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

And the heads of the prey, especially the deer and elk, looked different to Wallis—like different species or subspecies brought back from some distant continent—a red deer, rather than an elk—so that he wondered if that short stretch of time, a hundred years, had been able to produce some kind of speciation—isolating some traits in one population while gathering certain others, so that, while no one had been noticing it—death by death, and life by life—various new species, or subspecies, had been crafted, while old ones had fallen away.
    The thought of it made Wallis dizzy, as might a blasphemy to the ears of the devout. Wallis was so used to dealing in chunks of a hundred million years at a time—the birth and then total erasure (grain by grain) of entire mountain ranges—that the notion that anything of significance could occur in only a hundred years seemed to threaten who he was; or rather, who he had become.
    There were pictures of Matthew all over the walls too—and pictures of Mel, and Old Dudley, and Danny—and Wallis noticed that all of the pictures were old—the youngest of them from twenty years ago, it seemed.
    Was it his imagination, or were the smiles, the laughter, from those times more boisterous, more complete? He shook the thought away. These were the kind of thoughts that would impede his ability to dive into the boulder fields—to track the old paths of mountains as they moved across the landscape of the past like dunes of sand.
    Danny was bringing them drinks, and pouring one for himself. He kept shaking Wallis’s hand and patting him on the shoulder, touching him, saying how glad he was to have him in the valley, and asking about Matthew and Old Dudley. The feeling Wallis got from Danny’s enthusiasm was that Old Dudley and Matthew could do no harm, nor Mel either—and, by extension, neither could Wallis, now that he was among them. But Wallis also had the feeling—irrational, unprovable—that it was as if he, Wallis, had become trapped—coming in over the pass like that, just as the valley was being sealed in by winter’s snow—and that Danny’s pleasure was partly that of the trapper who, upon approaching his set, finds that he has been successful.
    â€œHow’s Matthew doing? Is he finding lots of oil? Are he and Dudley getting along? When are they coming back?” Danny was in his early fifties, flat-bellied, childlike. “Tell me about yourself,” he said. His eyes were pale blue, a shade that Wallis couldn’t remember having ever seen in a human before—almost like a Siberian husky’s, he thought—and Wallis wondered if, as with the heads of some of those animals, the color of Danny’s eyes was a color left over from the century before: like someone’s grandfather’s eyes, or even further back than that.
    â€œYou’ll be staying out at Matthew’s cabin?” Danny asked, with a glance at Mel. He gestured to the bar. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you’d rather—I’ve got an extra room in the back.” Mel smiled, shook her head, and said, “Relax, Danny, he’s not going to
ravage
me; I’m still Matthew’s girl.” Danny looked relieved, even hopeful, but said, “That’s not what I meant—I just meant, if he needed a place to work and concentrate, you know, be alone . . .”
    Mel smiled again. “I think it’ll be quieter for him out in the woods. Anyway, I won’t ever be home, except at night, when I get in from tracking. It’ll be fine,” she said. She laughed. “He’s not going to find anything, anyway. No offense,” she said, speaking to Wallis now, “but you’re not.”
    Wallis shrugged. “I didn’t come up here to fail.”
    Mel shook her head. “He sent you up here to train you and to play you against Matthew. The whole time