For the Climbers

Among the many lives you’ll never lead, consider that of the wolverine, for whom avalanche is opportunity, who makes a festival of frozen marrow from the femur of an elk, who wears the crooked North Star like an amulet of teeth. In the game of which animal would you return as, today I’m thinking snowshoe hare, a scuffle in the underbrush, one giant leap. You never see them coming and going, only the crosshairs of their having passed, ascending the ridge, lost or not lost in succession forests giving way to open meadow where deep snow lingers and finally relents, uncovering acres of lily — glacier yellow, avalanche white — daylight restaking its earthly claim. Every season swallows someone — Granite Mountain with its blunderbuss gullies, Tatoosh a lash on the tongue, those climbers caught if not unawares then perfectly hapless, not thinking of riding that snowstorm to the summit, not thinking wolverine fever in the shivering blood, not thinking steelhead cutthroat rainbow or the languid river that will carry them out.