Brogue 2007 - Belhaven College

t h e b r o g u e
merely shrugged.
“Look around you. This isn’t a playground. I told her to stay at home.
Wild things never listen: you can’t reason with them, and you can’t get them
to listen.”
“Well I’m going to need you to come into town with me so we can
put down your statement. I’m not arresting you; it’s innocent till proven
guilty—” Bob snorted, but it was a small explosion behind Danny that
stopped him mid-sentence. He spun around to see the team backing away
from what appeared to be another fuel canister. It was only a quick glance,
but when Danny turned back Bob Abies was gone. There were no leaves disturbed
from his flight, no branches swaying, no footsteps in the distance. It
was as if he had never been there, as if no conversation had occurred. Often,
Danny wondered if it had.
$ $ $
Olympic covers a million acres, at least, and anything left outside on
the Peninsula will dissolve with time, dissolve or be overtaken by the prolific
growth of ferns and briars. Bob remembered once when he was a ranger, he
spent two years digging out a trail that had been unused for five years and
was swallowed back by the forest. He knew this land better than anyone else.
He was only a quarter Quileute and didn’t put much stock in the taxilit,
not for him at least. He’d tried it once: he went out in the woods for two
weeks when he was twenty-four, had waited for a totem animal or a spiritual
revelation, but none came. Instead he felt a gradual dying away of one world
and an awakening to intricacies of another—the homey scent of loam, the
saplings that sprung up from nurse logs, the way fern fronds curled at their
tip and raindrops hung from them late in the afternoon, each gleaming in the
liquid sunlight until time itself seemed to stop. Bob saw all these things and
returned refreshed but disappointed to his station.
Decades later he stood on a bluff and started in amazement as a doe
walked softly across the crescent of sand of the beach beyond. The tide was
in, the rock yard was hidden, and thick fog rolled in with the waves. She
looked at him once before disappearing into white, and as he met her eyes,
he felt a deep peace with nature and with himself. He caught his breath and
hiked down to Rialto, where a few tourists braved the elements to watch the
fierce winter sea. Bob could see in the distance the dismal Makah fishing village
and little James Island, and he knew that somewhere in the fog beyond
was James Island, A-Ka-Lat, the one-time burial place of chiefs. The island
was only a sea stack; it was once the shore he stood on, land reclaimed by
the ceaseless workings of the sea. Bob felt young when he stood beside the
ocean. He was older than anyone knew, just well preserved by the elements,
and was sick of the sight of people, of all people, of the spectacle the land
had become, the developing resorts, the socially-conscious tourists ferried
38