want that, to want the night to never end.
I let the hammer down carefully on the rifle so it would not fire. The metal of that rifle the coldest element, and I tried to touch only the wood, held it in both hands before me as I walked toward camp. Like the last remnant of some larger band advancing still.
I left the road as I neared, made my way up through trees to come at camp from higher ground. Large pines with cones scattered everywhere and fallen smaller branches, so that I had to test each step before allowing any weight. The walk of a blind man, each foot seeking ground and no momentum. Ready to stop at any moment.
In the forest, all vision reversed. On the road, under the bright moon, all substance was light, outlined in shadow, but here all substance came from darkness, and it felt as if the world could have been created this way. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This was how it began, before the light. Not absence of matter but antimatter. A void prefiguring. The first pull that shapes us.
Walking through that forest, I had to focus on the darkness, because light was insubstantial and could only mislead. The forest grew as I walked, all voids always expanding, the distances seeming farther. From the road, I had seen the entire stand of pines between the rock above and road below, notched into the mountain, bordered and finite, but once I was in it, all borders fell away and new land emerged, small ridges and folds inventing themselves between me and camp and each step slower than the last.
The rifle was all I had, held close across my chest, and I was without scale, could have been any size, nothing around me fixed, and it was some time before I was above the camp, oriented by the water rushing into that sink and by pattern of moonlight on the roof above the table and on the cab of the pickup. More difficult to find the men where they slept, but I was careful, and I found the place where my grandfather had been ready to slit my throat with that knife, and I felt exposed and afraid and was shivering, looking constantly behind and to all sides, but I worked down closer through the trees until I could see the white of his mattress and his great bulk lying upon it.
I held that rifle with my thumb ready to pull back the hammer and considered hunting my own grandfather. He had come close to killing me, and it seemed he could still do so at any moment. I didnât know that I could sleep and count on waking up.
I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined up that round peep sight with the thin vertical tip on the barrel, old metal that my grandfather himself had held when he was a boy, the rifle he had used to kill his first buck, and the dark bulk of him was softened and made smaller by this deadly alignment of fin and circle, all invention colder and smaller than we expect, its power a transgression, an opening of the heavens themselves, and this eased my fear. I pulled back the hammer with my thumb and now no one in this world had any power to stop me. Whatever would be, I would decide. And the poacher had made all possible. There was no longer anything I couldnât do.
But I lowered the hammer and then lowered the rifle. I canât say why I didnât pull the trigger then any more than I can say why I did pull it earlier. The decisions we make come from nowhere near our conscious minds. I stepped back carefully to my sleeping bag and carried it farther off into the trees, higher on that slope, found a hollow behind a fallen trunk, a place blocked from view, and lay down and tried to get warm, held my rifle close and hoped for sleep.
7
T HE DARKNESS A GREAT MUSCLE TIGHTENING, FILLED WITH blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work. No first breath but an earlier animation and pulse and pressure. I lay in that darkness waiting, and I did not sleep, and the stars meant nothing but only the dark spaces between them. That was what lived
I let the hammer down carefully on the rifle so it would not fire. The metal of that rifle the coldest element, and I tried to touch only the wood, held it in both hands before me as I walked toward camp. Like the last remnant of some larger band advancing still.
I left the road as I neared, made my way up through trees to come at camp from higher ground. Large pines with cones scattered everywhere and fallen smaller branches, so that I had to test each step before allowing any weight. The walk of a blind man, each foot seeking ground and no momentum. Ready to stop at any moment.
In the forest, all vision reversed. On the road, under the bright moon, all substance was light, outlined in shadow, but here all substance came from darkness, and it felt as if the world could have been created this way. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This was how it began, before the light. Not absence of matter but antimatter. A void prefiguring. The first pull that shapes us.
Walking through that forest, I had to focus on the darkness, because light was insubstantial and could only mislead. The forest grew as I walked, all voids always expanding, the distances seeming farther. From the road, I had seen the entire stand of pines between the rock above and road below, notched into the mountain, bordered and finite, but once I was in it, all borders fell away and new land emerged, small ridges and folds inventing themselves between me and camp and each step slower than the last.
The rifle was all I had, held close across my chest, and I was without scale, could have been any size, nothing around me fixed, and it was some time before I was above the camp, oriented by the water rushing into that sink and by pattern of moonlight on the roof above the table and on the cab of the pickup. More difficult to find the men where they slept, but I was careful, and I found the place where my grandfather had been ready to slit my throat with that knife, and I felt exposed and afraid and was shivering, looking constantly behind and to all sides, but I worked down closer through the trees until I could see the white of his mattress and his great bulk lying upon it.
I held that rifle with my thumb ready to pull back the hammer and considered hunting my own grandfather. He had come close to killing me, and it seemed he could still do so at any moment. I didnât know that I could sleep and count on waking up.
I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined up that round peep sight with the thin vertical tip on the barrel, old metal that my grandfather himself had held when he was a boy, the rifle he had used to kill his first buck, and the dark bulk of him was softened and made smaller by this deadly alignment of fin and circle, all invention colder and smaller than we expect, its power a transgression, an opening of the heavens themselves, and this eased my fear. I pulled back the hammer with my thumb and now no one in this world had any power to stop me. Whatever would be, I would decide. And the poacher had made all possible. There was no longer anything I couldnât do.
But I lowered the hammer and then lowered the rifle. I canât say why I didnât pull the trigger then any more than I can say why I did pull it earlier. The decisions we make come from nowhere near our conscious minds. I stepped back carefully to my sleeping bag and carried it farther off into the trees, higher on that slope, found a hollow behind a fallen trunk, a place blocked from view, and lay down and tried to get warm, held my rifle close and hoped for sleep.
7
T HE DARKNESS A GREAT MUSCLE TIGHTENING, FILLED WITH blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work. No first breath but an earlier animation and pulse and pressure. I lay in that darkness waiting, and I did not sleep, and the stars meant nothing but only the dark spaces between them. That was what lived
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