Where the Sea Used to Be Read Online Free PDF

the long months to keep his skills sharp, when instead he still could have been down on the Gulf Coast finding oil. Wallis wondered if it were a kind of punishment for his not finding enough oil. He thought he had been doing a pretty good job: not finding as much as Matthew, but finding a lot; and he was still learning. Matthew had peaked. Matthew was definitely finished with learning.
    Mel was skating now. They came around a corner and into town, still following the stone wall. Wallis saw buildings that he had not been able to see from the summit: a store on one side of the street and a bar on the other. A couple of dusty-windowed outbuildings, already snowed in for winter.
    There were horses, cars, and trucks parked on both sides of the street. Wallis glanced back and saw that two coyotes were running along behind them, but the coyotes turned back when they reached the edge of town and skittered into the woods.
    There were people standing out in the street in the sunlight, and there were long food-covered tables set out. Men, women, children, and dogs surrounded the tables. Steam rose from a turkey carcass as a huge man with a big black beard carved it. The children played bareheaded, threw snowballs, chased each other in circles. People stood in small groups, drinking hot coffee and cider, with steam rising from their cups.
    Mel skated up to the bar’s wood-rail porch and unloaded Wallis like a sack of mail—as if he were the one who was tired.
    A few faces turned to look at Wallis, briefly, but most stayed focused on the long tables of food. There was a roast pig, glaze-glistening with the apple still in his mouth, legs outstretched as if in flight. There was a little fire burning off to one side, and children roasted marshmallows on it. Wallis caught the scent of pumpkin pie. Mel and Wallis brushed the snow from their clothes and went into the bar.
    A roar came from the men and women gathered around the table as a gust of icy wind blew a funnel of loose snow down the lengths of the tables and swirled cyclone snow-devils off the roofs of the buildings. For a moment, all visibility faded—there was nothing but blowing snow, drifts and drifts of it—but then the wind paused, and the world filled with sunlight again, and the men and women and children resumed filling their plates.
    They brushed the windblown snow from the turkey carcass and brushed it from the pig’s head. The snow steamed from where it had landed on his hot back. They cut into him with silver knives. Steam rose from the ribs. Those gathered around the pig made small gasping and groaning sounds of pleasure as they tasted the meal, and their cries of approval brought others. More gusts of ground snow blew back in, obscuring their dark shapes: but Wallis could hear them, down there by the pig, as they fell upon the feast with what seemed like neither mercy nor thanks, only hunger.
    Â 
    D ANNY WAS THE OWNER OF THE BAR—THE RED DOG. IN one corner, a huge wood stove cast a ferocious heat. Dogs napped next to it, their fur steaming, and there were various articles of clothing hung on racks next to it to dry, and boots and more clothes scattered on the floor, also steaming, as if the bodies they housed had disappeared or been consumed from within. The heads of moose, wolf, coyote, lynx, bobcat, marten, fisher, elk, deer, caribou, bighorn, mountain goat, black bear, grizzly, whitetail, mule deer, mountain lion, badger, and wolverine stared down from the walls in such an assemblage of fang and horn that in viewing them a person felt neither awe nor a sense of majesty, but instead only a relief that the animals could do no harm, would forever be poised at the edge of no longer being able to do harm. And from that relief—the feeling that one was safe, and alive—came a feeling of security, if not comfort.
    Some of the dusty, patchy heads of the animals looked as if they had hung up there, straining to bite, for perhaps a hundred years.