An Adventurous Trek Through Landscapes of the Heart

THE HERMIT’S STORY

Stories

By Rick Bass

Houghton Mifflin

180 pages, $22

*

Men and women reaching blindly for love, stumbling into and through intimacy, finding their way when the ground on which they’ve built their lives becomes liquid under their feet: This terrain of exposed human emotions is staked out by Rick Bass in his strong, gorgeously crafted collection “The Hermit’s Story.” Through these rustic tales, Bass (“Colter” and “Where the Sea Used to Be”) brings us deep into nature, where ice, snow and fire, wolves and coyotes endanger our lives, yet where swans and deer, ice-crusted lakes and hidden caves mark the entrance to a mystical understanding. Bass shows us, through crystalline images of the physical world, an intangible kind of grace--the blessings nature bestows when we’re least expecting them.

The title story describes the dog-trainer Ann returning a dozen speckled German shorthair pointers to their owner, Gray Owl, in the wilds of Saskatchewan, having completed a summer and autumn’s worth of training them. While trying out the hunting dogs’ new skills, Gray Owl and Ann become lost, drifting off course by as much as 10 miles. Knowing they’ll have to hunker down for the night, Gray Owl investigates a frozen lake as a source of water for the dogs. “He kicked once at the sheet of ice,” Ann tells us, “the vast plate of it, with his heel, then disappeared below the ice.” Ann crawls out on the lake, attempting a desperate rescue mission, only to find Gray Owl standing safely below the ice on solid ground. The lake had frozen on its surface, but the water below the ice had drained away, leaving a protected refuge.

Ann, Gray Owl and the dogs survive the night in this under-the-ice burrow with “the hot muck of the earth’s massive respirations breathing out warmth,” both trapped and protected by the ice, and eventually make their way to the shore under this frozen shield. The two find extraordinary beauty and enchantment in their glacial shelter. “The moonlight would strafe down through those rents in the ice, and shards of moon-ice would be glittering and spinning like diamond-motes in those newly vented columns of moonlight; and they pushed on, still lost, but so alive.”

This is Bass at his finest: showing us elegance where fear usually resides, demonstrating again and again that “the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil....” In Bass’ world of hardscrabble living, his characters are strong and perceptive. “Living up here sharpens one’s senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes stronger.” Yet, for all their physical strength, the characters are just as lost to their emotions, to the incessant pull of human longing and the need for connection, as we are.

“Swans” is a gorgeous love story of Billy and Amy, a gentle, well-matched couple living in the mountain wilds. All his life, Billy has worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land “in the bottoms;” he knows these woods as well as he knows himself and labors daily to keep them just so. Amy is a baker and the smell of her bread fills the mountain ridges. She bakes for Billy, for the neighbors and for the swans who live on their pond. When the winter comes on harsh, she lights fires around the pond to help the swans stay warm. The couple’s life and companionship are perfectly matched. “What it was like was a balance; Billy’s [and Amy’s] life was wedged--as if stuck in a chimney--between rise and fall, growth and rot.” But change, as nature always shows us, cannot be kept at bay. Billy’s health begins to fail, and we watch as this perfect balance slips and skids.

With these stories as our guide, readers follow Bass deep into the heart of the human wilderness. In “The Cave” a former miner revisits the confined space of the mine with a new girlfriend along. The entrance is so narrow, they must strip to fit through, and once inside, are alternately lost and found in the scary, dark and complex world of intimacy they find there.

“The Fireman” tells of a remarried man, a volunteer firefighter, who’s trying to make his second family work. He uses the adrenaline thrill of firefighting to keep distant any regret over his failed first marriage and to resuscitate his second one. As long as something keeps burning, he can avoid becoming weary of wedded life. His community “becomes a tapestry, a weave of that which he has saved and that which he has not--with the rest of the city becoming simply all that which is between points, waiting to burn.”

An affirming, resounding collection, “The Hermit’s Story” reveals Bass as a master craftsman, sparkling in the diamond-motes of his descriptions and the rawness of the human heart.