This road along the river isn’t the fastest route from Montana to the dry side of Washington, but she hasn’t crossed through here in years, and an opportunity to nose along unburdened by backseat questions should never, she believes, go unexplored. She pulls over, has a mind to go down and sit on the sandbar and do some remembering, but when she steps out, there’s a stillness that pins her to the door. It’s evening, and there should be birds, and the shushing noise the upriver wind makes in the trees. But it is quiet.
She glances downstream toward a big evergreen—a white pine, maybe? honestly, it’s been so long—and then across the river where the alders thicken. It is at this moment that she remembers the mountain lion.
That day, they’d awakened in the grainy predawn and, after a bit, got up and fished under the early light. The trout had been hungry—one in particular had put up a magnificent, humbling fight, and when she brought it in, red sides heaving, he lay quietly as she removed the hook, so beautiful and wild she could not believe the grace of a universe that put them in this moment together.
She remembers the fish almost better than the cat that appeared next. The sun had only just hit the water when they rock-stepped upstream to a new hole and saw an animal’s head sliding across the river. Its body emerged onto a flat rock where it perched like an inverted trapezoid, all four paws beneath its belly. The animal shook, its silhouette haloed in a shining molecules. Then, it coiled and leapt in one fluid arc, landing on their side of the shore.
Is that a dog? he’d said.
No, she’d said, slowly backing toward camp, keeping her eye on the place where the cat had melted into the shrubbery.
She remembers how they’d stood, backs to the river, watching. Remembers how they took down the tent reluctantly —their plans to use it again dissolved with the big cat’s apparition—and packed their rods, headed home early. If they had stayed, had fished that extra day, if she’d missed the phone call, that job opportunity, maybe she wouldn’t have spent almost a decade missing this place, its thick layers of water and dirt and green and air and the animals hovering in their elements.
Today she scans the banks of the river, the forest line, the strong, low limbs. Whatever is causing the silence is nothing that wants to be seen.
The cougar cracked an eye when she pulled up, and now he watches her search for him. The local fauna have taken note of his presence and lie low, but he’s feeling his age tonight, resting in this tree. Sure, if she comes near, he’ll consider his options. But he’d rather not.
He’s seen lots of humans, never once wanting to. This one smells like a memory from long ago, when he was still shedding his spots, when his mother started hissing him away from her kills and he’d had to find his own forest. Late one night in his wanderings, he’d come to this water for a drink and glimpsed a bizarre, glowing rock, and inside it, shadows. He shrunk back into the woods, thirst unquenched, and watched the shadows merge into one. The glow danced in the corners of the rock, then extinguished. He twitched his whiskers at their scent and, uncertain, moved upriver. Found a nice limb and settled in.
Hours later, when the sun smacked the water and bounced into his eyes, he decided to move. Tested the water. It tickled the clefts of his paw, June flows spread wide and deep. Grudgingly, he stepped into the wet, walking until the bottom gave out and then running in liquid nothing to a rock. A tired fish startled away as he hauled himself out and shook off.
He sized up the distance to shore and decided to chance it. Even as he leaped, he became aware of the smells, the shadows from the night before. He landed flat and slithered into the bushes, and only once concealed did he look. The two smells from last night stood on a boulder, hands tight on fragile sticks. They made some sound, like a quiet crow’s caw, then retreated.
The cougar slipped to a nearby tree and climbed until he felt a bending under his weight, and there he stayed until nightfall.
Cougars taste like pitch, pine needles, and cat piss, the river thinks. She spits, and a plume of water burbles up. From her headwaters in Montana to her tail at Chatcolet Lake, she is one eye, one tongue, one ear, one slick of liquid skin. Humans have gods they believe are all-seeing, all-knowing, but the idea came from water. She knows the story of every grain of sand and dirt and death that slides through her 140 miles of the Idaho panhandle. And on this day, a cougar has just crossed—the old one. She remembers his first crossing, how she gave him a good stir, let him go. Today he sleeps in that tree, a favorite of his since his youth. His naps grow longer, and she thinks this will be his last summer.
Next to him, a woman stands by a car, dead still. The river remembers her. She came as a girl, with that boy, both stretched and leggy and freshly outgrown of childhood. They swam and fished, and she watched how they reassured each other with touch. The river has never been alone or untouched. She knows pleasure, and ferocity, but not love.
The boy came again later with friends. The river examined their bodies—larger, harder, louder, painted with marks she couldn’t wash off. After a time, the boy reappeared as a man with a wife and sticky-mouthed child, but the girl hadn’t come at all, until today, woman-shaped, hips with stories.
A fish fins quietly in her depths as the river considers the woman’s reappearance, and for a long while, she and the cat and the woman remain still. Watching, remembering.
Hunched on the dead branch as the sun settles itself into the mountain crevices, the osprey feels tremors and rumblings from the nest beneath, peeps that target a nerve in the center of his head. His mate turns a yellow eye on him, and he takes flight.
He flows on the upstream wind over large fish in too-deep pools and small fish on the river’s thin edges. A mile upriver, the osprey feels the quiet and looks about for its source. He wheels north, then south, until he spots something out of place: a still, shiny boulder on the road, and beside it, one of the creatures who makes the boulders move. Then he sees the tree and deep inside it, a cat, snoozing, muzzle whitening with age.
Ospreys are not generally known for their sense of humor, even amongst themselves, but that doesn’t stop him from letting out a terrific shriek, jeering at the cat, Found you.
The mountain lion doesn’t care for the shrill cry of birds and has lost interest in the woman he’s frozen. He yawns and stretches, leaps down from the tree. The osprey watches as the cat and the woman stare at each other fifty yards apart, and then the cat pads across the road and disappears upslope, toward a deer carcass he cached last week.
The woman sags against her boulder.
In the river, a fish rises, checking for a hatch.
The fish saw a human once, that time he accidentally bit a fat mayfly that bit back. This witch-fly was so strong that even after the fish fought—weaving, diving, thrashing in the space where the water ends—the fly still hauled the fish to shore and tangled him in a web that pulled him from the water. The fish thought he would die of the dryness in his red gills when a creature materialized, scooped him up and removed the biting fly. For a moment they stared at one another, mutual admirers. And then she dipped him back in the water, tilted the net just so, and the fish darted down to a rock and turned to look wondrously at the surface, a small, remnant ache in his jaw.
The woman on shore just now might be the same. He stays unwisely at the surface, watching her, wishing he could ask if it was she who saved him, who educated him to study his dinner before he ate it. He wants to tell her that that brief foray into her world made him curious, that he wants to know what happens on the dry side of life.
The woman and the osprey spot the fish at the same moment.
And the river gives him up to the talons, and the fish’s last wish is granted: one soaring view of the river, of trees and mountains and a winding gravel road, a furry form sloping up the ridge. He tries to acknowledge the woman, to waggle a fin, and he thanks the osprey for this small blessing, answers to questions the fish has always harbored. His last thought, as they soar into the nightening sky,
How glorious—!
Chelsey J. Waters grew up on the Palouse hills, skiing Idaho’s mountains in the winters and rafting its whitewater in the summers. Idaho is not a state of flat-landed pursuits. These days she lives at the foot of the Blue Mountains in Walla Walla, Washington, where she fly fishes for small trout, studies creative writing at Eastern Oregon University, and works as a freelance editor.
