Beyond the wire
Creek Running North. At the Mile Mark. How seldom we encounter animals these days, other than ourselves, who can cause us more than inconvenience. We stood on the threshold of the Pleistocene and saw a world full of things that could eat us with a swipe. We killed them all.
One bright winter day, two elk soar in silence over the barbed wire fence right in front of us, land soundlessly on earth, then disappear into the pine trees─hoof prints in the snow the only evidence they are real. They sail so close to my little boy standing there with his mouth gaping wide open, I wonder if they have just told him something special. But C. never says. Occasionally we see the elk in the distance on the mesa above our house. They don’t seem to mind us too much when we're on horseback.
In the spring we see mule deer up there. Rather, we see the tip of their white tails flashing through the juniper. But my children pick the bleached white bones of the deer ancestors up from the ground, tie them to their saddles─even though the old pony shakes his head and rattles his bit─and bring them home.
My husband calls on his cell phone one morning as he leaves for work to tell me that there’s a dead black bear, a pretty good-sized one, on the road in front of our house. Someone must have hit him with their car, he says. The carcass is gone by the time I get there though. Once Dennis spots big cat paw prints on the old road running through our ranch. I carry a gun for a while after that when I go riding. Sometimes my horse and I freeze motionless in the scrub and rocks, smoke from the controlled burn on the mesa wafting down through the dusk, through the trees, certain that the mountain lion’s eyes are glued on us as I’m fingering the pistol. One starless, moonless night, my sometimes trickster husband, who grew up in this wild country, growls menacingly in play behind a piñon when I’m down at the barn in the dark feeding horses. I tell him it’s not funny. Neither is my dog amused. He’s the one who has a famous tale about a standoff (really) with an angry black bear over the elk he got when he won the hunting lottery, not me. There was no way he was coming out of there without that elk─black bear looking for an easy meal or no black bear looking for an easy meal─is the turning point of the story.
The mama cat who straggled into my barn a few days ago to have her kittens leaves plump baby rabbits and fat rats next to the dishes I fill with milk and canned tuna fish for her and her babies each morning and evening. Sometimes she deposits a crumpled barn swallow there too, poor thing’s feathers all askew. Those little animals are now in death no doubt convinced that there’s a tiger in my barn.
The father of my children’s friend is a taxidermist. After bringing his son over for a play date last weekend, he stands down in the pasture with us, eyeing my draft horse Toby, sizing the sizable gelding up, doing the mental calculations, finally announcing (as if this is news) that you could haul an elk down on that big boy, you sure could. Yes, I know, I say. This is what every single hunter says upon seeing the big Percheron. Perhaps Dennis and our son C. will do that some day, I tell him.
I am at the hardware store in town, the one where they have all of the stuffed animal heads hanging above the checkout counter. Next to the glassy-eyed water buffalo, there is the head of a horned goat of epic proportions. Like something you would read about in one of C.S. Lewis' books. (If he was alive, that goat would probably talk like Shakespeare and save humanity from itself.) His massive horns curl back over his ears and behind his head to come out pointing straight at you. I believe if I saw such a magnificent creature in person; in three dimensions; in real life; not in one of my children’s picture books; not on TV; and not stone-cold dead, stuffed, and nailed up on a wall; I might fall to my knees and worship him or his maker.
Twice this week I’ve rescued wrens from the now blessedly cold pot-bellied stove. Each time, there’s a fluttering of wings against cast iron like a tiny heart beating an SOS, and hinges creaking as I swing the stove door wide open. Eventually I have to chase one wren through the house, trying to herd him (can you herd a bird?) out through the French doors, but he crashes headfirst into my bathroom mirror instead. I scoop the stunned bird up into my hands. He is black with soot. Beak open. Black tongue stuck straight out. Tiny chest pulsating, heaving. I carry him to the porch rail, cradling his frail body, and lay him there gently. My husband says through the kitchen window, there’s nothing you can do. He will live, or he will die. And I know that’s true. But I am relieved when the little wren takes wing to the barbed wire along the top of the pasture fence, where he perches, still dazed, waiting.
Late last night I’m sitting on the front porch with Dennis. We are rocking back and forth on the glider, companionably sitting. The stars are like a million No.2-pencil-punched-out holes in a piece of my kids’ stiff black arts-and-crafts paper from school. And someone is shining a big bright light through them from behind. I wonder exactly who he is and why.
I finally say, “Dennis, this life is just too short for everything.”
He looks up at the stars. Chews over what I've said for a moment. “Yep,” he says.
We go inside.
On the mesa above our little ranch, the elk are sleeping.
Flickr photos: bodhi47; aroid; e3000
