The Messenger

Lone Elk

17 Lone Elk 1 r u m i n a n t s Full beauty of the herd— gold-brown, glowing in the grassy bottomlands, browsing the asters, coralberry, acorns. Let wild in the forest, we multiplied, cows fat with mothering, all of us a single mind, precise as the universe. Before the war, before the army fence cuts us off from food and movement, there are so many trees, a forest thickened by clear cutting—trees that carry sound in their branches like the voices of elk. Our voices. 18 2 c a l v i n g s e a s o n Our last spring, starving. And the calves come anyway. Browsing, we strip the trees, clear the grassland and then there is nothing to eat. The trucks come and go and no one feeds us, though they smell like food. Our milk dries up. Tenacity will keep us suckling into summer, searching out the last grasses, ignorant that what comes for us is here already. The ground unfreezes where they bury their weapons. We graze there too. 19 3 o c t o b e r 1 9 5 8 It is a kindness to shoot them. One charged our truck. Rage of a dying bull, a noise so terrible it takes the breath, cannot be spoken of later. Men make sport of it. We hunt the suffering herd where they are already dying, bounded by fences. Even in their weakness it is slow going. Winter helps us cull the rest until only the old bulls are left and those so slow the trees cannot cover them. 20 4 l i v e w e i g h t Ungutted, minus the blood loss, the weight of the dead is the same as the weight of the living. More than a hundred altogether. Their increase steady, a watch set ticking. The bodies are processed, sent to feed hospitals. We keep the heads, the ovaries, the stomachs. We make notes. As if there were a future, we plan habitat. On a table the skull of a yearling reaches maturity. We remember the herd in our work. They have vanished, they will reappear—a jawbone, the branch of a spine. 21 5 m a r c h 1 9 5 9 Silence, the hush of trees in the rain. It is nearly spring again. The men go on burying munitions; the deer graze the forest. Now the trees are harrowing trees. They would speak. They have a stench like standing water. In the forest nothing moves but oak branches. The war winds down, the soldiers’ days are numbered. Still they stop on every path to look for tracks. Asters rise like steam from the grass. A thousand eyes are opening. 22 6 l o n e e l k For you the children bring their dimes to school. Survivor of five months of slaughter, then years alone in trees grown thick with horror. How you managed, scavenging among deer and vultures, is anyone’s guess. Your terror at being found, incalculable. Your existence, inexplicable— a hellish magnificence, a message from the dead. Or just a lonely animal. When the others come you unwind yourself from the trees. ...