…
Summer, and our slow days around the cabin: cutting some firewood to sell, or building rock walls for the neighbors; in the late summer, both of us canning fruit and making jam. The heat almost unbearable, boiling water on the wood stove, with which to sterilize the fruit jars. Huckleberries from the woods, and strawberries from the garden. Sweat pouring down us. Adding half a bag of sugar to the whole vat. Pouring it steaming into the jars, and sealing them, and then waiting for the lids to pop!, indicating they’ve swelled to a perfect tight seal. The sweat veeing down our chests and backs; the crackle of the fire in the wood stove, and the baby asleep in the bedroom. Martha and I slipping down to the pond, undressing, and going for a swim to clean off. Making love in the pond—too hot out in the sun—and then climbing up onto the bank to dry in the faintest of breezes—late August, September—and no sound in the world, other than the silence of the baby sleeping and the faintest leaf clatter of the aspens—the sound of a cloud—and the irregular, soothing pop of each fruit jar.
Winter at full arm’s length: coming, but still a full arm’s length away. Dry brown grasses drying in the sun; our lazy arms around each other, our milky skin. A ninety-day growing season.
…
The deer that I hit with the truck, and carried home—the one that I hung out in the barn: on the fifth day of aging it, I went out to butcher her. I’d been walking past to check her every day—to make sure the coyotes hadn’t gotten her. And every day when I’d gone by, the deer had been untouched. The doe had been hanging there the same as I’d left her, with her back to me, neck outstretched by the rope, hanging from the rafters with all four legs drooping at her sides, drawn by gravity.
I’d assumed she was still all there, and I’d begun to look forward to the meat. I was going down to the desert to camp and was looking forward to baking the two big glistening red loins in the coals of a campfire, and I was going to marinate great long red strips of the backstrap.
I went into the barn with the butcher knife, but when I swung the doe around to begin skinning the hide, the carcass felt as light as a coat on a coat hanger, and as I spun her to face me I saw that there was only a skeleton beneath the hide, that a coyote had gotten into the barn and had eaten the meat off of her hindquarters, had eaten out all of the butt steaks, had eaten up into the carcass as far as it could reach—standing on its hind legs to do so—eating all the way up to the bottom half of the backstrap, so that only the shoulders and neck were left untouched. I was stunned, and ashamed. I thought I knew better. You can’t keep a coyote away from meat. It’ll get it—whatever it takes, it’ll get it, just as the wolves do.
…
Martha studied whitetails in college, got her doctorate in ungulate nutrition, specialized in winter range requirements. We used to talk about deer all the time—about almost nothing but deer. The bucks we’d seen. When we thought the fawns would drop. When the rut would start: that one week of the year when the bucks run wild, dashing through the forest day and night looking for does to breed, intent on only one thing. Totally unaware of their mortality. Road-hunters cruising the snowy lanes in big trucks, knocking down the bucks as the bucks run right past them, ignoring the trucks, ignoring everything but the sweet scent of deer vulva and buck jism, which has always reminded me of the holidays.
Roadside gut piles and gleaming red carcasses left behind then, and coyotes slipping out of the woods to join in the feast, and ravens cawing all over the valley in what can only be called pagan glee, swooping in and out of the trees with gobbets of red flesh dangling from their beaks, and the snow coming down, sealing off the old world and making the new one, the clean white beautiful one...
Martha and I met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?
Martha was eighteen, too. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road-building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things—the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.
She told me that we had too many roads already, that the mountains and all wildness was disappearing beneath concrete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.
It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries-old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.
But it’s not as if I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminism curricula. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January) I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life while she lived one.
This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were, as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences—the way she
