The Signal by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online Page A

silver rock run and capped most of the year with snow at the summits.
    “You get up here and you can see the planet again,” she said.
    “Our planet,” he said.
    “It’s not ours.”
    “You don’t know that. It looks like ours.”
    “You got any Vienna sausages?” she asked.
    “I might,” he said. “I’ve got this for you now.” He handed her a round of fresh pita bread and then a thick slice of yellow cheddar. He peeled the lid from a tin of sardines in olive oil and lifted half of them onto her open bread with his pocketknife.
    “All the food groups, thank you very much.” They ate in silence. It was strange and pleasant out of the wind, and they could now both feel the high chill of being sunburned.
    Then the trail was packed dirt winding down the first western slope, sage and berried-scrub and willows until they entered the trees again at a place they called the Gateway because of the great dead skeleton of a ponderosa standing over the trail, and high in it on a huge branch strung an old withered pair of hiking boots that had hung there through the years. Every time they saw someone barefoot in Jackson, one of them would say, I know where her shoes are, or I know where that guy could get a pair of boots. The descent leveled off and they crossed a tributary of the river, a stream that needed just a long step, and then the trail followed it gradually downhill. This became a valley that twisted north and south, the creek bubbling as they went and they moved apace. It was in this place that Mack always began to feel finally a long way from his truck, from town, from all of it. He could breathe; they were almost in.
    From here Mack could see the switchbacks of the western trail that led over the rim to Jackpine Lake, which was really three lakes, where his father had taken him when he was ten. It had been a great trip and a lesson, his father talking on the drive out from town, saying, “What have we got now?”
    “Sir?”
    “How many horses?”
    “Eleven.” Mack knew them all by heart.
    “Here,” his father said, “right now?”
    “None. No horses.”
    “And how many acres and ranches and buildings big and small, including tractors and saddles and tables and chairs and ladders and fences all totaled?”
    Mack looked at his father’s face as he drove. The faint smile. “None?”
    “That’s right, Mack. Just us and the truck and our gear, as I see it. You with me?”
    “Yes, sir, I am.”
    At the trailhead they’d packed up and when they had climbed over the first hill, he’d said, “And how many trucks?”
    “No trucks,” Mack had said.
    They’d camped at Jackpine, between the lakes, and the next day they’d walked around Larger Jackpine, and his father had said, “And now no tents, no pans, no stove.”
    “Daypacks and gear,” Mack had said.
    At the far end there was a rock spill onto which they walked. First they’d stashed their packs and stepped out carefully to fish.
    Mack already knew the answers. “Our poles and some gear.”
    “That’s about right,” his father had said. “You got your knife, Mack?”
    “My knife and some matches. Four flies.”
    “Well, this is very fine indeed,” his father had said. “We’re just about ourselves now. This is working perfectly. Three lakes and three days. We’re getting down to some very fine mathematics.” He swung his line free and gathered it back to cast. “Let’s fish.”
    Mack had looked at the man, sleeves rolled, lifting a cast out onto the blue-brown mystery of the lake surface, and that line marked the known world from the unknown, and Mack wondered how he understood the depth of this little bay, how he knew where the fish were, how he knew everything he knew. The wondering seemed to hurt Mack’s heart which he understood simply to be love, the aching desire to measure up, to master the mathematics.
     
     
     
    The stream joined the Wind River in a muddy open glade criss crossed with game trails, deer, elk, and