Winter Count by Barry Lopez

He moved several stones, seemed to orient himself, and amid spurts of dust I saw the stones lift off the ground.  As they rose from the earth, they began to move in an arc across the sky, turning finally overhead in a dark shape like a pinwheel, some four or five hundred yards across.  Now there was a waterfall sound, but only the lightest feeling of a breeze against my cheeks.  The man came toward me, acknowledging my dumbstruck stare with a conspiratorial nod that indicated he thought it was impressive too.  Perhaps because of friction, each of the thousands of stones now glowed, and they assumed the shape of a galaxy against the dark blue sky, like a bloom of phosphor rolling over in the night ocean.

The first story in Barry Lopez's collection Winter Count, "Restoration," takes place at a historic chateau in Killdeer, North Dakota.  The narrator is an academic passing through, and he stops in Killdeer for a few days to chat with the man restoring the chateau's library.  While the restorer goes through the painstaking, meticulous process of restoring books, the narrator skims through the library trying to recreate a sense of the owner's ideology about North American ecology through the notes he'd left.  The narrator and the restorer make a tenuous connection predicated on their shared obsessiveness and meticulousness, and at the end the narrator sees several antelopes standing outside looking into the house.

Placed at the beginning of the collection, "Restoration" seems designed to baffle: what happens here, exactly, besides a collegial interaction between two smart men?  The spare prose, which is balanced somewhere between Cather-Hemingway minimalism and the professional register of a research symposium, seems almost intentionally self-effacing.  The presence of the antelope--almost certainly not an impossible sight in North Dakota--seems oddly muted as an epiphanic moment, especially when compared to the other stories: In "The Orrery," quoted above, a man living in the Arizona desert shows the narrator how to lay out stones so that the wind picks them up and arranges them in the shape of the stars of the universe; in "The Location of the River," the Niobrara River literally disappears.  Even less mystical epiphanies, like the wayward herons that descend on a snowy New York street in "Winter Herons," seem bigger, grander.  "Restoration," maybe, serves as a caution sign for the stories to come.  Slow down, it says, and don't expect too many fireworks.

Like the restorer, the characters of Lopez's stories tend to be academics, professionals, people with small and narrow interests in history or ecology.  Like the stone-layer of "The Orrery" who is first seen sweeping the desert floor, they approach these interests with a zen-like intensity.  Take, for instance, the title character of "The Woman Who Had Shells," who, ah, collects shells.  The narrator--who, because of his aloof and professorial voice, is so easily imagined as the narrator of "Restoration," "The Orrery," and other stories--sees her gathering shells on Sanibel Island in Florida.  Years later, seeing the woman again in New York City, he tries to communicate to her how the sight of her combing the beach has stayed with him for occluded reasons, and offers her a shell he'd collected in Arctic pack ice.  In turn, she shows him her collection:

The shells draw July heat from the languid air, shells brittle as Belleek, hard as stove bolts, wiht blushing, fluted embrochures, a gamut of watercolor pinks and blues.  Shivering iridescence rises from abalone nacre.  Heirogylphics climb the walls of slender cones in spiraling brown lines.  Conchs have the heft of stones.  One shell hides both firsts; others could be swallowed without discomfort, like pills.  A form of genuflection turned over in the hand becomes a form of containment, its thin pastels the colors to chalk a prairie sunrise.

You read on expecting some grand statement about the meaning of the shells, just as surely as you expect the man and the woman to have sex.  But they don't, and no meaning is forthcoming.  The shells don't mean; they simply are, and the acting of gathering them is, like the work of a historian who puts the events of the past into his own boxes of glass, a way of honoring the mystery of being.  If that sounds a little mystical, blame me--these stories are awfully reticent to make any such suggestion.

The centerpiece of the collection is about a historian.  In "Winter Count 1973," a historian of Native america from Nebraska travels to New Orleans to give brief remarks about his study of buffalo robes among the Northern Plains peoples.  The recording of a single event on a buffalo robe was their method of reckoning time ("1809 Blue feathers found on the ground from unknown birds," "1851 No meat in camp.  A man went to look for buffalo and was killed by two Arapaho"), but different tribes, different clans, different families all reckoned time with different events.  The winter count method of reckoning time is a direct challenge to white historians, and in this one it has caused an existential breakdown.  "He had long ago lost touch with the definitive," Lopez writes, "the awful distance of reason."  Interspersed with the years of the Northern Plains peoples are his own internal reckoning of time: "1918 Father, shot dead.  Argonne forest."  Is this history?  "You can only tell the story as it was given to you, he wanted to say," Lopez writes.  "Do not lie.  Do not make it up."  Is history--the attempt to put events into a clear and universal causal order--a kind of lie?

"Winter Count 1973" is something of a minor masterpiece.  The stories refuse so stubbornly to be outsized or epic, even when they are about entire rivers disappearing or bands of ghost buffalo retreating into the sky.  I often found myself feeling that I had missed something, but finding the flaw not in the stories but in myself, as if I should have been slower, more patient, more careful.