Ruminants

FICTION Ruminants R.T. Smith The deer would not be moving much tonight, for the wind muddled their sense of smell, and they could not travel safely. On a still evening they could hear smoke or see an eye blink; they could smell the silver of a ring. When the air was gusty, they nibbled leaves and lingered close to their beds. That was the common wisdom, but Swofford knew they were insatiable once the first passing bird pecked a few pears open or early windfalls broke in the orchard grass. The bolder ones would always venture out, the hungry ones in whom the drought memory was still sharp. This late in September, there was never a night free of their pillage. The fruit farmers all along the Blue Ridge struggled for solutions, but nothing else was hit as hard as the Asian pears. Swofford and Su had tried hair bundles, rattle lines and chicken wire fencing, then electric current, and just last year a posse of restless young redbones who would interrupt their border patrol to gnaw any fawn that went down. Swofford shot bucks and dragged their bleeding carcasses around the perimeter behind the AlHs Chalmers, but 3000 mature trees were a lot to protect, and still they came. Su was troubled by the casualties. One morning he had found her in the orchard still dressed in her terry robe, moist-eyed and stroking the neck of a doe he'd shot the night before, and though she didn't speak, her eyes said, "How can we?" Perched on the rusting tractor's seat with a six pack and his Silvertone tuned an octave above music, he questioned the worth of it all. In early spring they'd installed motion-sensor floodlights and alarms, but that technology just disturbed their sleep and didn't seem to phase the whitetails. He and Su could hardly make love without being alerted that their profit margin was under assault, and some nights in full fury he'd run out wearing only boxers and swinging a shovel to whack the scavengers on the flank as they stretched their muzzles into the limbs and devoured anything they could reach. And in a way, the musician in him understood. He knew what it was like to be delirious with some undersong larger than any 47 creature's will. By late summer the sugars were twirling wildly inside the Shinsui, and by the time the pollinated fruitiers of Kosui and Shinseiki had begun to blush, even the bee skeps had to be moved, for the workers who had savored the flowers in April would swirl around, desperate for a different harvest they couldn't define. Everything was intoxicated by the crispness and texture, the sweet flesh and pineapply aftertaste of Hosui or the insinuation of apricot in the pith of Arriang. Gourmet had written up Cavalier Orchard's Asian fruit as the best on the East Coast, and people drove to Charlottesville all the way from Maryland and Pennsylvania just to buy them fresh-picked, to stroll amid the orderly rows and point out the soothing blue sawtooth of the surrounding mountains as they sampled the available assortment and complimented the proud growers. The market was there, but so was the wildlife problem, and since he and Su had begun to argue over how badly the deer forage might cost them, he had started to see the Albemarle County herds as a threat to his security. Not that weather and insects didn't exact their own toll, not that the calendar and refrigeration problems and the national economy didn't get in their own licks. Everything had local consequences, personal ties. In his life with Su, the time was ripe for a child, he knew, and she was tired of experimenting with greenhouse hybrids and devoting her whole existence to the orchard. Her dark eyes would glow whenever she spoke of the need for family, and he knew she meant both her own people back in Korea and an urge stirring within her. Marriage was the knot in the wood. He'd been a migrant strummer for so long, pushing farther and farther from his...