Excerpt of The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass
(Page 2 of 9)
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He crashed heavily to the ground, as if attached to an invisible
tether; got up, ran once more, and fell again.
The cows and calves in his herd, as well as the younger bulls,
stared at him, trying to discern his meaning, and disoriented, too, by the
sudden explosive sound.
They stared at the source of the sound — Jyl had
risen to her feet and was watching the great bull’s thrashings, wondering
whether to shoot again, and still the rest of the herd stared at her with what
she could recognize only as disbelief.
The bull got up and ran again. This time he did not fall, having
figured out, in his grounded thrashings, how to accommodate his strange
new dysfunction so as to not impede his desire, which was to escape — and
with one leg and shoulder tucked high against his chest, like a man carrying
a satchel, and his hind legs spread wider for stability, he galloped off, running
now like a horse in hobbles and with his immense mahogany-colored rack
tipped back for balance: what was once his pride and power was now a
liability.
The rest of the herd turned and followed him into the timber,
disappearing into the forest’s embrace almost reluctantly, still possessing
somehow that air of disbelief; though once they went into the timber, they
vanished completely, and for a long while she could hear the crashing of
limbs and branches — as if she had unleashed an earthquake or some other
world force — and the sounds grew fainter and farther, and then there was
only silence.
Not knowing any better, back then, she set out after the herd
rather than waiting to let the bull settle down and lie down and bleed to death.
She didn’t know that if pushed a bull could run for miles with his heart in
tatters, running as if on magic or spirit rather than the conventional
pumphouse mechanics of ventricles and aortas; that if pushed, a bull could
run for months with his lungs exploded or full of blood. As if in his dying the
bull were able to metamorphose into some entirely other creature, taking its
air, its oxygen, straight into its blood, through its gaping, flopping mouth, as
a fish does; and as if it were able still to disseminate and retrieve its blood,
pressing and pulsing it to the farthest reaches of its body and back again
without the use of a heart, relying instead on some kind of mysterious
currents and desire —the will to cohere — far larger than its own, the blood
sloshing back and forth, back and forth, willing the elk forward, willing the elk
to keep being an elk.
Jyl had had it in her mind to go to the spot where the elk had first
fallen — even from where she was, fifty or sixty yards distant, she could see
the patch of torn-up earth — and to find the trail of blood from that point, and
to follow it.
She was already thinking ahead, and looking beyond that first
spot — having not yet reached it —when she walked into the barbed-wire
fence that separated the national forest from the adjoining private property,
posted against hunting, on which the big herd had been sequestered.
The fence was strung so tight that she bounced backwards, falling
much as the elk had fallen, that first time; and in her inexperience, she had
been holding the trigger on her rifle, with a shell chambered in case she
should see the big bull again, and as she fell she gripped the trigger,
discharging the rifle a second time, with a sound even more cavernous, in its
unexpectedness, than the first shot.
A branch high above her intercepted the bullet, and the limb came
floating slowly down, drifting like a kite. From her back, she watched it land
quietly, and she continued to lie there, bleeding a little, and trembling, before
finally rising and climbing over the fence, with its “Posted” signs, and
continuing on after the elk.
Copyright © 2006 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
