Where the Sea Used to Be Read Online Free PDF Page A

compare it to that he knew of. It was like being locked leg-in-leg and arm-in-arm with someone falling from the sky.
    When she made her turns—sinking even lower into a crouch to do so—roostertails of sunlit ice shavings sprayed them both. The wind from their speed was cold. They dropped lower down the mountain, descending, corkscrewing, as if into its interior. He could feel the pleasure coming straight through her—could feel it like heat conducted, as if it were his.
    They raced lower into the valley. The trees were immense, and the sunlight fell upon them in shafts. A rock wall appeared on their right. Snow-covered, it followed the road in a crooked, wandering weave, and seemed to Wallis to make the scenery not more bucolic, but wilder, as if they were going back in time, back to some time before true fences. The wall reminded him of the crude territorial boundaries of some feudal warlord. It was waist-high and constructed almost as if without seams, and he watched it, nearly hypnotized, instead of watching the woods. He tried to imagine such a seam of rock wall running underground, but couldn’t; the piston risings and fallings, the fracturings and grindings would in no way allow such a thing to travel that far uninterrupted, nor so gracefully.
    They skied across a wooden bridge. Dark water rushed beneath them, with steam rising where it passed into the sun. Snow and ice lacework fringed its edges, closing in on the stream from both sides.
    The rock wall passed through the stream—enormous rocks, now, to withstand ice floes and jams—and behind the wall, upstream, the water had backed into a pond of black water ringed by white bare-limbed aspen trees. The dark water behind the wall had not frozen yet, but something about the appearance of it made Wallis think that it was about to any day, any moment.
    He caught a glimpse of movement in the pond as they thundered across the bridge. Their sudden appearance had caused some great dark creature at the back of the pond to lift its head. It was a moose, chocolate-brown, with a mantle of snow on his head and wide antlers, his back freighted with snow. With water dripping from his muzzle, he watched the skiers, and Wallis wanted to stop and watch him. Standing knee-deep, serene amidst all that snow around him, the moose seemed somehow wise—his head huge as an anchor. But then they were past him, and there was only more forest, and rock wall, and they raced on, past more and more of it, as if it would never end.
    Around one corner, Mel tipped too far forward and hit a small bump—her eyes blurry with icicle tears from her speed—and they became airborne. There was an alarming moment when Wallis could feel her strength leave her, as she lost contact with the ground—it was as if he had his arms and legs wrapped around just any old person, rather than someone of such strength—and they cartwheeled wildly when they landed; and when they finally skidded to a stop, it seemed to both of them as if he had pursued and caught her, had tackled her, like some predator pulling down its prey. But she was the first one up, dusting herself off and then helping him up. No injuries. The buffering, the forgiveness, of snow.
    He climbed up on her back again, and they skied on. The snow crusted their faces like masks from where they had fallen, and caked their clothes: and doubled up as they were, humpbacked, they looked like some strange creature born from out of the snow.
    The road pitched and dropped. Wallis could see the river now through the trees, and was surprised at the size of it, for such a small valley. Again, he tried to imagine what story lay beneath it—whether the strike of the formations, the outcrops, was canted left or right—a reverse, normal, thrust, or slip-fault. He scanned the snowy mountains for clues, but it was impossible to say. He wondered again why Dudley had sent him up here in the winter, and what he would do during