huge change. Dave pulled that miracle off. He went back in secret to a kind of school. He stuck to a plan to swear off skin-deep relationships and start life over in this valley, moved a whole bunch of goods perfect for Montana into storage here to serve that life, and kept himself aimed in the best direction he knew. And it sounds tragic that, just before he would have freed himself, he took sick and was gone fast. But I spent his last month with him and, suffering included, it was the best month we ever had. He stayed aimed in his best direction to the last breath, and left me feeling the Big Mercy helped him hold to that direction in the unseen. So when I think how happy he’d be that I’m sharing a fire and whiskey with two men who knew Stella, knew the land he neighbored, knew all his favorite Elkmoon places, a sweetness saturates his departure, turning it bittersweet. Like the best blues. Like real life.”

  Kale shakes his head. “As a father who raised a daughter, I’ve got to tell you, Risa. Every word you just said does your dad so proud I can feel his pleasure.”

  Lou Roy knows it’s coming, fears its coming, looks across the fire, and there it is: the grateful glowing smile, tears brimming but never quite spilling. Lou can’t take that look. It makes him want to drop to one knee, hand her his sword as if he had one, and swear fealty to her, or some such stupid stunt. Turning away from her, he rolls another smoke and hunts his mind for a story that might move the light around on her face in a less devastating way. When he feels he’s found one, he passes Risa the Dickel.

  “Enough o’ my plain bitter bitchin’, Miss Risa. Here’s a differ’nt flavor story. Bittersweet. You haven’t heard this either, Kale. You okay with me tellin’ this?”

  “Let ’er buck,” says the Pope.

  “Last week I tackled that thick-forested fence line runs from Mink Creek down to the river. Tall skinny lodgepoles growin’ dense as they get. The elk an’ moose damage wudn’t bad. Thought I might get off easy. But as Kale warned, I come on a snarl of forty-some trees downed by a microburst. Trunks tangled ever which way. Fence buried beneath. Wire snapped. Posts splintered. The tangle too thick to get my truck close. Grey an’ me fetched the chainsaw an’ got to it. I limbed an’ Grey dragged out the logs one by one. Bucked an’ stacked eleven cords of stovewood in a place my truck could fetch it. Built a huge slash pile. Planted new posts an’ strung an’ stretched wire. The fence come out good by dusk on day six.

  “So I’m cut up an’ corpse tired, it’s more’n half dark, an’ I’m ridin’ the woods side of Mink Creek to the ford, when I spot a glow down where creek meets river. Meadow’s posted. We’re ten river miles upstream of any water I ever seen boated. I tell Grey, ‘Shush,’ an’ ease toward the glow, worried some nut’s out to burn down the world. Grey snorts an’ backs up a few steps. I’ve walked him right into some fella out to take him a night crap, I figure.”

  “Keep it civilized,” the Pope puts in.

  “Keep your hat on, Kale. I’m sayin’ I figured, not what happened. I wouldn’t waste Risa’s time on some bunkhouse potty joke.”

  “Sorry, Lou,” the Pope says solemnly—then shoots Risa a sidelong grin.

  “Fella says he didn’t mean to startle us. Has a good way with Grey. Name’s Taylor. Little red-headed fella. Turns out he’s not only not takin’ a crap, he’s lookin’ for me. Says he an’ his friends heard me workin’ while they fished all day. The fishin’ was good, Taylor says, which made ’em feel guilty, which earned me a drink and a bite if I want ’em. Bison burgers, he says, but drinks first of course. Day I had, I says why not.

  “Turns out there’s four of ’em camped on a little sandbar. Andy, Al, and Aaron, fly-fishers all. Sounds like a band, I says. Taylor an’ the A Words. They like this. They’re floatin’ the Elkmoon despite it’s so small up here, in these itty-bitty pontoon craft, an’ every damn thing they own matches the boats. Itty-bitty tents. Itty-bitty coolers an’ camp stoves. An’ they’re all settin’ in itty-bitty no-leggèd ass-on-the-ground chairs. Taylor offers me his no-leggèd. If I was to set in that, I says, I’d never make it to my feet again an’ the day you buried me stuck to it you’d lose a slick little chair. They like this too.