“Mountains are talkative if you shut off the mind chitter and listen,” she said. “You just have to know which mountains to believe.”

  While High El thrilled to think the mountains track his whereabouts and share the intel, Low El opined that only an imbecile would fail to realize the Informant long ago hid some kind of tracking device in his backpacking gear.

  •A final fruit of my “Union with a Capital-R Rock”: I had made my way up to Jade, the injured rib knifing me every breath of the way, set camp on the soft tundra close to the lake, and again slept fitfully due to rib pain. But at some timeless hour of the night I dreamt that no less a being than God visited me there at Jade, and the form God chose to take was female. Though no more visible than a heat shimmer over a sunbaked road, God the Mother swung low as the proverbial sweet chariot, a shimmery arm reached toward me out of nothingness, She reached into my body without shedding blood or inflicting pain, gripped my cracked rib in Her right hand, and Her touch was bliss as she slid, smooth as a knife from a sheath, three inches of rib bone out of me. In the loving heat of Her hand the bone then melted into a liquid the color of mercury, which began to set, becoming claylike though it retained its stunning mercury color. She fashioned this substance into a tiny woman whose body and close-shorn hair were the same shining silver, and the woman’s three-inch height and metallic fluidity caused her nakedness to appear exquisite, but sexually neutral. Then the mercury began to cool, turning to flesh as the woman began to stir, and the comeliness and grace of her form and movements aroused me despite her size. Given the other Female present, this shamed me, but God the Mother came to my rescue, dressing the woman in adorably tiny brown hiking boots, beat-up little blue jeans, and a sleeveless T-shirt of forest green. Mother God then set the woman in my hand, vanished without a trace, and there I stood gazing at an exquisite, newly minted woman kneeling, face lowered, on one knee in my palm. As she then raised her face and looked up into my eyes, three things slammed me.

  One: as her astounding eyes met mine, I suffered a thunderbolt dunderbolt loveblast like nothing I’d ever experienced.

  Two: the painful way she took to her feet left me certain she was mortally wounded in some way, and not long for this world.

  Three: I woke alone on the shores of Jade, looked at my palm, found it empty, pulled open the flap of the tent, saw that the impossibly deep waters in the predawn light were the same green as the wounded woman’s T-shirt, and somehow knew that God’s gift woman is as real as Jade, that I’m going to meet her one day, that she’s going to be as completely lovable and mortally wounded as I’d dreamt, and that my love will turn to heartbreak. When I then broke down sobbing, Low El Grady paid a visit.

  “Pathetic!” he snarled. “Bad-ass Glad-ass the Lûmi Info Bitch viciously cracks your rib for no reason, scoffs at your pain, and you’re so goo-goo about this touchy-feely Lûmi shite that your subconscious plays right into her abuse, causing a female Gawd to highjack your dreams, give the old Adam’s rib yarn a jujitsu flip, and make you the butt of a women’s lib joke starring the AARP magazine version of Tinker Bell! When you look deep into Granny Tink’s eyes, you then burst out sobbing at the tragic grandeur of it all. Frackwaw-voo! What kind of idiot are you?”

  “The kind who invented the wonder phrase ‘Frackwaw-voo,’” I calmly replied. “Thanks for liking my favorite gratitude-expletive enough to use it.”

  “Frackwaw you!” quoth Low El.

  •It is said in the Singings that there have been Lûmi in these mountains and valleys “since humanity was born,” and that “the One-Thousand-and-Five Summits, Nineteen Valleys, and Lûmi People created one another in the endless Now of the First Night and Day.” Though these phrases stop my reason cold, they connect, sans reason, to my enormous regard for the Informant, grouchy and in one instance violent though she can be, to say nothing of my love for the tiny broken woman Mother God bequeathed me in a dream, possibly triggered by Gladys’s well-aimed stone. Which returns me to the seemingly crucial question: Is the Informant a living Lûmi? She’s never come out and said so. But how can she if the Lûmi are takh-nekh-wakhul (no outward sign) in this lust-, greed-, and anger-crazed age of the world?

  Sharing her campfire on the shores of Pipsissewa again last summer, fussing with the fire’s symmetry as always, the Informant, apropos of nothing we’d been doing or saying, all of a sudden said, “There’s something you’re ready to know. The purpose of Lûmi life is to reinhabit the Now of the First Night and Day.”

  Cutting off any question with which I might have peppered her, she added, “To speak more of this is without purpose.”

  With no goading from me she then added: “It is without purpose because, though any story is a saying, every story but the First Saying has a limited life span. The First Saying has no life span.”

  In what was amounting to a soliloquy by her niggling standards, she said, “The First Saying becomes audible, in our little cosmos, when a pilgrim has traversed the One-Thousand-and-Five Summits and mastered the One-Thousand-and-Five Sayings. At which point the pilgrim too has no life span.”

  Cool as a cup of water freshly lifted from a mountain spring, she said, “I seem to describe an impossible task. But know this, friend Grady. The One-Thousand-and-Five Sayings are learned in a split second.”

  Becoming friend Grady at the same instant I was told of an experience that defies the limits of space, time, and memory filled me with an energy I’d never known.

  “When a Loop traverser sets eyes on the Gahan-ka’isht,” she said, “they see an ordinary person, but that person is singing, or effortlessly ringing, with a continual note. The One-Thousand-and-Five Sayings are all contained in that incomparable note.”

  A storm of gratitude struck as I realized that not only was the Informant sharing huge secrets, she’d come a hell of a long way via trails dangerous on horseback and worked an eleventh straight Wise-Woman-Finds-Grady’s-Manger miracle to do it. The charged look in her ancient eye then struck a match, an Other-than-me flared to life in my place, my self-doubt, self-consciousness, self-disgust fell away, and whoever now breathed in me did not just look at the old woman seated across the fire; his gaze entered the gaze she was sending, fused with it, and at the same time I was me gazing at her, I was her gazing across at me. We didn’t just mirror one another. We were one another, separate but fused as if “in the Now of the First Night and Day.” And what are those old Greco-Roman or Sanskrit words for the Source Flame that is our very life? Agni? Helios? That Flame, pouring out of my eyes in a stream smooth and dense, met the same Flame pouring from her eyes, the flames fused, what I want to call an “Immensity of Mercy” welled up out of the batholith beneath us, my limits were exceeded, the container named Grady burst, exploding out to fill the next available container: the One-Thousand-and-Five Summits and Nineteen Valley fastnesses of the Lûmi Cosmos! The Immense Mercy poured from night shadows into all creatures, all vegetation, all objects, infusing the eagles on their aeries, the hummingbirds awaiting the nectar of gentian fields, the ladybugs enduring eight or nine frigid months under mountaintop scree. In the fiery exaltation of the inpouring and outflowing Helios gaze, the Mercy just as improbably permeated pika pellets, moose flops, biting flies, predator kills, and a self-involved hundred-seventy-pound agglomeration of flesh, blood, neuroses, dirty Smartwool socks, pitch-stained jeans, way-making boots, and immortal spirit the Informant had always taken the trouble to call “Grady Haynes” until the Mercy upgraded him to “Friend Grady,” causing everything Low El and High El once hated about each other to be mercy-attacked, mercy-infused, mercy-erased, and their long-running effort to destroy each other was not only over, it was no more worthy of note than the winter-sterilized bird dropping lying atop the largest rock in our fire ring.

  I somehow felt directed to reach out and pick up this bird dropping. The instant I did so the Immensity of Mercy seemed to complete its work, and I began spiraling outward till I found myself back in my workaday body and mind. And if I might lapse into my workaday parlance, the Informant’s response to all of this was so fucking perfect: with the most understated, birdlike expression of wonder I’ve ever seen, she did a little chin cock, the way an old-school cowboy does on the day he first fully accepts you as part of his world and crew.

  I didn’t just revel in the cool of her gesture: I appropriated it. Gazing up at the mountains, I said, “Fourteen straight summers I’ve hied on up here, seven of ’em to cross paths with you because the mountains told you where I’d be.” I did the chin cock. “I figure this, plus the two-way seeing that just befell us, makes me local enough in these parts to have earned some kind of local name. What do you think?”

  “Not only was I thinking the same,” she said, “a name just came to me.”

  “What name might that be?” I coolly asked.

  “Bird-Dropping-Me,” said she.

  I looked at the little present between my right thumb and index finger. “Bird-Dropping-Me. It does have the right ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  The Informant smiled the closest thing to a loving smile I was ever to see on her face, considered me in silence, then took on gravitas the way she can. “I’m going to say two simple things, and you need to hear them perfectly. Just you, Bird-Dropping-Me. Not those other two ding-dongs you used to drag up here.”

  Bird-Dropping-Me was amenable to this request.

  “One,” she said. “What just happened was a birth. A child of the mountains has been delivered into the world to which he belongs. To see that finish line is not to cross it. The mountain child is just our partner, Bird-Dropping-Me. But his birth is as real as these mountains.”

  Bird-Dropping-Me gave her the chin cock.

  “Two. In case you think you just saw your destiny revealed, I repeat. To traverse the Loop is too much for a human life span. It would break you a hundred times. That’s why, to see with the Lûmi Seeing, we don’t wait lifetimes. We leave time via a coming and going as extra-natural as the arrival and departure of the Elkmoon snows.”

  Leaving those words suspended in the firelight, my friend did her ablutions by the lake, and retired to her tent. But I stayed on by the embers under slow-circling stars, praying to the peaks a little, crying a little when they’d whisper back as never before, my heart going out and out as, down through the diaphanous night blue, the mysteries continued to come rattling.

  In the morning the Informant groused and grumbled as she broke camp, refusing my help as always as she heaved her panniers up onto Mo and Anon. Noticing that her ability to work with the Belgians was giving out half broke my heart, but turned every moment we’d ever shared invaluable. Mounting up, she lined her horses out, nudged Ho close, gave me a look that did nothing to disguise her affection, then reached in a saddlebag, dug out a leather sheath, and handed it to me. “Don’t let the two ding-dongs even touch this,” she growled. “This parting gift is for no one but Bird-Dropping-Me.”

  The words parting gift broke my heart the rest of the way, making my hands a little shaky as I took hold of the sheath and drew out an old arborist’s saw. Unfolding the curved twelve-inch blade from the hardwood handle, I found it razor-sharp, with excellent bite, like the gift’s purposefully cranky giver. From that day forward every fire I’ve built has been as tidy and close to smokeless as Gladys’s own.

  When I thanked her with a final cool chin cock, she let out her llama bleat, nudged Ho forward, raised her left hand high and kept it high, without once looking back as she rode out of sight, and my heart hurt in ways it had never hurt before. But so did it keep pumping the blood as far from the heart as it can go until, at the end of every least capillary, back it turned toward the heart’s life-giving chambers, enabling my very pulse, when I set out the next morn for low elevation, to assure me I needn’t strive to be more than, and have nothing more to lose than, every earthly drop of water on its prayer-wheel journey, mountains to rivulets to rivers to ocean to rising vapor to cloud banks—and ever again inland to the mountains it blankets in the Beginning we call snow.

  II. Romeo Shows Jamey the Door

  (Portland and the Oregon coast, January 2000)

  All beings are. They never are not. They are either alive or between. There is, hypothetically, a split second between life and the between that is properly called death. A boundary. A line with no width. Something ultimately not there except as an arbitrary border.

  —Robert Thurman, Circling the Sacred Mountain

  ON FEBRUARY 19TH, 2000, Jamey Van Zandt held his best friend in his arms, nodded to the doctor standing over them, then watched that doctor, in obedience to his nod, end his friend’s life via lethal injection.

  This world being a cauldron of war, violent separation, murder, injustice, suffering, it sounds anticlimactic to admit that this friend was just a black and tan border collie. But it’s true. Jamey loved a lot of people a little and a few people a lot, but in duration of intimacy he’d been closer to Romeo than to any human he’d ever loved, and even in degree of intimacy, he had, in many ways, been closer to Roams than to Risa and their toddler, Fionn—of whose birth I will speak later. Jamey and Risa had become very close fast, but Risa had not spent eighteen years imbibing his every gesture of hand, meaningful or meaningless word, facial expression, odor; eighteen years jumping up out of sleep just to track Jamey’s unconscious pacing as he talked on the phone, guard his wee-hour insomnia attacks, join him on every trip to the garbage can, corner convenience store, mailbox. Nor had Risa insisted, as Romeo had every morning of his life, on following Jamey down the hall to lie outside the bathroom door as Jamey moved his bowels, greeting him when the door opened, seven thousand times in a row, with grins, dancing, and tail wags of such contagious delight that Jamey too sometimes felt he’d accomplished something remarkable in there. For eighteen years he and Roams were a six-leggèd, two-headed, one-tailed unit so constantly fused that most people found them ridiculous at first. But as years would pass and they’d bump into the Jamey-Roams Unit again, something would flip like an egg over easy inside them, and the ridiculous would become the exemplary. Yes, Romeo was “just a dog.” But he embodied a love that came within a single condition of attaining the transcendent level known as “the unconditional,” and the only condition Romeo placed on his love was a burning wish that Jamey never, even briefly, leave his sight.

  So that’s who, on February 19th, Jamey held in his arms. That’s whose adoring brown eyes he gazed into, then turned from, to nod to the animal doctor. That was the beloved sixty-pound piece of himself he then watched die via the requested injection.

  WHAT DID THIS sundering do to the now two-leggèd and tailless survivor? When I later asked, Jamey quoted Emerson: “There is a crack in everything God has made.” He then told me that Romeo, as his parting gift, cleaved the very crack in Existence that serves the spirit as door, offering a deathless exit out of the doom to which birth fatally binds us. “This isn’t hocus-pocus,” he insisted. “The door was palpable. Invisible, yes, but as real as a sudden zephyr. I felt it all through my body.”

  To preface this door, all that need be said is that eighteen years caused the canine portion of their oneness to grow ancient while the human portion did not. Romeo’s sight and hearing faded. His teeth became nubs. Arthritis turned his paws into something more like flippers. The hard month of January then delivered the coup de grâce. Behind the Poor Man’s Penthouse was a sidehill yard with a concrete goldfish pond. In exchange for maintaining the pond and picking up the dog berries, Jamey won Romeo lavatory rights among the azaleas above the pond. One cold morning he let Roams out to use his lavatory, whistled for him twenty minutes later, and walked out wondering why he failed to come. Romeo’s hips had collapsed, sending him rolling down the embankment and through the thin ice of the pond, where he stood submerged to the neck. And because Jamey, years before, had forbidden him to bark in the yard early lest he wake the neighbors, Roams had kept silent. Dying of hypothermia, he would have stood in the icy water obeying Jamey’s order till his spirit left him. “Tell me of a higher love if ever you hear of one,” Jamey told Risa when he carried Romeo up into the penthouse.

  Within two days a sinus infection developed, and grew chronic. The recommended drugs didn’t cure the infection but they did make Romeo incontinent. Mortification at every indoor mistake was now as palpable in his eyes as his love. Too sick to remain at Jamey’s side even in the Nautilus, he stayed home alone for the first time in his life. When Jamey, Risa, and Fionn were out, the infection caused him to sneeze convulsively to clear his sinuses, but the arthritis destroyed his ability to control the sneezes, so he’d smash his muzzle on the floor, causing profuse nosebleeds. These too mortified him. When Jamey and family got home, bloody paw prints showed how Romeo had hobbled round and round the apartment, trying between sneezing fits to lick up the blood he kept spilling. Trips to the vet accomplished nothing.

  One morning Jamey called Romeo so he could take him outside. Romeo stepped out of the Nautilus, took two steps, went splay-leggèd, and collapsed on the floor. Watching from the kitchen, Risa began to cry as Jamey stood him back up, but Romeo lay back down, gazing up at Jamey with an expression Risa and Jamey clearly saw as a plea for the only help remaining. As Roam’s namesake had put it,

  Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear

  As will disperse itself through all the veins

  That the life-weary taker may fall dead,