282
PARTISAN REVIEW
and away it went. The current caught it right off and carried it
out and you watched
it
till it was out of sight!"
The two had now reached a clearing
in
the forest where a few
gray squirrels were scampering about on the grass. A dark-browed
Indian in a windbreaker, utterly absorbed by his friendly task, stood
with a sleek black squirrel sitting on his shoulder nibbling popcorn
he was giving it from a bag. This reminded them to get some peanuts
to feed the bears, whose cages were over the way.
Ursus Horribilis:
and now they tossed peanuts to the sad lum–
bering sleep-heavy creatures-though at least these two grizzlies were
together, they even had a home-maybe still too sleepy to know where
they were, still wrapped in a dream of their timberfalls and wild
blueberries in the Cordilleras Sigurd and Astrid could see again,
straight ahead of them, between the trees, beyond a bay.
But how should they stop thinking of the little boat?
Twelve years it had wandered. Through the tempests of winter,
over sunny summer seas, what tide rips had caught it, what wild sea
birds, shearwaters, storm petrels, jaegers, that follow the thrashing
propellers, the dark albatross of these northern waters, swooped upon
it, or warm currents edged it lazily toward land-and blue-water
currents sailed it after the albacore, with fishing boats like white
giraffes--or glacial drifts tossed it about fuming Cape Flattery itself.
Perhaps it had rested, floating in
a.
sheltered cove, where the killer
whale smote, lashed, the deep clear water; the eagle and the salmon
had seen it, a baby seal stared with her wondering eyes, only for
the little boat to be thrown aground, catching the rainy afternoon
sun, on cruel barnacled rocks by the waves, lying aground knocked
from side to side in an inch of water like a live thing, or a poor
old tin can, pushed, pounded ashore, and swung around, reversed
again, left high and dry, and then swept another yard up the beach,
or carried under a lonely salt-gray shack, to drive a seine fisherman
crazy all night with its faint plaintive knocking, before it ebbed out
in the dark autumn dawn, and found its way afresh, over the deep,
coming through thunder, to who will ever know what fierce and
desolate uninhabited shore, known only to the dread Wendigo, where
not even an Indian could have found it, unfriended there, lost, until
it was borne out to sea once more by the great brimming black tides
of January, or the huge calm tides of the midsummer moon, to start
its journey allover again--
