Julian had a way of falling into shadow even in the dark. As the fire kindled, he shifted in his camp chair, avoiding the flame’s oblong spotlights.
“Are you cold?” I zipped my own coat higher and tucked my hair inside my hat, one of the green beanies I’d knit when I was pregnant with Huck that always caught my earrings and threatened to tear them loose. “Earth to Julian,” I said when he didn’t respond. “I have more layers in the car.”
“I’m not cold,” he said, still squirming. “You’re like mom with the layers. I brought my own clothes.”
Julian had always been this way, bobbing and weaving as if he wanted to make himself less visible. Even as a kid, even before our father died, he was curled in a sort of habitual hunch, as if shrinking inward so that the winds of our lives would pass over and around him, never through.
I heard a rustling in the tent and sent a flashlight beam back into the stand of jack pines. One of the lumps inside the tent rolled over, but then all went still again, the boys sleeping soundly inside their tiny thermal bags.
“I appreciate you coming,” I said, turning back to the flames.
“You said that already.” Julian’s voice slipped out in soft whisper. “I told you it’s not a favor. I wanted to see the kids.”
I shivered, but not because I was cold. “I’m sure it’s hard to miss work.”
“Why would it be hard to miss work? My job is a joke.”
“I’m saying it’s probably hard to get time off.”
“It’s weed Amy. I’m not doing heart surgery.”
“I just mean money-wise. It’s probably hard to turn down the money.”
Julian sighed dramatically, and I put my hands up in surrender.
I wondered sometimes if Julian was a different person, if he was more put together or whatever, if he was an investment banker or middle school teacher, I wondered if he was more boring or traditional if we would still fall back into these same roles, if I would still be checking up on him, still badgering him about work and money and relationships, still playing the protective older sister, if he would still be hiding from me inside his oversized coat.
“I’m just trying to say I’m glad you’re here. The boys are glad you’re here.”
“I know.” Julian stood and wandered from the fire. I heard his lighter flick and watched a small red moon appear in the trees. I imagined the fingers that were attached to that moon. The arm. The body. My brother’s frame blending in with the knotty, high desert pines.
The tiny town we’d driven through on the way to our campsite that morning had boasted on its welcome sign “one house of worship for every major religion,” and when we passed, Julian had pointed out the window at the temple and the church and the ashram, taking time in between to explain the chief tenants of each belief system. The boys—five and two—had not grown up religious. Even after Doug and I divorced—in that dark pit of custody battles and nights spent Instagram stalking his mistress—even then I hadn’t ushered them towards God. So they had no clue what Julian was talking about, had never heard words like eucharist or messiah or hermitage. But Julian kept talking anyways, speaking as if to me or to a close friend, quoting from scripture and philosophical treatises, explaining different interpretations of faith and freewill, different versions of afterlife and atonement.
Julian was still talking when we turned out of town and made our way up through the winding hills towards the campsite. When we turned onto the dirt road marked for dispersed camping, Julian stopped speaking mid-sentence. He’d been saying something about pilgrimage, then something about an anthropologist who’d retraced famous pilgrimage sites and written a volume of tractuses. He was going on and on and on about tractuses when he suddenly stopped at the boys in the backseat. Hunter was fast asleep, Huck drooling into his pajamas.
“Sorry,” he said to them, but really to me.
“It’s okay,” I said, and turned on my high beams, and we rode the rest of the way in silence. Since then he’d said a total of maybe a dozen words to me.
When Julian finally came back to the fire, he carried with him the smell of soil and pot smoke and pine forest. He sat and poked the coals with a gnarled bristlecone staff. I wanted to ask him if he’d talked to our brother Aaron lately, or Lacey, our oldest sister. I wanted to ask when he’d last checked in on Mom. I asked about his girlfriend Wendy instead, the photographer who, at least from the looks of it online, had recently dumped him.
“How’s Wendy?” I said, fishing.
“She’s fine,” he said, not taking the bait, and the silence opened between us again.
I thought about telling him about my own life instead. About the young accountant I’d met on the apps that was currently rocking my world but was way too young and unserious to introduce to the boys. Or about my asshole boss or the drama with my neighbor Kevin and his truck and my rose bushes. I thought about mentioning our father, that ghost that walked around loudly in the shadows whenever any of us got together. I wanted to tell him how alone I felt in the world sometimes, about how I felt alone with the accountant and sometimes even alone with the kids. Right then, I wanted Julian to know how alone I felt when I was with him especially, and that sometimes that was okay and that sometimes that made things worse. I searched the woodsmoke for how to say it, for anything at all that would open the door between us.
Instead, we sat and stared at the fire, the sputtering coals speaking in our stead.
The next morning we drove to the national park, and Julian ran with the boys up and down and up and down and up and down the giant dunes, Hunter bear clawing his way up and rolling his way down, Huck bouncing gleefully in the pack on Julian’s back. Even six months earlier it might have made me sad to see them so well loved and cared for by a man—my husband’s lack of interest in the boys seemingly having started at conception—but as I watched Julian turn and chase Hunter back up over the sandy rise, I could only feel relieved they were happy, that Julian was happy, that we were all together.
Back at the campsite we tried to get the boys to nap in the tent in the afternoon sun, but of course they wouldn’t. They’d reached that nexus of overly tired and overly excited that meant there would be no coercing them in any matters. When Julian suggested another hike, it sounded equal parts ludicrous and ingenious. “Huck might fall asleep in the pack,” he said, and because that sounded better than walking him in screaming circles around the campsite for another hour, I relaced my boots.
We’d seen signs for a trailhead further up the canyon. Our guidebook marked the trail with a green circle indicating easy terrain and gave a brief description of wildlife. The trail also held “historical interest,” according to the book; the path wound through a smattering of old gravestones, the cemetery for an early mining community, ancient bones of the gold rush. Julian had read all about it, apparently. As we set out, he somehow already had the names of the long dead gold panners in his brain and on his tongue. He talked as we walked, and Huck did in fact fall asleep, and Hunter gathered pebbles and pinecones and sticks and feathers and interrupted Julian occasionally to ask him to consult the book about this or that animal, this or that stone or bird or flowering bush.
Sometimes when I looked at my boys, I would see Julian at their age. I would picture him in the Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket he wore through most of grade school or in the Spiderman pajamas he wore as a Halloween costume most of his young life. Other times when I looked, I saw their father. In their eyes, and in the celestial spray of freckles that appeared across their nose and cheeks each summer. And sometimes when I looked, I saw my own father, his too big buck teeth emerging now every time Hunter smiled. I often wondered if this was the way for other people too, every train of thought inevitably trailing back to your parents, like a stone or shell washing back against a shoreline, edges smoothed by time and tumult. I was already in college when our father died, but Julian was only twelve. My children were younger still when their father left.
We never found the goldrush cemetery, which didn’t seem to disappoint Julian that much; he already had it all in his head. When the light started to change, a pear-colored hue hemming in the tree line, we turned and headed back the way we came. All of us had started yawning, and even Julian’s lecture about the forty-niners and James Polk and the oil painter Charles Nahl started to be punctuated occasionally by long pauses. My mind had emptied, and my breathing had settled to a perfect rhythmic pattern, my feet scraping against the wonderful muteness. It felt good to walk in long stretches of silence with my brother and my boys. So little of my life was left to walking in happy silence in those days.
We had nearly made it back to camp when the beast came upon us. This is how I think of it now, and how I tell the story at parties, because that’s how it felt in the moment: a beast bearing down on the three of us, our lives turned in a flash to inky terror.
It started with a blur at the corner of my eye and a sudden stab in my chest, that deep, instinctual fear that leaps into your body when you feel the presence of a wild animal. I’d felt the neural hitch of the predator, the protection instinct, many, many times since I’d become a mother, in parking lots and doctor’s offices and playgrounds. I’d felt it for Julian many times when we were younger too. But I could not remember the last time I’d been reduced to prey.
I saw it before the others, the black blur in the trees, the eyes, the galloping gait, the glinting teeth and red, open mouth. I saw it first but couldn’t speak. I stepped off the trail and grabbed Hunter, pushing him behind me, making myself a shield. A mute cry fell from my mouth, a sound like the wind had been knocked out of me. Julian looked back, then turned in the direction of my stare. It was still coming, the thing I was so sure was a bear that my body had frozen stiff with adrenaline. Then Julian saw it too.
He stepped forward and started shouting. “Hey! Hey bear!” He waved his arms above his head and screamed. “Hey bear! Get!” Huck woke in the pack and started wailing.
Behind me Hunter was saying my name, his word for my name, over and over. “Mom!” he shouted. “Mom!” He looked at me and then at Julian. “Mom!” he screamed, his face beet red and streaked with tears.
Julian put himself between us and the animal. “Hey bear! Go on now!” he yelled louder, but the black streak kept coming through the trees. It had been a hundred yards off when I’d spotted it, but now it was half that.
“Back up,” said Julian. “Don’t run. Don’t turn.” He yelled at the bear again and took another step forward.
“Huck,” I said. “You’ve got Huck,” but Julian put his hand back as if to quiet me.
“Go on bear!” he yelled again, and that was when I finally really saw it, when it finally fell into focus.
“No bear!” I said, my voice still trembling like a plucked string.
Julian looked back at me, his brow knit beneath his long bangs.
“No bear!” I said, still half shouting. “Dog!”
Julian turned and put his arms down slowly, as if being deflated. The animal kept coming towards us, and with each step closer it became less bear and more dog. By the time it loped into the clearing it had morphed from a snarling grizzly to a shaggy, slobbering Newfoundland, its tail wagging and jowls flopping cartoonishly, it’s big lips dripping drool. I held Hunter back and watched the dog circle and sniff Julian’s jeans, then lap at his extended palm.
“He doesn’t seem dangerous,” said Julian, his hand cautiously outstretched beneath the dog’s chin. “Friendly even. No tag though. And it looks like he’s been in the woods for a while. He’s all muddy and matted. He’s kind of beat up too. His face. He’s been into something. Can’t be wild. Abandoned maybe.”
Huck’s sobs had subsided. He strained to point down from behind Julian’s back, his pudgy arms flailing. “Doggie,” he said. “Doggie.”
Julian looked back at me and shrugged. “Doggie,” he said.
I could still feel the adrenaline climbing around in my system, looking for a way out. My hands still clutched Hunter’s tiny shoulders. But watching Julian stand there, the dog sniffing and pawing at him, Huck in the pack saying “doggie doggie doggie” the way he did when we walked our cul-de-sac at home, I couldn’t help but laugh. “I thought we were done for,” I said, pressing my hand to my face. “Bear meat.”
“I know.” Julian smiled and shook his head. “Crazy.” He scratched the dog’s big head. “There’s a lot of writing about this actually, the phenomenon of hallucinating or misperceiving in nature. Most times it’s with explorers, people who are hungry or haven’t had water or slept. Like a mirage in the desert. Only in the forest. I can’t remember the term …”
The dog came over and nuzzled me next, and I patted at the knotted fur behind his ears. Hunter wanted to pet him, but I said he’d better not. My grip had loosened, but I was still shielding him behind my legs. “Dogs like this can carry disease,” I said. “We’d better let him on his own.”
“He seems fine to me,” said Julian.
I shot him a look.
He put his hands up. “No, your mom’s right. He’s feral. Might not be the best idea.” He squinted at the dog. “Sorry,” he said, probably to me. Then, to Hunter, “We ought to keep our distance.”
“And it’s getting dark,” I said. “We should probably keep moving.”
Julian looked at horizon and shook his head. “Lead the way.”
The dog trailed us for a while, looping in and out of the trees beside us. Eventually it got distracted and fell behind. Eventually it retreated back the way it came, loping into the forest like the beast I had thought it was.
It was nearly dark when we found the car, and Huck had started crying again. As I strapped the boys into their car seats, I could tell that something was wrong with Julian. He was wandering the edge of the woods as if he’d lost something there.
“Julian,” I shouted. “Are you ready? I’m getting cold. The boys need to sleep.” I started the car in hopes that he would come. In the low light I could just barely see him in the trees, pacing back and forth at the trailhead. He did this type of thing sometimes too, lingering in a place when everyone else was trying to leave, or wandering off alone at the exact moment someone would be looking for him. He’d always been sort of bad at transitions, bad at following the natural movement of the crowd.
After a few minutes, when he didn’t come to the car, I gave the horn a light tap, then rolled down my window and yelled for him again. When he emerged from the woods, he came to my side of the car and leaned into the window.
“We can’t just leave him, right?” He peered back into the woods. “I mean, we can’t just abandon him, can we?”
“What? The dog?” I leaned forward to look too. “Julian what do you want me to do? It’s a dog.”
Julian squirmed. “I know.” He rubbed his stubble. “But maybe he’s just lost or something. He’s so big. Like …” He looked back towards the trail again. “These kinds of dogs just don’t wander around by themselves. They are expensive. They have owners. I’m sure he has people somewhere.”
“So what do you want to do? Go find him and bring him home with us? I can’t put him in my Prius. He didn’t have a collar or anything.” I was getting irritated. It was late. The boys needed sleep. I needed sleep. Huck was still wailing away in the back seat. “Julian, it’s very sweet but what would we even do with him? How would we even start finding him or finding out where he belongs?”
“I could take him,” said Julian. He shifted his face so he wouldn’t have to look at me, and in that moment, he looked so much like his younger self, so much like the boy I’d grown up next to, it hurt me to say no to him. Who was I to say anything to him?
“Julian …” I motioned to the backseat as if to indicate all the reasons why we couldn’t take this dog. “We can’t take him. You can’t take him. Where would he even go if you found him? You share a studio apartment.”
Normally this condescension would have set Julian off, my minimizing his life or indicating that he couldn’t handle this or that responsibility. But in the moment, he didn’t seem to even notice. He was too upset about the dog to be upset about anything else. He stood staring back into the forest for a long time. “Julian,” I said, so softly it was barely audible over the car’s blowing heat. Finally, slowly, as if his whole body was tethered to the ground, he trudged around the other side of the car and got in.
I started to apologize, even though I didn’t have anything to apologize for, but Julian waved me off. He watched out his side mirror as we turned down the road towards our campsite, as if waiting for the dog to emerge on the path follow us back down the valley, but the only thing following behind us was twilight and the dust kicked up from beneath my tires.
Back at the campsite I tucked in the boys and climbed into the tent after them. Julian started a fire and sat a lonely watch in front of the flames. At some point deep in the night I turned over and he was still out there, tending his fire alone, waiting for something only he could see.
I woke early the next day and relit our coals to make coffee. At some point Julian had crawled into the car and was curled up against the passenger side window. I tapped on the window to wake him, shaking a tin coffee cup in his direction.
We sat by the fire and drank our coffee, both of us acknowledging, by not speaking, the small miracle that the boys were still asleep this late in the morning. Julian finished his coffee, then cleared his throat a few times, another tick of his, something that usually meant he had something to say.
“What is it?”
“There’s this myth.” He cleared his throat again. “This story that I’ve heard. There’s a version of it in a few different cultures, but it’s always pretty similar. It’s about ancient peoples, cave dwellers. And these cave dwellers, these ancient people, they are artists. Or some of them are. Ancient artists. Ancient story tellers. Poets. Philosophers. They paint their cave walls with tales of the hunt, tales of love and loss, tales of death and conquest.”
I nodded. Julian’s skin looked waxy and yellow, his eyes holding blue bags.
“And one man in particular, of these ancient artists—he’s a boy really, an orphan they’ve folded into the tribe—he’s taken to painting everything, every story he puts down in char on the cave’s massive ceilings and floors and alcoves. He makes story anywhere he can. He’s obsessed. It’s all he wants to do. He spends so much time drawing that he sometimes forgets to hunt, to eat, to mate. He grows sickly and gaunt, and when winter comes, he nearly dies. The others in the cave are forced to give this boy shares of their meat, fetch him water, care for him. They debate about the merits of keeping him alive, about what he is worth as meat and what he is worth as man. They stand just outside of earshot and have the earliest conversations about moral obligation.
“Anyways, one spring, these ancient peoples are unlucky. A bear smells their fire and comes to the cave to hunt. Some try to dissuade the bear, offering it meat, tossing their food store out into the snow for the bear to feast on. Some try to fight the bear. Some flee and start the search for a new cave, a new home, a tiny new step on the evolutionary ladder.”
As Julian talked, I could see sweat forming at the crown of his head. He had a coffee ground stuck to the edge of his mouth. He began speaking more quickly, looking past me into the trees. His mug twitched in his hand.
“But when the bear comes, this boy, the artist, he stays where he’s at in the corner of the cave, a nub of charcoal nearly fused to his hand. He can’t move. How could he? He’s entranced by the life study in front of him, the giant bear, the beast he’s never seen so close, never been able to observe in such detail. He traces the bear’s form as fast as he can, draws the sleek black lines of his back, shades the thick ropes of muscle around his arms, the scruff of his jowls, the arrow-sharp claws, the black pools of his eyes and nose. At first the bear pauses to sniff the boy, rears back as if to watch him paint, and for a moment the boy thinks his art has spared him, his gift has somehow helped him transcend hunger and biology and fate. But no. Just as quickly the bear steps forward and batters the boy’s skull with his massive paws, strips his flesh and picks clean his meager bones.”
When Julian stopped speaking, he looked up at me, as if waiting for a response. I could see him breathing hard, his Adam’s apple quivering.
“Okay,” I said. “So what? What’s the moral then?”
Julian gasped. “Never mind,” he said, and dumped the dregs of his coffee in the fire. “Forget it.”
“No, I’m just trying to understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. Are you the artist in this story? Is that it? The artist, lost in your time?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe I’m the bear.” He stared into the bottom of his cup. “Or maybe … maybe I’m the person who finds the cave later, who photographs the cave drawings or writes down the hunters’ stories or takes a film crew in and lifts cameras to the cave walls. Thousands of years later. Maybe I’m the person who sees the artist. Who resurrects him. Maybe I’m an observer.” He looked me in the eyes, something that he had not done all weekend, had not done maybe in years. “Maybe without me the boy in the cave never existed, never exists.”
“Julian,” I said.
“But then maybe that doesn’t matter anyways.” He hung his head a bit, passing the coffee cup from hand to hand “Maybe being the observer means nothing. Not in the story. Not in real life.”
“Julian,” I said again, and put my hand on his shoulder.
He shrugged it off. “That fucking dog,” he said. “I just keep thinking that maybe I could have done something for that dog. Actually done something. Something real. Something meaningful.”
I started to say something, but then Huck sent up a mournful wail from inside the tent, and just like that the boys were both awake and screaming and the day was moving again.
After breakfast Julian helped take down the tent and pack up the car, and while I fed Huck, he even took Hunter on a snipe hunt in the nearby woods, an old cub scout game where you look for a mythical animal that doesn’t exist. But all the while they were hunting, I could tell that Julian was also looking for another animal, the bear-dog we’d left behind, not a story or a myth or a concept, but a real, living thing that Julian had wanted to bestow his love upon, had wanted to protect from the cruel world. I was wounded at first, angry that Julian had decided to give his love and protection to some strange animal when he couldn’t even be bothered to ask how I was doing or to check in on our mother from time to time. But as I watched him watch Hunter stalk the woods for snipes, I began softening to what Julian was in my life, what I’d maybe taken for granted in him.
The dog never showed, and we eventually piled in the car and drove back down the canyon towards the highway. We drove in silence through the little town with the temple and the church and the ashram. I put my hand out across the front seat and waited for Julian to take it in his. We’d done this as kids, in the backseat on long road trips when my father’s driving had made us both stomach sick. Julian took my hand and held it there as we coasted through the sleepy town and out towards the ranchland that would take us back to the front range and back to our lives.
I used to think that there are people, like me, who spend their whole lives trying to be seen and then people like Julian, who spend their lives hiding. I thought this to be true before our encounter with the bear-dog, before Julian swept out his caveman myths. But of course, as all things, the answer is murkier than that, is layer upon layer of charcoal on the cave wall.
I squeezed Julian’s hand, and he let me hold it as we passed through town, as we circled the houses of worship, each with their answers about how to be a person in this world and in the next. Julian was a witness to my life, to the lives of my boys. How many others were there? He was a witness, which even I had to admit was as saintly as anything else.
We passed the ashram and then a sprawling horse farm, with a half a dozen white mares chewing grass. Hunter counted them on his fingers in the backseat as we passed. Beyond that was another pasture where a sheep dog ran back and forth along the fence line, chasing each car as it went by. “Doggie,” said Huck from his car seat, and we all turned to look.
Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press), My Modest Blindness (Autofocus Books) and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West (Wayne State University Press). He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
Image: vancouvertrails.com
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 