Going to the Sun by Jean Craighead George
“I’m happy,” she said presently, and he buried his nose in her dusty curls.
Soon after the sun had set, a thin line of smoke spiraled out of the shadows at the end of Sky Lake.
“Someone’s camping down there,” he said. “Whoever you are, go away. There’s no more room in Paradise.”
8
ANDROMEDA
At dawn Marcus awakened to the tattoo of rain on the roof of the tent. He had planned to climb the Jaw but now it would have to wait. The rocks were dangerous in the clouds and rain, and so, he decided, today would be the perfect day to build the fireplace he had been planning—a circle of rocks with an air current for a chimney, like the fireplaces in the Indian teepees. It would warm the tent in the cold autumn. When the snows came they would move down-mountain with the goats.
The rain stopped. He dressed quietly, left Melissa sleeping and went into the meadow to gather flat rocks. The Jaw was in clouds, the Tent Glacier and the ledges were lost in fog. Only the meadow was clear. It was now the top of the world, a jade-green pincushion stuck with red and blue flowers.
He carried the rocks into the tent and placed them in a circle beneath the window. Then he went outside, cut the window flap in half and tied strings to each part. These he knotted on the twisted firs of the windbreak in such a way that the flaps formed a funnel. Gathering dead fir limbs, he went back inside and lit his fire.
It crackled, sparked, and burned brightly. The smoke streamed out the window as if pulled by magical forces.
“Hey,” said Melissa, opening her eyes. “A fire—a warm cozy fire. We can stay here all winter.” She crept out of her bag and held her hands to the flames. Marcus put on a bucket of tea water and sat down beside her.
Thunder rumbled and cracked over the Jaw, the rain pelted, and Marcus and Melissa reclined luxuriously against their sleeping bags, the fire lighting their faces and spirits.
“A nanny goat for your thoughts,” Melissa said.
“Okay.” He leaned forward and gazed into the fire. “I keep thinking about your plant and bite chart. Since the plants are flourishing so well it must mean that all the goats are not on this side of the Jaw. My father said there are about a hundred up here. The herd has been split. Perhaps the lumber road has cut them off. That’s it. The road.”
“Even if there were a hundred more goats,” she snapped, “they would still eat and crop the same way. They would eat the new shoots and leave the old to go to seed because that’s how they eat.” She folded her arms on her chest. “I’ve been down on my hands and knees watching.”
Marcus felt annoyed. Melissa should be cooking, cleaning and tending their home. He placed a hand on each knee and stared at his boots. She opened her botany book and picked up a leafy plant.
“A good course in botany would be exciting,” she said and lapsed into silence. Marcus glanced at her. A botany course! he thought. And then what? College? Marcus felt suddenly deserted.
An hour passed, the rain stopped and the wind blew more softly. Marcus went outside.
Clouds sailed down the Jaw, poured out across the ledge and flowed off the cliff. They gathered over Sky Lake, white and wind-shredded, then vanished into the rocks. The sun came out.
Marcus picked up his day pack, some nuts and raisins, and started off for the Jaw. As he passed through the meadow he saw Andromeda and Remus. They were grazing beside Helen and Romulus. He noted with interest that the nanny group was peaceful. Now that Remus had a step-mother, no one charged him.
What did this mean? How did it fit the hunting picture? It must have something to do with the surplus, he kept wanting to believe.
Marcus felt as if he were being watched. He spun around. Old Gore stood above the meadow on one of the rocky pinnacles, twisting his head slowly from side to side as he studied Marcus, first with one beady eye and then the other. He did not have to focus them both together as people do, for his widespread eyes could see either separately or together. Goats’ eyes detect even the slightest quiver on the vast landscape, for these eyes were evolved to protect the goat from the tremors of the mountain as well as the stalk of the hunter. Old Gore aimed his dagger-like horns at Marcus and bucked.
“You do have it in for me,” Marcus said as Old Gore pressed a two-toed hoof on a sliver of rock, pinched with this tool-like equipment and leaped over an escarpment. The cascades roared and the wind screamed crazily. Marcus shook his fist at the goat and the Jaw.
He hiked up the saddle, crossed the raw stones of the glacial bowl and came to a gigantic wall. Placing his hands on red mudstone, he climbed the rock steps of the mountain. Suddenly Old Gore appeared at the top of the wall. He glanced down at Marcus. From below, his black lips formed a stony grin and Marcus could not help himself.
He sighted in on an imaginary gun and the goat sprinted out of sight.
Using hands and feet, Marcus picked his way up the wall. The water cascaded white-and-silver at his side, and bits of clouds whisked past him. Not even the dipper bird of the alpine waterfalls dwelled in these high barren cascades, for he was at ten thousand feet, well above the last wind-twisted tree. Marcus had climbed to the tundra of the Rocky Mountains, the lichen-and-moss world of plants. He felt the force of the wind and understood why trees could not grow here. Picking hand- and footholds, he scrambled up to the ledge, stopped and peered up at the Jaw. Another thousand feet and he would be at the top.
Old Gore was also going to the peak. He moved upwards as if there were no gravity, smoothly as if the rocks were a plane.
Marcus jogged along an ancient goat trail on the ridge, scaled a mammoth boulder and arrived at the foot of the chimney, formed when molten lava intruded into a fracture in prehistoric times. He looked up. At last the mysterious peak of his childhood was at his fingertips.
Placing his feet and hands on either side of the chimney, he crawled up like a fly. The wind screamed down the shaft and dampness seeped from its sides. Inch by inch he moved upwards until he threw his leg over a limestone slab and lay on the top.
Slowly Marcus stood up. The great mountain rolled out from his feet. Valleys, rivers, forests spread out to meet the distant prairie to the east. The Canadian Rockies to the north, and the saw-tooth landscape of Idaho to the west.
He breathed the thin air and cheered. He, Marcus Kulick, was on top of the great Jaw at long last. An eagle soared out over the mountain, twisted its head and eyed him with curiosity.
“Hi, brother,” he called aloud.
Then he glanced down at the north face of the Jaw. Felled trees lay on its lower side like splinters. They were strewn in the mud and along the winding logging road. “They have clear-cut,” he said as he studied the mountain side. The few goat ledges that circled above the forest had been cut up by bulldozers and maimed by truck wheels. The great Douglas fir forest was gone, the subalpine firs ripped up, and the meadows were beaten to dust and blowing away in the wind.
Not a goat wandered the north side of the Jaw. Marcus sat down and waited. The hours passed. By three o’clock he had seen all the marked goats, and they were all in the glacial bowl where the tent was. He recorded their positions and the habitats they were in, then he waited longer, still hopeful that others would appear. No more came into view.
“Twelve goats,” he said.
Marcus got thoughtfully to his feet as Old Gore came around a Jaw boulder. The monarch started down toward his old haunts on the north face, paused at the sight of the devastation and climbed back to the peak. He trotted down toward Melissa’s Meadow.
Old Gore approached Small Glacier, the little glacier above the mile-long wall of waterfalls. He walked out on the green-blue ice to join Molly, Jason, Andromeda and Remus. The July heat, although not warm to Marcus, was too hot for the wool-clad mountaineers. They stretched out on the ice to cool off. Molly arose at Old Gore’s approach and stepped between her kid and the monarch. Andromeda picked up her ears and threatened the billy with a thrust of her head. The king of the mountain lay down alone.
“Thirteen goats,” Marcus wrote.
He returned to the tent late in the afternoon. “There are no more goats,” he said. “Three kids were born, one died, and one nanny was killed. Out of fifteen goats, there are only thirteen. Something is wrong with the law of compensation. There should be more than thirteen as we go into the hunting season so that there will be thirteen left in spring.”
Melissa knocked the seeds from a wheatbunch stalk into a paper bag.
“Chances are one more will be killed—maybe by a hunter. If there are only twelve goats here on the Jaw,” he went on, “and there are about seventy peaks in the Mission Mountains high enough for goats to live on, then that makes eight hundred forty goats in this state.
“Twenty-five permits are given out each year. Even if only half of the hunters get their goat, that leaves only eight hundred thirty. Avalanches get three more in each herd, two hundred ten statewide. That leaves six hundred twenty. Poachers get one more...take away seventy. If three kids are born to each herd, you add two hundred ten to five hundred fifty, and get seven hundred sixty goats, which is much less than you had in fall. That’s hardly compensating.”
Marcus had Melissa’s full attention.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Go on.”
“Not one goat can be shot on this mountain until we know what’s happening.” Melissa dropped her paper bag and threw her arms around him.
“There are only thirteen goats on this mountain.” He repeated, “Just thirteen.” He shook his head, wondering what kind of error his father had made.
Each day Marcus returned to the Jaw, noted where the goats were and what they were doing. One day he realized none ever crossed to the other peaks, nor did the goats on the other peaks ever cross the valleys and come to the Jaw. He waited, watched, took notes and saw by the entries on his map that the marked herd lived in an area about three miles square. Here they ate, slept, bred, gave birth and died. They lived on an island. They could not migrate to new lands. The elk and deer wandered and migrated. The mountain sheep sought out the best forage by moving around, but not the goats. They stayed on their peaks forever.
“How did they ever get up here in the beginning,” he asked himself one day while on the Jaw, “if they never come down below five thousand feet? And how, when roads come in and all the goats in a herd are killed, can they ever come back to the peaks? They don’t wander and migrate.”
The answer came to him in his own words: “They can’t. When a herd is gone it’s gone forever.”
That night he sat down beside Melissa as she sorted and reaped grass seeds. He told her about his day on the Jaw.
“It’s perplexing,” he said. “You know, I once asked Dr. Wing why the Game Commission did not release goats on the mountains where they have been shot out. He said they had tried, but that goats put in new areas die.”
“Maybe we should raise them on farms,” Melissa said. “That’s how the buffalo was saved and returned to the wild.”
“No one has been able to raise a Rocky Mountain goat on a farm,” Marcus answered. “For some reason or other they must have rocks, peaks, snow and ice to remain healthy and alive. There isn’t a farm or zoo in the world that has been able to keep a mountain goat.”
Melissa’s face shone. “I think that’s beautiful,” she said. “Goats are wilder than the wind. They can’t be held in fences. But it’s also sad.”
“If I only knew what they needed,” he said, “I could help the Game Commission transplant them to new areas.” He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Melissa, I know this: mountain goats have no predators, but they never did. The mountains hunt them with cliffs and avalanches. Man doesn’t maintain their balance; he upsets it.” He leaned back on his hands and kicked the toes of his boots together. “The mountain goat must not be hunted.”
Melissa’s eyes sparkled. She picked up a pan, put it away, shook the dust from their sleeping bags and sang about the tent. Occasionally she looked at him as if she had seen him capture the sun.
Several days later, as Marcus shinnied down the chimney on his way home from goat watching, he saw the three-year-old billy called Orion, peering up the shaft at him. The billy goat was alone. Marcus jumped to the trail, opened his map and made the dots for Orion. As he did so, he noticed that he had many marks for the billies and all of them, like Orion, were alone. The nannies, he noted, were in groups with the kids and yearlings. It was as if he had filled in a number painting. There on his map was the social structure of the mountain goat: isolated males; social females and young; and the dominant, overseeing Old Gore.
Another piece of the social jigsaw clicked into place. The billies wandered alone and the nanny groups spread out for good reason; clustered together an avalanche could wipe out a whole herd in one disastrous moment. So the goats spread themselves out. There would always be individuals to carry on the family line.
Marcus jogged to the waterfall and backed down the steep cliff. Melissa’s talk about the plant zones had given him new insight into the mountain. There were lowland marshes in the valley below, then came the cedar-and-hemlock forests, next the subalpine firs, then the high meadows and tundras, and finally the moss-and-lichen zone (where he crept now), and the zone of the wind. This zone lay above the waterfall and mosses, up near Small Glacier. There the wind and ice filed down and scoured away all living things.
At the bottom of the falls Marcus turned and ran toward the wildflower zone—the Melissa zone, he liked to call it, for its color and brightness.
Near the saddle he heard a cry and found Remus shivering in a crevasse. His tail was low, his ears back, and his feet were wide apart as if he were about to bolt in fear. Marcus looked unsuccessfully for Andromeda. He searched for a long time before he finally took out his map and noted that the last time he had seen Andromeda was yesterday at Tent Glacier, so he decided to check for her there.
As Marcus backed down the cliff, Orion bolted out of the rocks and charged Remus. The frightened kid scrambled past Marcus, pulled himself onto the goat trail and started up it, when he was attacked by Perseus. He backed away and climbed toward Small Glacier. The two billies pursued him until he was run out of the moss-and-lichen zone into the zone of the wind. Then they turned back.
Remus is an outcast again, Marcus wrote in his book. Something must have happened to Andromeda. Leaping from boulder to rock Marcus ran down the saddle into Melissa’s Meadow. She was climbing up over the cliff from Sky Lake. Her face was red, her chin smudged and dusty.
“Marcus,” she cried, “Andromeda fell! She was butting at Roman Nose and fell. She’s dying.” Melissa covered her face with her hands and Marcus put his arm around her.
“They aren’t perfect, are they?” he said and ran his ringers through her curls as he tried to comfort her. “And now we have another hunter of the goats: the goats themselves—their butting of each other on the edges of cliffs.”
“Marcus, they take care of their own surpluses, don’t they?” Melissa said. “The mountain keeps them in balance with their food supply, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes.”
They walked thoughtfully back to the tent.
“I wish I could help Remus,” Marcus said. “He’s been driven into the wind zone.” Melissa’s cool fingers slipped into his hand.
“You do care, don’t you? You do love the goats.” She searched his face.
“You do,” she said. “I knew you would.”
“Remus is telling us something, Melissa,” Marcus said, trying to re-establish his severe scientific attitude. “Can you hear what he says?”
9
THE VOICE
As Marcus washed his socks in the rivulet that evening, he thought hard about Remus. “Remus has been pushed out of his society,” he said to himself, “for a reason that will eventually help us keep the goats alive in the North American Rockies. If I could only see the reason.”
Melissa came to the s
“Marcus,” she said, “the next time you go to the north face of the Jaw I’m going with you. I want to plant the seeds I’ve been reaping. They’re goat grasses. I’ll sow them on the torn-up ledges. Maybe they’ll grow.”
He squeezed out his socks and shook them. “So that’s what you’ve been doing. Harvesting grass seed for goats.”
“Maybe Remus can live on the other side of the mountain if he has food,” she said.
“That’s a great thought.” He spread his socks on a rock.
“If we can save Remus we might be able to save another goat and then another and another. Let’s try.”
The next day Marcus set out to find Remus. The young goat was near the chimney, scraping moss from the rocks with his hoofs and licking the orange lichens with his tongue.
“You’ll never make it on that stuff,” he said. He wedged himself into a crack out of the wind and took out his notebook and habitat chart. The sun was fiercely bright and hot. Marcus pulled into the sparse rock shade. The radiation made his head buzz. Wheels of color circled before his eyes. Men lost their minds in this alpine sun, he recalled, and put his notebook over his head for protection.
Orion was grazing the ledge below. Occasionally he glanced up, saw Remus and bucked. The little goat needed only see the buck of Orion to become terrified. It was as if a horn had been thrust in his face. He crawled higher into the jagged rocks.
Clattering down from the top of the Jaw came Old Gore. He leaped, dropped free, caught himself on a spiny niche and dropped again. He came at full speed, his black horns gleaming, his white body falling like a meteor.
Remus saw him, clamped his toes on a sleek boulder and laboriously pulled himself out of the lichen zone into the rocks where only the wind dwelled. There he paused, sides heaving, breath coming in gasps. The exertion had taken much from his thin body. Marcus watched in horror as the kid was driven out of the herd.