Stonecrop Magazine

We know where we wanna to go. Up on the divide is where he is, breathing quietly in the scree that tumbles down as musical as glass. We wanna dig him out and show him how we live. How to live without fear, and without fame. Bear hunters know that life isn’t about the sixth gear, or being fastest in your class, though cunning helps. It’s about a slow drive up a jeep track along a soda creek. It’s about a climb up a trail with a mostly empty bag and no first aid kit. We rarely slip, and when we do, we get up. We think about staying down wind. If there’s a scrape on a knee, the dust is a bandage that always fits. Once the three of us came up with a plan: We would place marshmallows outside the mine and wait for the draft to pull in the scent. The mountain, Dad said, would rumble like the stomach of something as large as it. Of course we roasted them, summers, while embers circling like mayflies. Our eyes were comfortable gleaming in the dark. Dad would wrap his arms around Ellie and squeeze my bicep as he went back and forth to the pile by the house. When he finally left us, we were okay. We got up. Dust, as I said, is an adage in and of itself. We think about him, but only a few moments at a time. Now we drive slow with our beers and just to the trailhead. Less and less. We could walk all the way up to that shaft, but we prefer to just think about how it’s there and turn the truck around. We know where we wanna go, and it’s usually back to town. That road is snowed in anyhow, nothing but white for months. Jesus came out of a cave, and I’d like to think maybe Dad will too, when he’s rested. We left those marshmallows there years ago.