At the sound of Chocolate Bar’s deep-throated growl, Jack scrambled to his feet and grabbed the Hawken rifle leaning against a scrubby white bark pine. He found the dog crouched at the foot of a massive basaltic boulder, baring his teeth at a buff-colored mountain lion. The cat had been stalking Jack and his dog all day, all the way up a steep ridgeline overlooking Hells Canyon, but Jack was surprised at the predator’s boldness now, venturing so close to his camp.
The cat let out a hair-raising howl, high-pitched and apocryphal, the kind of sound Jack imagined he’d hear the day he finally arrived in actual Hell. The dog’s growl was a low, dull rumble, like distant thunder gathering momentum. Jack’s mule, Hammertoe, shuddered and bucked at the end of her picket line. Her instinct was to run, but the picket kept her moving in frantic circles.
Jack wedged the Hawken’s worn maple stock between his shoulder and his cheek, aiming at the mountain lion’s chest. He felt the rifle’s cold trigger against his finger, but he didn’t pull. The cat was such a beautiful thing, so sleek and daring and dangerous.
Jack had loved mountain lions ever since the day he saw one sitting on top of a giant saguaro cactus. For all their beauty, all the elegance in their movements, all the heat in their fiery eyes, cats sometimes made spectacularly bad decisions. Jack, whose life had been one bad decision after another, understood the astonishment, the bewilderment, the futile regret of that cat on top of the cactus, almost as if they were kin.
He hollered—“Hey! Hey! Hey!”—and fired the gun in the air. The muscular cat took the warning and bounded away. She flew to the top of a rocky outcropping, fifteen feet or more in a single leap, and disappeared in the fading light just as silently as she’d arrived.
Chocolate Bar, about the same size as the cat, chased after her, snarling and full of bloodlust, but the dog couldn’t hope to match the mountain lion’s retreating speed. He ran back and forth from Jack to the base of the high, bony shelf where the cat had escaped, moaning and sniffing every footmark she’d left. Hammertoe trembled, brayed, and reared against her picket line, which only tightened the knot.
Jack stood in a patch of wild buckwheat, holding the hot-barreled rifle, breathing in gun smoke. “You’d have died gloriously if you’d caught her,” he told the dog, “but you’d have died all the same.”
Chocolate Bar yowled and whined and refused to come when Jack called him.
“I’m not drunk,” he told the insolent dog. “I missed her on purpose.”
Chocolate Bar stared at Jack doubtfully, but it was the truth.
Jack sat down on a dusty boulder, surrounded by mountains with names like He Devil, She Devil, Ogre, Goblin, Devil’s Throne, Mount Belial, and Twin Imps. Vertical walls of rock, covered with pictographs and petroglyphs, plunged thousands of feet from the high shelf where Jack had stopped for the night to the Snake River crashing through the narrow gorge below. He wondered how the ancient Indians had climbed those sheer canyon walls with their pots of ochre paint to record births and deaths and plagues on the face of the rock. He wondered how a spider could hang on there.
Jack took his supper from a pretty silver flask. Eventually, the truculent dog settled down beside him. Jack pulled pine needles, sticks, pebbles, and bits of grass from the dog’s bushy tail and used oil to remove gobs of sticky sap from the thick black fur around his neck. Forgetting his grievance, Chocolate Bar rolled over so Jack could scratch his tummy.
“Sometimes I think God put cats and women on this earth for the specific purpose of humbling men like us,” Jack told the dog, picking up their earlier conversation. “He knew full well how they’d taunt us.”
The dog stretched and yawned.
“You mustn’t ever let them see your desperation, though,” he said. “No whining. No moaning. No panting if you can help it.”
Chocolate Bar yawned and closed his eyes.
###
Three days earlier, Jack couldn’t have imagined he’d soon find himself camped in the Seven Devils, chasing Indians. Then again, three days earlier, his father’s house hadn’t been burned to the ground by the Nez Perce. Rescuers had combed through the smoking wreckage with rakes and shovels, searching for Sally’s corpse, but it had proven a futile task. If she was inside that house when the conflagration went up, her remains would never be identified. The fire had burned too blistering hot, reducing every shingle, every beam, every stick of furniture to cinders. Door hinges, jewelry, silverware, even pots and pans had been melted. Window glass had liquefied and cooled in iridescent pools beneath the ash. Two stone chimneys were all that remained, facing each other like forgotten sentinels.
Witnesses saw a Nez Perce flee the scene. Nobody mentioned a hostage, but that didn’t mean the Indian hadn’t taken Sally with him, in which case she might still be rescued. After sending a heartbreaking telegraph to his father, who was meeting with the governor in Boise at the time, Jack had gone out on his own, drunk as a boiled owl, vowing to bring Sally home. Now he was camped on the ridge overlooking Hells Canyon, which the local band of Nez Perce would have to traverse if they wanted to join the other hostiles.
Sally was the only mother Jack remembered, and though she could drop the temperature in a room ten degrees just by walking in, she and Jack had always shared a peculiar bond. When Jack’s father beat him, Sally would bring cold compresses to his room, touching his brow with her elegant hands. When Jack’s father spent the night with one of his whores, Jack would sit beside Sally on the porch, listening to her muffled sobs. They knew things about each other that neither one would ever share with another living soul. Wasn’t that the essence of family?
Jack’s father, Robert Peniel, had devastating flaws, but he wasn’t a bad man entirely. When Jack was a boy, his father would rise early each morning to start the fires, which would be blazing by the time Jack stumbled out of his room with his clothes in his arms to dress before the kitchen hearth. Peniel would be scalding his throat with coffee by then, measuring flour and lard into a bowl for biscuits, which he insisted on making himself. Biscuits were too important to trust to Sally, who made them hard and dry. “Like turds,” Peniel would say in an oft-repeated rant, which used to make young Jack laugh.
Breakfast would be a gluttonous affair, with eggs fried in butter, thick slabs of bacon slathered with maple syrup, and peaches fixed with cloves and soaked in brandy. Peniel’s biscuits came out of the oven hot and steamy so the honey and apple butter melted down Jack’s chin.
Over breakfast, Peniel, who usually hadn’t slept the night before, would read aloud from the Lewiston Telegraph, whose publisher was a friend, or from well-thumbed volumes by Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Shelley, and other sensualists, with his spectacles perched on his shark-fin nose. Jack loved the sound of his father’s deep, baritone voice. The man could be charming when he wanted.
Jack’s father had engaged in a number of vocations over the years—teacher, missionary, farmer, trader, lawman—but his real genius, the thing he truly excelled at, was lying. Peniel had a capacity for eloquence, camouflage, unverifiability, and inventiveness that was unequalled among even the most unrepentant charlatans. He’d once tried to tutor Jack in this industry, explaining that a good lie had to be delivered brazenly and unashamedly, with one’s shoulders thrust back and chin tipped up. It needed a few small bits of truth woven into the tapestry so it resembled something that might have been true under other circumstances. A good lie had to be alluring. It had to seduce you, irresistibly. There had to be artistry in it—beauty, almost.
Jack only ever knew one person who didn’t seem to understand, let alone appreciate, the occasional necessity of prevarication. Motsqueh and Jack had been six years old when they’d met at an orphanage where Jack’s father had left him for a while. The two boys sat beneath a giant cedar tree for hours, companionably mute, until they were called for a cold supper. The next day they played “quiet” again, but this time Jack’s new friend broke the silence, forfeiting the match.
“Take a breath,” Motsqueh said. “Now let it out. . . . Now take another breath. . . . Now let it out. . . . Now take another breath but hold it.”
Jack held his breath for one, two, three seconds.
“Now let it out. See? That didn’t hurt, did it? My mother died just like that. She was breathing and then she wasn’t. The next breath never came.”
“I didn’t see my mother die,” Jack said.
“Maybe she’s not dead.”
Motsqueh was like that. Tell him the mountains were created by an invisible trickster named Coyote, or that Jesus was born to a virgin named Mary, and he believed it unhesitatingly, but tell him that the paint on the porch rail was wet, or that someone you knew had died, and he had to see it for himself, or at least interview three eyewitnesses.
If Motsqueh had been around after Jack went to live with his father, he never would have believed the ridiculous explanations for Jack’s many injuries. The two boys would have played quiet, and Jack would have told his friend everything. Motsqueh would have told his older brother, Tiloukaikt, who would have done something about it. Maybe the two Cayuse would have helped Jack hide in the mountains. But Motsqueh died of measles when the boys were only eight, and his brother, Tiloukaikt, killed the doctor with an axe and was hanged before a cheering crowd. Years later, Jack whispered his secret into an empty tobacco tin, quickly tapped on the lid, and buried it next to Motsqueh and Tiloukaikt in the ground, hoping for supernatural intervention which never arrived.
After Motsqueh died, Jack found that he was one instead of two, and though he hadn’t studied his numbers much at that point, he understood that one wasn’t half of two. One wasn’t even one billionth of two.
The more Jack thought about Motsqueh, the more other people disappointed him. At boarding schools, apprenticeships, church socials, Jack always found himself standing slightly apart. He was the fish in a jar. The white crow in a flock of black ones. The pine scion ludicrously grafted onto an apple tree. He was always carrying things—a block of clay, a plaster mold, an empty bucket sometimes—as a buffer between himself and the people he might bump into on the street. He stared down at his shoes a lot. When someone tried to be friendly, he stared down at their shoes.
As the years rolled by, Jack found that things were easier, and so much more lyrical, when the whiskey flowed. Sure, his art had suffered. Sure, he’d lost Jessica. Sure, his hands shook and his stomach hurt almost all the time. And yet the whiskey kept him company. It covered up an overwhelming sense of loneliness that sometimes felt catastrophic. It made him forget that his name was Jack and that he slept alone in a cavernous studio with only a kiln and a forge for warmth at night. Like a beautiful woman or a worthy lie, good whiskey demanded his appreciation. Then it kicked him in the teeth.
“Damn it all,” he said out loud. He reached for the Hawken, poured powder down the barrel, added a patched iron ball, and pulled the hammer back to half-cock. He laid the gun in a rocky crevice, within easy reach, and pulled off his boots.
When the Nez Perce outbreak had begun, Jack had promised his father he’d drive Sally’s carriage to Fort Lapwai and leave her there in the care of friends. Instead, he’d passed out on his straw mattress with an empty bottle in his hand. A messenger had woken him later that night with the news that his father’s house had been torched.
The idea that Sally had been kidnapped rather than killed was a notion hatched by desperation more than rational thought. Jack sensed the cresting of a massive wave, and only this tiny, mad idea—that Sally was still alive—somehow kept it from breaking over and smashing him to bits.
He stripped to his cotton union suit and lay beneath the darkening sky. The canyon was noisy with tree frogs and boreal toads, screeching hawks and hooting owls, and the Snake River grinding through the deep gorge down below.
Lying in the unquiet dark, thinking about Sally, Jack fell into a hazy dream in which he’d somehow rescued her and delivered her safely back to Lewiston. In the dream, he could hear people murmuring that perhaps they’d misjudged him all those years, that perhaps he wasn’t as frivolous as many of them had believed, that sometimes he acted as white as any man. He was wearing a hat that he’d constructed entirely from orange peels, and this, too, seemed to impress the people in the crowd. Even his father seemed pleased with him for once. But naturally, and in due course, he woke up alone in the wilderness, almost embarrassed by the absurdity—the transparent neediness—of the dream. Chocolate Bar looked at him with such sympathy, Jack suspected that even the dog found him pathetic.
“You probably dreamed you caught and killed that mountain lion,” Jack said, “but you don’t see me pitying you for it.”
Chocolate Bar stood up and stretched.
“Half of life is hope, and that’s the half that sustains the rest,” Jack said. “She might still be alive.”
The dog ambled to a tree, lifted his leg, and trotted off.