Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [205]
Tentatively she moved out a yard or two, and stood. It seemed remarkably steady. The damp water-breath excited her. With one hand she lifted her skirts above her shoe tops, and with the other she laid hold of the rope’s weather-softened twist. Steadily, holding her breath but not hesitating, she walked the sway downward, then upward. Then she was on rock. Then she emerged from the cliff’s darkness into cool moonlight, and the river smell was replaced by the smells of dust, sage, horses, dry hay. Exhilarated, feeling no bigger than a doll, she crossed to the corral and went around it to the shed side. She spread her forearms on the top bar and put her chin on her stacked hands, a white figure flooded by the moon, rounded and highlighted against the rounding white poles, with her shadow stretched on a rack of fence-shadow behind her.
A trance was on her eyes, she saw up, down, ahead, and to both sides without moving head or eyeballs. Before her, reaching to her feet, was the pocked, silvered dust of the corral, across which the shadow of the opposite fence was drawn like a musical staff. High across the river her window glowed orange; straight ahead, and up, Arrow Rock jutted black beside the moon. All her right hand was a blackness of cliff. Upward the sky opened, a broad strip of silver gilt with the moon burning through it and stars like fading sparks flung down toward the world’s rim.
She stared with eyes stretched to their widest, and as she stared, the firmament rolled one dizzying half turn, so that she was looking not up, but down, into a canyon filled with brightness, on whose bottom the moon lay among silver pebbles, a penny flung for luck into a cosmic Serpentine.
“I wish . . .” she said, not knowing what she wished.
Her neck stiffened, her chin came up off her hands. She listened, caught by some sound. Then she heard it again, a musical, drawn-out howling downriver. It paused, broke into a kind of barking, lifted again into the howl.
The hair prickled on the back of her neck. She was familiar with the usual animals of their mountains and deserts, and she knew this was no mountain lion–a mountain lion mewled and complained like a distressed child. It was deeper and more thrilling than the yap and quaver of a coyote. A wolf, then. Even the sheepherders, who liked to dramatize the dangers of their life, admitted that wolves were getting scarce. Yet what else could this be? And if there was ever a night on which a wolf would want to tilt his muzzle to the moon and let out the sound of his wild heart, this was the night.
The sound was gone, diffused in sky, lost among canyon walls. Her straining ears picked up only a sort of ringing in the air, and that, she was sure, was not in the air at all, but in her own head. She put her chin back on her laced hands and brooded into the patterned shadows of the corral.
In a minute she heard the sound again, this time definitely closer. It had come around some obscuring corner; it was moving her way. In quick fear she took a step backward, estimating with her eye the distance to the hidden end of the bridge. But then she stopped and turned her head sideward to listen once more.
There was something un-wolfish about this wolf, something too human. He howled something too close to a tune, he barked something too reminiscent of words. In double relief she laughed aloud. It was Oliver, riding home in the midnight quiet, picking his way from shadow into moonlight and into shadow again, his hat off, maybe, his shirt open to the softness of night, and singing like a boy on a hayride.
Perception and inference were all but simultaneous. If he rode home singing, his long day must have had results. Someone must have put up the few thousand dollars he needed to dig his mile of the Susan Canal. Any potential investors sent out by General Tompkins in the spring might see water flowing around the contour at the canyon’s mouth, and a wheatfield on the sagebrush bench above the Olpens’.
Another corner; the sound came suddenly louder, enlarged by echoes.
How the old folks would enjo-o-o-o-oy it,