In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass Read Free Book Online

fur, but it wasn’t a bear cub. Perhaps it was some rare animal, something from Canada—maybe something no one had ever seen before. Whatever it was, it never grew from year to year, yet it seemed young somehow, as if it might someday grow. It would rip out of the woods, a fleet blur headed for its burrow, and as soon as the dogs saw it, they would be up and baying, right on its tail, but the thing always reached its burrow under the chicken house just ahead of them.
    Glenda and I would sit at the window and watch for it every day. But it kept no timetable, and there was no telling when it would come, or even if it would. We called it a hedgehog, because that was the closest thing it might have resembled.
    Some nights Glenda would call me on the shortwave radio. She would key the mike a few times to make it crackle and wake me up, and then I would hear a mysterious voice floating in static through my cabin. “Have you seen the hedgehog?” she would ask sleepily, but it was never her real voice there in the dark with me. “Did you see the hedgehog?” she’d want to know, and I’d wish she were with me at that moment. But it would be no good; Glenda was leaving in August, or September at the latest.
    â€œNo,” I’d say in the dark. “No hedgehog today. Maybe it’s gone away.” Though I had thought that many times, I would always see it again, just when I thought I never would.
    â€œHow are the dogs?” she’d ask.
    â€œThey’re asleep.”
    â€œGood night,” she’d say.
    â€œGood night.”
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    One Thursday night I had Tom and Nancy and Glenda over for dinner. Friday was Glenda’s day off from running, so she allowed herself to drink and stay up late on Thursdays. Before dinner, we started out drinking at the saloon. Around dusk we went down to my cabin, and Glenda and I fixed dinner while Tom and Nancy sat on the front porch, watching the elk appear in the meadow across the road as the light faded.
    â€œWhere’s this famous hedgehog?” Tom bellowed, puffing a cigar, blowing smoke rings into the night, big perfect O’s. The elk lifted their heads, chewing the summer grass like cattle, the bulls’ antlers glowing with velvet.
    â€œIn the back yard,” Glenda said as she washed the salad greens. “But you can only see him in the daytime.”
    â€œAww, bullshit!” Tom roared, standing up with his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He took off down the steps, stumbling, and the three of us put down what we were doing to get flashlights and run after him to make sure he was all right. Tom was a trapper, and it riled him to think there was an animal he did not know, could not trap, could not even see. Out by the chicken house, he got down on his hands and knees, breathing hard, and we crowded around him to shine the flashlights into the deep, dusty hole. He made grunting noises that were designed, I suppose, to make the animal want to come out, but we never saw anything. It was cold under the stars. Far off, the planting fires burned, but they were held in check, controlled by back-fires.
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    I had a propane fish fryer, and we put it on the front porch and cut the trout into cubes, rolled them around in flour, then dropped them in hot, spattering grease. We fixed about a hundred trout cubes, and when we finished eating there were none left. Glenda had a tremendous appetite, and ate almost as many as Tom. She licked her fingers afterward, and asked if there were any more.
    After dinner we took our drinks and sat on the steep roof of my cabin, above the second-floor dormer. Tom sat out on the end of the dormer as if it were a saddle, and Glenda sat next to me for warmth, and we watched the fires spread across the mountainside, raging but contained. Below us, in the back yard, those few rabbits that still had not turned completely brown began coming out of the woods. Dozens of them approached the greenhouse, then