Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [78]
On the other side of the marsh, reached by the tenuous little bridge which ran above the twin culverts, lived a bull. He and a few scrawny chickens seemed to be the only nonhuman tenants of a farm on the skids. Its large barn was twisting dangerously on its foundation, like a set for some rural version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and there were never any people to be seen out-of-doors, though occasionally they would roar down the dirt road in large, antiquated cars. They did not slow down to wave to us.
The bull controlled his side of the marsh, which I would have been happy to leave to him except that there, just across the little bridge where dry land resumed, ran a wonderful road, actually the remains of an old railroad which had hauled away—hard now to believe—practically every tree in the region, late in the nineteenth century. The industry had ceased only because, after the clear-cutting, there was simply nothing left, though the train ran on, carrying lumbermen, till early in this century. The first owner of the camp was, in fact, a woman with a great fondness for lumberjacks; in those days there were no trees between the cabin and the tracks, and the story went that she’d hang out her laundry in the altogether just as the train went by, displaying her charms for the men en route. (She liked her whiskey, too; the woods turn up an inexhaustible supply of mossy bottles.) The railroad tracks and most of the ties are gone now, but the old bed winds on forever, through shady vales, past ferny cliffs of granite and deep, shadowy sloughs favored by moose, toward a number of small lakes. An old man who stopped his astonishingly decrepit army-green pickup on the road in front of the camp to talk to me one day told me a lovely story, about swimming with his Newfoundland dog in one of these ponds. He had been a teenager then, and had taken himself for a long, long hike across some trails we knew and some we did not, to arrive at a pond. Then he’d decided to swim across, and, in his exhaustion, something must have gone wrong. He came to some time later, on a large rock by the shore, the drenched Newfoundland towering over him; he had been rescued by the valiant pet.
Our noble pet seemed to lose his nerve in the presence of the bull; we’d carefully slink around the edge of his territory. Arden, never barking once, wouldn’t take his eyes off the bulk of the beast, standing spread-legged in his meadow, until we were well out of range. His caution turned out to be wise. One day, alone at the camp, Arden and I are walking down to look for beaver; the bull is himself out on the little road, near the bridge, and he decides that we have come quite close enough. He begins to walk toward us; I try acting nonchalant, but then decide that the appearance of fearlessness is an inadequate defense. We turn and begin to walk away, but hear behind us, gaining a little, the determined hoof steps of the bull. The bull is tall as me, wide as a small tractor, and horned. We walk faster. The bull walks faster, too, and I begin to think this is serious. I’m unsure if he wants me or Arden or both of us, but by this time we’re both panicked and start to run full-tilt, which only seems to pique the bull’s interest. He chases us all the way up the road back to the camp, and Arden and I race into the house, and I slam the door behind us, my heart racing as if it’s about to burst, Arden panting and pacing. The bull stands in the road in front of the house, pawing the dirt, snorting, triumphant.
If Wally had experienced this, I don’t think he