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PARTISAN REVIEW
hunting the others. But when I got my feet into the sewer-pipe, and was
sure I was in that hole in the side of the sea-wall, that I had found it and
had come back to hide in it, I knew a little about things from the other
side that I hadn't thought about, or thought about enough. I knew
how the marmot feels when he makes it to his hole, how the badger
feels, how the snowshoe hare feels when he understands that the color
that's been given him is right, that it works, or works right now, any–
way, that nothing can get him because nothing can find him. Any animal
would have had a better hole than I had, but it was all the same thing;
we were in our place, me and the rest of them.
But my God, it was awful. I wasted another match, and risked
blowing up on shit-gas, to get back to the curve, and went on up be–
yond it and sat down in the shit and other slow-moving stuff. I waited,
but I couldn't stay there long, and edged on out toward the ocean until
I could see it, and smell it, through the shit and God knows what else
was in there.
All day, I was in it. All day, counting on the night and the fire. I
had put it into my head that I shouldn't show anything around the
curve of the pipe, because if anybody found the chute there would be an
all-out search; somebody might even have a look into the pipe, or at
least shine a flashlight up it. But I would be sure to hear them before
they did, and could duck back. So, as it turned out I spent most of the
day at the curve, looking out at the sky, which was a little blue circle at
the end of everything, and that filled up with whatever I wanted to be
there.
The caribou had been good to me, in my mind, especially since we
took the first hit in the '29; before that I hadn't known how good.
Them coming out of the woods was a beautiful thing to think. [n such
huge space they were, in snow that was more like ice, a little cautious, a
little slow, but all of them coming, and then all in the open, in the
overcast light that makes the snow more merciless than it is any other
time, in the long afternoon that never ends. And then they are gone off
into the winter range, and there's nothing left but the snow. Let there
be a little more fall-down, I said, more snow. The caribou are good; the
tracks are beautiful and good, but let the snow drift them down, let it
drift them under.
It happened. The eye of the pipe I was in went away so far that
there was not any more of it; everything there was snow. The snow of
the Brooks Range, or some other snow. But snow: snow: not a track
on it. I knew, then, what I needed to do. The little compass would
point north, no matter what I did; whether it was outside my body or
in it. North was north, and it would stay that way. And there was the
pull of something else to go with it; that other thing that was not called
j
