I.
The raccoon
was early,
before the crowded trees
held only warblers
and the nattering of squirrels
pummeled the lake in glancing
dives, giving the grebes what for. Then
there were still tanagers, voicing
their globed remote golds when sly
winds smoothed back the beech leaves
and the squirrels were less feckless,
cobbing their cones of pine in silent
covertness, near stumps and hollows
that stored our water, fuel,
and light. We
were more primitive then
and always arrived glowing,
seeing less than we absorbed,
radiating all our thoughtless
wonder, innocent as rain.
These were the days of the orange
pup tent, the heavy skillet
and beaten coffee pot and
bacon smoking up in the morning
after a night stoking heat
in undulating covers. I
can still feel the young day
as a hand gently heeled to a
drowsy eye, the rouse of
orange wrapping spreading
its deepening wings,
the privacy almost unbearable,
the only thing better
than the limber, contemplative,
bosky air, an awful sheeting of
thunderous vexation
shivering us back into down.
The fires were always
stirring, magical —
rituals that I
could only lend a spirit to,
barred as I was from
axing and steepling the wood,
kindling the first dainty blaze
from courted shavings and chips,
choosing the least green timber
from the reverenced stack,
already split, and heaven-protected in the tarp,
raising the frame for the living flames
which always came unappeasable
into our world
drinking the night with fury,
claiming it by primordial right. You
were skilled in closing in a circle
for bright opulent splays of orange,
tooling upward scrolls of viridescent white
into lost-world caves and columns,
breathing as if by compact
an exalted shadow-making entity
into all of its elemental potency
onto a bidden site. You
never damped it down
but let it falter by itself,
guttering over the spent logs,
licking a last forked splinter
before billowing back to the dirt. You
might have had a flute
with a call silent to all but embers. You
watched, swigging starlight to the last,
long after I tucked loneliness
into bed, your real companion
a force unfelt by me. You
singed your eyebrows once
when rescuing a cramped
corner of a wasting flame
but that was later, after the
winds kicked mordantly up.
Here, in this soft dark,
we were just beginning
our orange nuptials and we
tilted toward each other
like birch surprised at their
adjacency. We
had not yet come
to grief and we
were fond and somewhat frolicsome. We
sat on a bench with a stalk of French bread
peering out of a sack. We
were possibly tired of cooking
on the sluggish hibachi, possibly
going to slice cheese or
spurt grapes into our bread-
dry mouths, possibly
planning to mix a salad
in the furrowed wooden bowl,
beefsteaks, cukes, and carrots
aired and piney, ready to rinse
and toss. We were
pausing, I know, and we were
certainly in New York, the
Catskills, perhaps, or the lower
Adirondacks. On a lake and not
a river so it was not
Uncle Pete’s, the place of
tubing on the Esopus
where we learned about currents
and outcropping rocks. We may
have been enroute
from some place
to someplace else
and stopped here with our
hearty aplomb, our freedom,
and languid equipment. This
was before we had regular places,
destinations determined
by venturesomeness and love. This
was before we had more sporting
and experienced gear, a shelter
for the whole site so the rain
never muddied our entry or
enthusiasm. I have a notion
of a kind of compound
with strutting Winnebagos
strung with territorial lanterns and
hampered with makeshift porches,
like drawbridges to the
lawn chairs, welcome signs with
family names and caricatures,
card games and serious grilling
of neighborly spuds and steaks. We
pretended isolation,
secure in our baffled
dignity and growing infatuation
with the trees,
our lone tent tinily
out of place, but still
our dearest portion. We
were peaceably waiting
for one of us to move,
by mystic afferent impulse,
chore-ward, when
the ‘coon
swooped our bread into the
piney hinterlands as swift
and neat as a kingfisher spearing
an unsuspecting perch.
The raccoons learned
to move on
when pickings
weren’t as easy. They
deepened into the forest
where the boot soles weren’t
as thick.
II.
The Moosehead bear
snuffled like a big raccoon
into our scrubbed and crumbless site.
The moonlight drifted spottily in
through the celadon canvas of our tent.
The huge lake misted the deep night pines
and the stillness was fast and unwondering.
The sound of a heart stopping snapped me
into the air. When my heart lumbered
into motion again it ran like quail
in tightening circles. I lay in my fear
thoughtlessly, zipped into my comfy
down home like a package of stiffening bait. Bears
don’t particularly want to feast on flesh with any
fight left in it but the problem is, when one is
idle, helpless, and acutely conscious
of one’s puniness,
that one, even schooled,
just really never knows. Now we
had had bear scares
before, like the one on the shores of
Cranberry where the dogs barked it off
and I listened in a half-sleep all night
for a graze of an unknown claw on stone. Or
the grizz in Jasper whose presence made us
switchback down the half-ascended trail,
knowing only that the steep
angles of the air were too seemingly unsprung,
the roots and trunks too seemingly freshly raked. And
on horseback once, in the Rockies again, the trees and plants
diminishing with our climb, a sighting following us up
the thin beauty of the peak like the smell of a truculent ghost. We
pitched these scares between us like a tent, guywires
of shared tension and reason supporting our sheltering unity.
But Moosehead was different. No matter what
I knew of bears, I knew
you couldn’t help us. The bear
sniffed for flecks of spice and blood.
You were so sound asleep
you never even heard.
III.
The moose had been rained on for days
covering himself with brush and nesting
in gusts of bent pine
branches. He was doused and in need of a run
to loose the leaves of maple and hemlock
from their tangle on his rack,
to spray the still-pent air with a drizzle
of haunch-matted pine needles. He wanted
warming and the electric friction of a
self-made wind in his glazy coat
but he hadn’t bargained on the slim flick of road
being slick or even bleakly there or
the lone car goading itself
through the Rangeley mist with
a grudging curtailed onwardness,
its rain-punchy inhabitants
zinging drunken moose calls
into the leafy twilight
with a New York swagger and demand. We
had never in all our years in Maine
seen moose and today, caught in the car and
showered in thunderous grey,
we distracted ourselves by hurling our desires
to the silent pine sentries ranked
on either side of our way.
We saw the moose
jerk and hit the tar,
gravel bubbling up from our skid as we
stopped dead and speechless. He fell unbuffered,
with all his absolute might and regalness,
smack onto his broad bull-behind, his legs
spindling out crazily, his huge head swinging alarm
inches from our headlights. We
did nothing for a laden beat
then, in pell-mell simultaneity,
rolled our windows up and braced
for livid moose-assertion, the hoof or head
to the bumper, the crazing and shelling of
astonished windshield, our heads
cuffed and cracked like beech-nuts, relieved
of guilt and adrenalin. We
expected, deserved comeuppance
for having abetted the cause
of this pratfall. We wanted moose,
by golly, but never meant to spook one
into such ludicrous indignity. We
would have turned away
had we had time to sense
the outcomes. As it happened,
we bore witness and escaped
without a charge — nary a withering moose-glare
nor bellowed scolding evening the score.
He collected his shocked but working limbs
and shook the road out of his head, then hightailed it
into the woods, hoping, we figured, that
none of his cows or cronies were around.
And down aways along our road
after a decent interval of silence, we
sputtered into laughs
convulsively
the way you shouldn’t do
when something mighty
hits the dust. We
tweaked the story between us
when the thunder got too rough
and we savored
a knowing privilege,
sheepish but elite,
for stumbling on
this unaccustomed vision
of an addled nature
bumbling its
sublimity.
IV.
The elk condensed out of the vaporous
mountain dusk, moved into our range
and stood
still as a blessing poised
and unbestowed, staring into the
quickened light of our unrepentant
eyes. Our mugs of tea
steamed into the pause
and something
coalesced and cleared
and shone regenerate
and timeless
and there wasn’t
any speaking
after she bowed and vanished
and after we set down
our
consecrated tea.
This happened where we
walked sidelong on glaciers
clamping our treads into the ice
and holding
for dear life.
Coda:
A vent on a cobbly grade in the lush Taconics
gives rise to huddles of leaf-loving families
trekking up-peak into mid-October, slowly,
movement its own end. I puff in the wake
of three capped and sweatered children,
their grandparents certainly our age,
preserved in the sweet-tempered,
renegade, macrobiotic look of,
god help us,
fifty years ago. I listen
as I climb, affecting more wind than I have,
to an enticing stream of encouraging babble. I
cup my listening and soon make out
observations and
invitations to observe,
explanations fanciful and actual,
a spill of buoyant skips and hops
and gentle, appreciative coaxing,
delight like the tumbles of orange leaves
spirited and spared by the softest of winds.
I prize a loop of fuzz from
a shard of granite and watch it
ride my palm. The oldest child,
a girl of perhaps eight, tells me
I’m holding a woolly bear. The woolly bear is black
with a middle of brown, or brown with edges of black.
The length of the winter is predicted
by the length of brown on the woolly bear.
The father, ponytail gangly and grey,
bandana slightly askew but expertly tied,
volunteers this bit
of lore, for which I am
ridiculously grateful.
We
had a kitten
together. You
rinsed her fear from her when I
cradled her into your arms
after the shaky car-ride, toweled
her off and let her
find her way
as she gingerly
rubbed herself home. You
took over
expertly, knowing
just how to be watchful
but unobtrusive, offering her safety
and independence, indulgence and fair,
essential limitation. She
curled against us when we slept
and I sang to her
as she rested on my belly. She
is still in her home
with you, grown sweet and lazy
with the name that I gave her.
She is still afraid of thunder
and she still flattens against you
at night, nosing into the warmth
of your always
being there.
I
haven’t seen her
for years.
And, you know,
the woolly bear cautions
another long spell
of cold.
Kate Falvey’s work has been published in many journals (including previous issues of DO) and anthologies; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and for ten years edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.