Read Online The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson - Free Book Online Page B

was in this last light that we saw them— hooters , that was the name our father used—a covey of wood grouse dodging through a broken tumble of sharp gray talus rock.
    “Look,” Gary said. “There.”
    I picked up a stone about the size of a baseball andwatched them—imagining myself a hunter of wild animals.
    “They’re beautiful,” Gary said. “Just look at them.”
    I let fly hard and in the gray light the covey scattered, a drilling of buzzing wings, birds tossing themselves down the mountainside, but one seemed to leap up so that for a moment it was painted like a shadow against the sky, the tips of its wings wide, a sound like whoot whoot whoot whoot whoot to-whoot aimed at the heavens, it did a half-roll in midflight and plummeted, describing an arc, headlong into the darkening scree.
    “Jesus,” Gary said. “What did you do that for?”
    I had no good answer. I said, “I didn’t think I was going to hit one, Gary.”
    We went down and stood by her where she was dying among the rocks. She was a large female—soot-colored tail feathers, some white hind shafts, a narrow, bluish band where her flanks narrowed. My stone had caught her flush in the breast. One wing had been crushed in her fall to earth.
    “Jesus,” Gary said. “Look what you did.”
    I didn’t speak, though. What could I say? We stood there, the two of us, watching her.
    “Jesus,” Gary said again.
    There was nothing left for her. The other birds were long gone. The one good wing only twitched along the rock. Her life flowed out of her, into the scree, back into the earth it had come from.
    “I’m going to finish this pain,” Gary said. “God forgive me.”
    There were tears in his eyes I hadn’t figured on.
    He put his boot on the dying bird’s head—the sole over one alert, clear eye—and ground it suddenly into the rock while the wings gave a last frenzied shudder. They flutteredout to their full span spasmodically in the moment just before she died.
    “That’s it,” Gary said, not ashamed of his crying—just crying now while he spoke to me. “That’s all it is. That’s all there is to it, Bud.”
    We went down the mountain and around the canyon head to Wall Lake. No trout were feeding there; not a sound except the croaking of the marsh frogs.
    After we had eaten the pinto beans with chili powder and white rice for supper we sat by the propane stove for a while.
    “How has it been?” Gary asked. “What have you been up to?”
    I told him about not making the basketball team, the fight I’d had with Mike Kizinski, other things that didn’t really matter.
    “I like hearing all this,” Gary said. “Tell me some more, Bud.”
    But I didn’t. I was young and didn’t know any better. So instead I asked him about the thing on my mind: “Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” I said.
    “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam?” said Gary.
    “Did you?”
    “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam,” said Gary. “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam.”
    And again he began to cry silently, in a way I hadn’t figured on at all.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”
    But he went on crying. He cried with no shame. He criedin a way I didn’t think was possible. He didn’t rub his eyes or try to stop it. He just cried.
    Later we took down our sleeping bags from where they’d been airing over the branch of an arctic pine, and laid them out on the flat ground we’d cleared the night before. The two of us lay buried in our bags, only our faces showing, the drawstrings pulled around our heads so that the spilling of the snowmelt over the pebbles in the streambed was like a muted roar, a streaming music beginning and ending in our ears. We lay there side by side staring up at the stars, and talked about how unfathomable was the phrase light years , the possibility of life on Saturn’s seventh moon, the years that would have to pass before NASA put a man on Mars. We talked about a theory Gary read about in a book—that time and space didn’t