Goat Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

yards in every direction, the most gentle part of this mountain. Usually we’d stop and look all around with scopes and binoculars. But this time we drove on.
    Side roads heading down to our left, lower on the mountain, to switchbacks and several enormous glades and the burn and bear wallow and another reservoir. We owned this entire realm. It was ours. From this point, we could hike in any direction and not have to cross onto another’s land.
    I’d like to remember what that felt like, to own and to belong. I’ve lost the sense of it. I have no land now, and I can no longer visit our history.
    We drove through that familiar landscape and believed it would always be ours. It was so certain it was never even a thought.

4
    O UR CAMP IN A LARGE STAND OF PONDEROSA PINES, COOL and shaded. Always a breeze and the sound of that breeze in the treetops. A spring that ran cold and pure. Ferns and moss and mushroom. Miner’s lettuce we could pluck and eat fresh, bounty of the land. As close as we’d know to Eden, as close as we’d come to being able to return.
    My grandfather had built small waterwheels here, and several had survived the winter. Turning still in the stream, miniature engines of imagined villages, all built for me, and before that, for my father. Each made from only three small slats and two nails, but animated beyond that. The water shallow and clear across a wide delta of small islands, an entire land, a region twelve feet across, not yet carved into deeper channels or bends, a world too new to have left a mark.
    Downstream, at an impossibly larger scale, a pole lashed high between two trees, hooks hanging down by chains, one of them a scale for weighing bucks.
    From my earliest memories, all features of this camp had been in place and nothing changed. The spring fed into a black plastic hose that gushed without ceasing into a white basin, the stream three inches thick. Beside this, high wooden countertops, freestanding, for the Coleman stove and griddle and boxes of provisions, Tom’s place, the camp cook from before I could remember. All of it open to the pines above and the sky.
    Just down from this kitchen, close along the land of the waterwheel islands, a picnic table between two trees and a steep corrugated roof above. The primary structure of the camp, without walls, this open table, the place we gathered, where lanterns were hung and stories told.
    And that was it. Off in the trees, generations before me had left old rusty box springs, turned as brown as the pine needles, and farther off, a few pieces of plywood tacked between two trees for an outhouse.
    The camp an outpost in an enormity. The slope of pines extending above, gradual at first and then rising much higher along the mountain. We could see only the bases of dozens of trunks as they rose, a contour of land still to be discovered. And below us, the stream curled around and left a fringe of fern and pine and then a wide meadow. Dry yellow grass baking in the sun and filling this forest with light.
    All was ideal: the cool shade and breeze, the light, the sound of the stream and pines, the smell of sap and grass and fern, the history and feeling of arrival, of belonging. To me, this was the best part of every trip, the moment we found ourselves here again, the moment all the time between collapsed.
    I hopped down from that mattress. I was ready to set up camp.
    But my father and grandfather and Tom remained in the cab. There was no sound of talking. They were only sitting there. And when they emerged, finally, they didn’t look at me. They gathered at the back of the pickup and looked at the dead man, who lay still with his face to the sky and arms flung above and mouth and eyes open. As if he would take in all the world, all at once.
    I’m not touching him, Tom said. I’m no part of this.
    I wasn’t asking you, my father said.
    You had one chance to not be a part of this, my grandfather said. You could