Goat Mountain by David Vann

Author:David Vann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

13

DESERT THE HOME OF THE BIBLE. WE COME FROM DESERT. We’re meant to walk across dry ground, meant to breathe dry wind. This open glade of dry grass grown only to our shins, thin stalks with too much space between, not a place where more can grow. Hordes of us burning under the sun, water a clock and nothing more, step after step in our vast migrations, and how did we become so numerous?

Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel, then Abel is gone, but there are enough people for Cain to build a city. We are sudden apparitions, risen out of the dust in great armies as Cain walked toward where he would found that city. Cain and the others we remember from the Old Testament are demigods. Noah lived nine hundred and thirty years. But we are more ephemeral, risen and walking, made of dust but filled with thirst. Dust that will not rest. And this is god’s will, but his cruelty was to make the dust think, so that it would know its thirst as it walked.

Tom already far down that slope, a walker the same as thousands of generations before him, dissolving into the folds of earth, visible and then gone and then visible again, patterns sweeping over him, patterns he would not see or know but would participate in nonetheless.

And I followed, as of course I would. Walking is all we know. Only the broken lie down and refuse to walk. My father with all taken away: his rifle, his will, his future. There was nothing I could do but leave him. The feel of that ground beneath my boots, ripped and changed forever, sound of it against the wind, a scab-land of spiked burrs and yellow thorns, dislocated and without source, brought here and forgotten.

Some feeling of hope at the beginning of every walk, something in the act of setting out, a pleasure. The scattering of small lizards before me, bodies without momentum, a run and instant stop then run again. Gravity with no hold at that scale.

I looked for the tallest of the grasses and pulled one from the ground, bent the end back carefully and creased it over itself and tied to form a slipknot. Squatting with my rifle close, the stock of it on the ground and barrel on my shoulder. I kept an eye on Tom where he was disappearing below and also on the edge of the glade above, where my father and grandfather were lost to their own callings.

A small loop now at the end of the grass, slipknot noose for lizards, and I stood and walked carefully, each footfall held back and erased, and I followed these tiny remnants of time, plated backs and scaled necks, holes only for ears and expressionless mouth, eyes direct apprehenders of the world, no mediation, no thought. The first hunters and no desire to hunt but only shadows of movement and instinct to devour. If I held still, I became the same as any rock, unrecognized.

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