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The Kilimanjaro Device

I arrived in the truck very early in the morning. I had been driving all night, for I hadn’t been able to sleep at the motel so I thought I might as well drive and I arrived among the mountains and hills near Ketchum and Sun Valley just as the sun came up and I was glad I had kept busy with driving.

I drove into the town itself without looking up at that one hill. I was afraid if I looked at it, I would make a mistake. It was very important not to look at the grave. At least that is how I felt. And I had to go on my hunch.

I parked the truck in front of an old saloon and walked around the town and talked to a few people and breathed the air and it was sweet and clear. I found a young hunter, but he was wrong; I knew that after talking to him for a few minutes. I found a very old man, but he was no better. Then I found me a hunter about fifty, and he was just right. He knew, or sensed, everything I was looking for.

I bought him a beer and we talked about a lot of things, and then I bought him another beer and led the conversation around to what I was doing here and why I wanted to talk to him. We were silent for a while and I waited, not showing my impatience, for the hunter, on his own, to bring up the past, to speak of other days three years ago, and of driving toward Sun Valley at this time or that and what he saw and knew about a man who had once sat in this bar and drunk beer and talked about hunting or gone hunting out beyond.

And at last, looking off at the wall as if it were the highway and the mountains, the hunter gathered up his quiet voice and was ready to speak.

“That old man,” he said. “Oh, that old man on the road. Oh, that poor old man.”

I waited.

“I just can’t get over that old man on the road,” he said, looking down now into his drink.

I drank some more of my beer, not feeling well, feeling very old myself and tired.

When the silence prolonged itself, I got out a local map and laid it on the wooden table. The bar was quiet. It was midmorning and we were completely alone there.

“This is where you saw him most often?” I asked.

The hunter touched the map three times. “I used to see him walking here. And along there. Then he’d cut across the land here. That poor old man. I wanted to tell him to keep off the road. I didn’t want to hurt or insult him. You don’t tell a man like that about roads or that maybe he’ll be hit. If he’s going to be hit, well that’s it. You figure it’s his business, and you go on. Oh, but he was old there at the last.”

“He was,” I said, and folded the map and put it in my pocket.

“You another of those reporters?” said the hunter.

“Not quite those,” I said.

“Didn’t mean to lump you in with them,” he said.

“No apology needed,” I said. “Let’s just say I was one of his readers.”

“Oh, he had readers all right, all kinds of readers. Even me. I don’t touch books from one autumn to the next. But I touched his. I think I liked the Michigan stories best. About the fishing. I think the stories about the fishing are good. I don’t think anybody ever wrote about fishing that way and maybe won’t ever again. Of course, the bullfight stuff is good, too. But that’s a little far off. Some of the cowpokes like them; they been around the animals all their life. A bull here or a bull there, I guess it’s the same. I know one cowpoke has read just the bull stuff in the Spanish stories of the old man’s forty times. He could go over there and fight, I swear.”

“I think all of us felt,” I said, “at least once in our lives, when we were young, we could go over there, after reading the bull stuff in the Spanish stories, that we could go over there and fight. Or at least jog ahead of the running of the bulls, in the early morning, with a good drink waiting at the other end of the run, and your best girl with you there for the long weekend.”

I stopped. I laughed quietly. For my voice had, without knowing, fallen into the rhythm of his way of saying, either out of his mouth, or from his hand. I shook my head and was silent.

“You been up to the grave yet?” asked the hunter, as if he knew I would answer yes.

“No,” I said.

That really surprised him. He tried not to show it.

“They all go up to the grave,” he said.

“Not this one.”

He explored around in his mind for a polite way of asking. “I mean…” he said. “Why not?”

“Because it’s the wrong grave,” I said.

“All graves are wrong graves when you come down to it,” he said.

“No,” I said. “There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times.”

He nodded at this. I had come back to something he knew, or at least smelled was right.

“Sure, I knew men,” he said, “died just perfect. You always felt, yes, that was good. One man I knew, sitting at the table waiting for supper, his wife in the kitchen, when she came in with a big bowl of soup there he was sitting dead and neat at the table. Bad for her, but, I mean, wasn’t that a good way for him? No sickness. No nothing but sitting there waiting for supper to come and never knowing if it came or not. Like another friend. Had an old dog. Fourteen years old. Dog was going blind and tired. Decided at last to take the dog to the pound and have him put to sleep. Loaded the old blind tired dog on the front seat of his car. The dog licked his hand, once. The man felt awful. He drove toward the pound. On the way there, with not one sound, the dog passed away, died on the front seat, as if he knew and, knowing, picked the better way, just handed over his ghost, and there you are. That’s what you’re talking about, right?”