I did tell Erik and Earnest about the encounter, by urgent necessity, but this is the first time I have ever revealed it to anyone else. I know you might not believe me. But it explains how I changed and why I did what I did not long after.
My bear encounter: Now I think that’s how the pull of our larger destinies works, too. For no real reason, we go making a strange small noise, a secret song consisting of, oh, our way of talking, our ironies or mumbles, that Irish accent we affect sometimes, or the clothes we choose to wear, our habitual faces and moods, the music that’s on our iPod, as we mosey along in our lives. We get that stupid tattoo on an irrational whim, we buy lunch from that particular falafel stand because we like to look at the Turkish guy’s thick mustache. We just do. We’re turning this way and that, finding our way in unknowing response to some irresistible gravitation. And others are drawn by it, equally unaware. If we even notice, we think we’re making choices, but really we’re just fulfilling the same impulse as my bear-calling “shhhhhhhew.” It’s just much larger and longer-term. We don’t know we’re making that random sound in all the ways we express ourselves, don’t know why we are who we are, don’t know we’re on such an inexplicable yet destined journey. We may not trust ourselves or the world that deflects us or lures us or obstructs us. But we blithely continue, heading toward whatever meeting awaits. And that’s how magic finds us.
Chapter 53
By late July, Erik’s hops had climbed eight feet up the coconut-fiber ropes he’d trained them to. Brassard said he’d never seen any plant grow that fast. Erik told him they had hardly started: In the next few weeks they would gain another six feet and then thicken as they exploded with cones. In all, he expected that each acre of trellis would be holding about ten tons of hops plants, all that mass sprouted from tiny shoots in just three months. If nothing went wrong, he would harvest perhaps three thousand pounds—after drying—of hops cones from the top three acres. The lower three acres, grown from rhizomes, would produce only half that in the first year.
Before the plants rose up their training strings, the trellis was an odd place, not pretty, with almost-straight rows of vertical poles connected at the top by wires, just like telephone poles. But once the bines climbed higher than my head, a hop yard became quite wonderful—a series of paths between near-vertical walls of foliage. Deep in the middle of the yard, it felt pleasantly secret, an enclosure like a topiary maze in an old English garden. When the sun beat hard on it, I could almost hear the bines reaching, stretching, spiraling upward with remorseless muscularity.
Though in many ways my life was now more coherent, I was living in several distinctly different worlds. To my days working on the farm, and to my time in the woods, I had added working among the hops alongside Erik and, often, Will. Earnest’s tree business kept him away three or four days a week, and when he returned he had essential farm chores to do. Earnest and I saw very little of each other, and at times I wondered whether he was deliberately avoiding me. I yearned to tell him about my bears—I knew he would hear it without skepticism and would understand the magnitude of it—but I never found the right time or place.
Will was working on a video project that explored new farming trends in Vermont, so he justified his hours of menial tasks among the hops, always with a camera, as possibly worth a few minutes of the planned forty-minute video. He had a hard time keeping Erik from clowning for the camera.
My miraculous night with the bears stayed with me. My mind turned it this way and that, but I still couldn’t slot it into any conception of the world’s workings I had ever known. I walked around with that wonder and reverence resonating inside. I held it against my heart like a precious thing, a gem of inestimable value.
This reverence—its violation—explains why I responded as I did when a Goslant killed on my land again.
One evening, I was wandering through my woods, loving them but also doing an offhanded inventory of straight hemlocks and white pines—by then I knew my trees pretty well—that Erik might use for another trellis should market demand call for more hops. I was looking up at trees, not at my feet. Up near my northeastern border, I stepped in something that slid under my feet and made me leap away. When I looked down, I saw another heap of guts on the forest floor. Another deer had been killed and field-dressed here, the abdominal contents left to rot.
Then a horrible thought came to me: Maybe the pile wasn’t from a deer. Maybe it was the intestines and organs of one of my bears. The thought came like a scream, and I nearly vomited. My night with the bears was transcendent, a guiding if baffling star in my personal cosmos. Killing one of them was beyond blasphemy.
This time, there could be no ambiguous rationale. It was simply poaching, out of season, illegal, on my well-posted land.
My boot was slimed with the wet of that pile. I stood paralyzed for a moment before I could leave the scene. It was fresh; flies were just starting to find the mess,
