Beaver, Badger, and Hunter's Moon
No man can step into the same river twice, for the second time it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. ~Heraclitus
My little boy is bathed in moonlight on the edge of the front porch where he stands pointing up at the November sky.
I’m still flushed from the hot bath I was just drying off from as he raps his fist on the pine door, “Mom! Come see! Come see!” I’m mildly irritated, wondering if I will ever get some peace and quiet in the bathroom again, thinking it’s probably something on his video game—what’s he call it? Furious the Monkey Boy? That little trick from the Age of Empires CD?—that he feels is so earth-shatteringly important. I’m wrapping my wet hair up in a towel, shrugging on a sweater, shoving my feet into wool slippers. “What is it C? I holler at the 9-year-old, with less patience than I intend. I open the door. He’s not there. I pad into the living room where the wood-burning stove is stoked. Just catch a glimpse of him disappearing out the French doors into the cold night, a flash of blue and red pups at his heels.
“The moon!”
I am stopped in my tracks in the middle of the front porch. Captivated by the enormous orb hanging over the pasture, waning from burnt gold to icy blue to silver white. It is lit up from the inside out. Almost alive. Sheathed in a ring of light.
“The moon!”
C. turns an excited face back towards me. His cheeks are rosey. He’s breathing hard, his chest rising up and down. Against the backdrop of stars and sky and mesa and pasture--the two uplifted arms he flexes sometimes in a goofy muscle-man pose to show me just how strong he’s getting these days when I tell him he’s not big enough to lift something, the creamy dimpled elbows, the white palms of his hands—everything about my son looks heart wrenchingly small to me.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell him.
He’s wearing the camouflage pants I got him at the hunting department at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. The ones he would wear every single day if I didn’t sneak them out of his room after he’s sound asleep in bed. He may not have his Hunter Safety License yet, but that boy is sure dressing the part. Those are going in the laundry tonight, I decide. I make a mental note to remove his Swiss Army knife (and rocks, sticks, etc.) from his pockets first.
“It’s a Hunter’s Moon.” C. adopts the authoritative tone he gets when he’s telling me about something he’s learned in school.
“Oh, Really? Why do they call it that?” I look up again at the unusually large moon. I really am wondering why exactly, but I also want to let him give me the benefit of his recently acquired knowledge. “Because of the ring around it?”
“No,” he grins. “Because of the light.” He says the last two words very slowly and kind of loud, speaking to me as if I’m from some foreign country.
I inhale. Close my eyes. Open them again to a world awash in platinum.
And maybe I am.
Because a herd of pewter horses with manes and tails of tangled silver wire are suddenly waiting at the corral gate in sharp relief against diamond-speckled sand. The liquid mercury barn and hen house cast long shadows so black you’d skirt the edge for fear of tumbling in, never to be seen or heard from again. Burnished juniper, pinon, and blades of buffalo grass quiver strangely argent in the breeze. The geese sleep with their heads tucked beneath their steel wings and make shrill, contented goose sounds that cut through the cold like the blade of a bowie knife. With their snowy tail feathers like handles, you could almost mistake them for teapots. Charlotte Gray slips through the glittering web, whiskers glinting like piano wire, stalking a field mouse. The heeler puppies’ speckles are stars.
“Because at this time of year hunters can still see their prey at night time.” C.’s not looking at me anymore, but stares into the silvern night lapping against the porch instead, pups quietly attentive at his side, big ears like antennae. They seem to be hoping for a glimpse of buck, bear, beaver, badger, elk, owl, coyote ... Anything wild and wooly. And not quite tame. Like them. “Here—” he says.
C. presses some moonlight carefully into the palm of my hand, blows on it like an ember to keep it alive. Like the time we built a campfire together up on the mesa with kindling we’d gathered from beneath the tall pine while keeping a sharp eye on the shaggy steers grazing nearby, and he surprised me by blurting out of the blue, “You’re not like any of the other moms, Mom. Ya’ know?”
"Oh, because I know how to build a camp fire?" I ask him with a wink, and suddenly our faces are full of smoke.
I hug the sweater closer to me. It's freezing cold. But the little man is not ready to come inside. Not yet.
The hunter’s moon rises.
Flickr photos by: Pixability, KariMelissa, gwENvision
