Chapter 3 The wolf knew no boundaries and she crossed from Mexico into America. She found little to eat. At the point where the international boundary line intersected the thirteenth minute of the eighth meridian she crossed the old nation and followed the creek. She had been killing cattle and horses for sometime, and the docility of these animals was a puzzle to her. The cows bellowing and bleeding. She brutalized the cattle and the weak horses in a way she did not the wild animals. As if the tameness of these creatures evoked in her some rage. As if she were offended by the violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross the road in daylight. These were the new ceremonies. She killed a baby doe and ate even the bones of her where she lay bleeding in the snow. She nursed a wound on her leg where her mate had bit her. It had been a gray wolf that was one of the many wolves. He had run at the forefront of the pack, the leader. It was he who had guided the course. It was he who had bitten the younger members. It was the shewolf who had found many kills, and it was he who had bitten her. He had bitten her because she had refused to leave him. Even when all of the other wolves had deserted them in hunger to hunt alone. Even when he had crouched at the length’s end of the chain that held him in the trap and bared his teeth at her. She had watched from the hill as the two men approached him. Then she had ran. She was pregnant. The child found her in a trap. He tried to move with casual movement but felt all his motives naked to her. The truth is concealed from the youth when they begin a journey, else they would have no will to ever begin. He had led the horse through the woods carefully. He watched the wolf which seemed to emerge from reaches unknown, as a whale might emerge from the deep. The boy knotted one end of the rope into a muzzle. He approached the wolf. He knelt down and studied her. He then quickly slipped the muzzle over her snout and mounted her almost in a rush although she did not resist him. He worked fast to tie a loop around her mid-section. He walked behind her with the rope and pulled the loop tight. He tied the rope around the saddle horn, walked to the wolf, knelt down and pulled apart the jaws of the trap and locked them. He took the paw from out of it and set it down. He saw that she could limp but not walk nor run. *** In that barren night a bird cried and quieted where no bird flew. When he passed the trees with the wolf he thought of his sister and knew that she would never enter that house again, and that he would never see her again, and in sleeps to follow he called out to her, but she did not answer him, but only passed down that empty road in infinite sadness and infinite loss. He rode on the curved plate of the earth, and it carried his form up into the swimming stars, so that he did not travel beneath but amid them. *** Years ago the soldiers had gone to Mexico and it was painful. None knew why they had gone away to be painful when it was so simple and pleasant and easy at home. They went to where the cannons fired through the silence, then through a dull lull that grew until the balls burst, and the horses had learned to side-step them along with the steaming holes on that shimmering plain, and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among them in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled vaguely navigational. And then it was done, and the westward lands were taken, and the land-size of American was doubled, and it was a training ground, so that when the urge to murder settled on the land once again, the leaders knew the techniques to make it properly terrible, and made the machines to make them sufficiently atrocious. And then they picked themselves up off that bloody ground and moved westward. And toward these lands the child now rode. *** He had ridden into Texas. The sun climbed up out of the pastures to make the world again from the dark. Forms began to appear from the gray. Trees, stones. The wolf twelve feet behind limped along, and he timed the horse to her pace. During the evening hours he turned the horse off the road and dismounted. He shot a rabbit with the shotgun, and the horse skittered at the sound of the blast. He took the knife from the satchel, field dressed the rabbit, and cooked it over a fire he made from sticks. He took the muzzle from off the shewolf and set some meat in front of her. She gorged it quick and swallowed, so silently, her’s a form of grace and horrific beauty, as if from a world where all was blood and flowers. *** He slept that night on the dirt. He woke and lay on earth lonesome and listened to the breeze. He gazed at the few remaining cinders of the fire in their dying, as though their endeavor against the timber brought out geometries of the order of the world which could only stand completely disclosed and no way other, thus are the ways of the world, in darkness and ashes.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 13:24:58 +0000
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