Chapter 5 The child camped alone on the boundless fertile plain. The wind blew in the high grass and he slept on the ground wrapped in a blanket an old man had given him. He made a small fire, but there was not much wood, and the fire died in the night. He awoke and watched the stars fall from their positions to blaze to their deaths in the darkness. He could hear the grass stir softly, and he could hear his own breathing or the swaying of the grass, and he saw far to the east beyond the mountains of the plain the flash of lightning over the country, and he knew at last that he would not be buried in this prairie but in some distant field, and he looked north where the high grass was rustling in the wind beneath the ancient stars, as if the earth dashed headlong, and he said once before he slept again that there was one thing he could say and that was he must live until it was time to die. All that night the stars fell and he held his head down and wondered if there were other worlds or if this was the only one. *** That next night the child shot another hare. He broke the shotgun and the two shells ejected. He slid in two more and jerked up the breech and it snapped in place. He made a fire and field dressed the rabbit and ate it and fed the wolf. The wolf watched the fire in the darkness. As the fire rose the eyes of her blazed like lamps to a gateway of a different world. A place burning on the shore of a mysterious vacuum. A place made of blood and the chemistry of blood, and in the center it was blood, because not anything but blood alone had strength to oscillate against the nothingness that tried to annihilate it. The child sat and he gazed at the shewolf. As her eyes and the empire that they testified had finally vanished with their pride back to their genesis there might yet be different fires and different testimonies and other worlds likewise observed. Yet they could never be this one. *** The child dreamed that he stood alone in a wide open space and all had been bloodied by the sun’s declination beyond the wall of the world. He slept and he dreamed that he gazed to a far away orchard. He knew that in this place he gazed to where his father stood outside the tiny cabin, and his father wept silently as he watched the sun die, and then he hung his head, and a bell tolled where there was no bell. And there be no other dream nor other waking world and no other history to tell. *** The child rode on then stopped and dismounted and took the carcass of the shewolf that had died and set it on the earth. He took her head and held it up to the sky. He opened her mouth and leaned back, and yet what he had in his hands was not the wolf, for she had gone back to the winds and the rains which were so suited to her and she to them, the wolves and the ghosts of wolves, and the boy held what was not there, for the wolf soared already fast between land and sky, had given up what bone and blood are made of but alone can never make, not on any alter, what has its origin in stone and star, what will carve the world out of the dark shape of the universe, if rain does, if wind does.
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:22:21 +0000
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