Two Deer

IT WAS JANUARY when the first deer went through the ice. I was out in the barn working, and Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me.

I grabbed a rope and went running down to the lake. The deer, a doe, had gone out onto the new ice, all the way to the middle, and had crashed through. It was twenty below and supposed to get colder. The deer had punched a car-sized hole in the center and was swimming in circles, flailing and trying to pull herself up onto the ice with her black shiny hooves. She would work her front legs up and prop herself on the ice that way, like a woman resting her elbows at a table, and then she would kick and thrash, trying to pull herself back up, but would crash through again and slide back into the water. Then she would resume swimming in circles, panicked.

I hurried out onto the ice. The ice cracked under my feet; I slowed down. I knew my wife was watching from the window and I could feel her thinking, stupid, stupid, as I went out across the ice. We had a new baby.

The doe’s eyes widened. She swam harder, certain that I was coming to leap on her back and bite her neck. The ice was making splintering sounds, so I got down on all fours and crept closer. I was almost close enough to throw the rope.

One knee punched through the ice, and I sank into the water up to midthigh. I lay spread-eagled to keep from sinking any deeper. Cold water swirled around my chest. I could feel the cake of ice I was lying on breaking away from the rest; it began to bob and float, and then sink. I figured I was going down as well, and it was a sour feeling to realize Martha and baby were watching me. I hoped they weren’t filming me; we had gotten a new video camera because of the baby, and Martha was always filming everything. It would be a stupid death, captured on tape.

I rolled onto my back—water rushing all around me—and wriggled backwards from the floating ice onto the firmer shelf ice behind me, sliding away from the hole in the ice, away from the thing I was trying to save.

The deer was, I’m sure, wondering only if it would go under or be leapt upon.

***

The second deer leapt in front of my headlights in March. Another doe, it just came sailing up over a snowbank. Her feet never touched the road. I slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve but hit her in mid-flight, as if she were a bird. The truck struck her left shoulder and knocked her into the snowbank.

I stopped the truck and got out and picked up her limp body, and loaded her into the back of the truck with my dogs. She was heavy, and I had to wonder if she was pregnant from back in the fall, from the wild rut that goes on in November, deer chasing each other all over the place, a carnival of deer breeding.

The day before I hit the doe had been the first mild day since winter, the first one where you could feel the sun again, and I’d noticed all the animals walking around slowly, blinking and standing out in meadows as if marveling that such a thing as sun and grass, and open ground, existed.

This deer had eluded starvation, coyotes, and lions, had survived the long hard winter, and now I had snuffed her out, here on the cusp of spring. All of that brave suffering had been for nothing.

My dogs were in the back of the truck with her. It was just into nightfall—seven o’clock. At first the dogs were excited by the deer, but once we started down the road they calmed some, and by the time we got to the cabin those sweet hounds had moved over next to the deer and were lying with their heads resting on her shoulder and flanks, as if keeping her warm. I saw with some surprise that the deer had her head up and was looking around.

I whistled the dogs out and shone a light on the deer. She had just a little bump on her head, and I left the tailgate open, hoping she would jump out and run back into the woods. It was a clear night with stars, and later I crept out and laid a heavy blanket over her. I kept checking on her through the night.

Gradually her head went lower and lower, though, and her breathing grew more ragged. She began to cough, and in the morning she was dead, stiff, her eyes shaded to a dull and opaque blue.

I pulled her out of the truck and took her behind the barn and cleaned her. I was slightly sickened to discover upon gutting her that her shoulder was shattered hopelessly and that her stomach lining had ruptured, so that all of her intestines and other organs (except for the heart) had slid down into the lower half of her body. It was a terrible mess. And she’d just been holding up her head like nothing was wrong. It was dumb to think she could’ve been all right. I could scarcely believe, looking at her, my childish hopes of the night before—that she might hop down out of the truck and go back off into the woods, and survive, even prosper. I cleaned her and hung her in the barn to age for five days.

The third deer ran through my yard the very next day. I was in the barn trying to work, huddled over a quickly cooling cup of coffee, and I heard the dogs barking the way they do when they see coyotes. They were snarling and barking—Ann howling like a wolf—and I jumped up and ran out into the snow, nearly colliding with this deer, which was bounding through the deep drifts.

A big coyote was right on its tail, and my dogs were chasing the coyote as it chased the deer. We all arrived at the same place at the same time.

The coyote stopped in his tracks when he saw me, but the deer kept going. The coyote whirled and ran in the opposite direction. The dogs chased him a short distance, then turned and trotted back.

I felt like I’d saved that deer, which helped dull the guilt I’d been feeling about the other deer, but it wasn’t an altogether clean trade, because I knew that coyotes had to eat. I had saved the deer but had messed up the coyote.

***

Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It’s good weight, most of it, but it alarms us, I think, at the way it feels like that added weight tries to sink us.

It’s like sinking through snow up to your ankles, or deeper. It’s like not being sure, one day, that the ice will hold you—when every day before, it has. It may be my imagination, but it seems like Martha doesn’t want to talk about this—perhaps does not even believe that this accrual of weight is happening. As if she believes that any day now—tomorrow, for instance—things will begin to get lighter and freer again—if she would even admit to this weight-gathering occurring in the first place.

Martha says all things are cyclic, and they are, but this thing—us—is somehow different.

The things outside of us seem never to change, beyond the constancy of the four seasons—birth, life, death, rebirth—but I’m convinced that our lives are different, just a tad above or below these constant cycles. As if we are on some march through the woods toward some final, newer place.

But Martha won’t listen to this kind of talk. She says it’s all one cycle, that nothing’s changing. And still: despite the endlessness of the days, there are fractures and gaps where whole chunks of time will fall away—as if calving away from the core. Things that were assumed to lock-solid, rock-sure, weaken and fall away, leaving only loss, emptiness, and confusion.

And we start anew.

***

The thing that gets the deer in these woods most of the time is the wolves. There’s usually just one pack at a time in this little valley. They keep the deer pruned back real nice, real healthy. None of our deer has ticks or other parasites. Nature’s still working the way it’s supposed to up here.

There are a lot of coyotes, too, but if the wolves find the coyotes in their territory they kill them as well, viewing the coyotes as competitors. We’ve seen a group of four wolves chase a pack of a dozen coyotes across a meadow, routing them.

Coyotes hunt the same prey as wolves but use a different style. The coyotes aren’t as efficient as the wolves—a lot of times they’ll only try to injure a deer, then stay near it for days, waiting for it to succumb—whereas the wolves just pretty much go after what they want and either get it or don’t. And if they get it, they get almost all of it. They’ll eat nearly everything—85 percent, 90 percent, sometimes 100 percent of the kill—bones, hooves, hide, everything. As if the thing never was.

***

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 was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in—these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.

***

What I did with that first deer—the one that fell through the ice in January—was run back to my cabin and dig my canoe out from under the snowdrifts.

Drenching wet, but with my clothes starting to freeze in that clanking wind, I dragged the canoe down to the lake and slid it onto the ice. I sledded it out to where the ice began to crack and splinter, and then I got in the canoe, and began to smash the ice with my paddle.

The deer’s eyes rolled wild as I broke that ice, and I sledged my canoe, a foot at a time, closer.

Finally, I had the canoe off of the ice and out into the open water, the cold black water. I canoed right up to the swimming deer—the deer so cold, and tired—and slipped the noose over its head. I hauled it up out of the water and managed to haul it into the canoe with me. It scrambled, trying to leap free, but I gripped the rope tight and held on.

With my free arm I paddled us back in the ice-breaking lane I’d plowed on my way out—a lane just wide enough to slip a canoe through.

Once on shore, I pulled the deer out of the canoe and put it over my shoulders. I carried it up the mountain and then turned it loose deep in the woods, in a cedar jungle where I knew there were neither wolves nor coyotes—too thick and tangley for them. I watched the deer run off. The ice had frozen into a glass coat around the deer, and as the deer ran, the ice shattered and tinkled. It was like a kind of miracle.

***

I remember us driving through town one day, the whole family—Martha and me and the baby—on a shopping trip and to see a movie. It was in the winter, and too far to drive all the way back that night; we’d gotten a hotel room in town and would head back the next day, up over the snowy pass.

It was right around Christmas. The lights were twinkling, and streamers and banners were draped across Main Street. There were snow-flecked wreaths on the doors of all the businesses. We were coming back from the movie theater when we saw a hunter driving home with a deer strapped to the hood of his car. He was doing it mostly to show off: just cruising the main drag. The clank of tire chains on the snowy road. Smoke rising from everyone’s chimney.

There was no need to be parading that thing around. The guy was just being an asshole.

Still, it was a big deer. It’s possible it was some kind of record deer—some kind of trophy.

The guy pulled over in front of the Chevrolet dealership and got out and stretched: an excuse for people to stop and ask him about that big deer, to comment on his prowess, etc.

We walked over to look. Snow was falling. Everything was real nice and quiet. There was that nice hush, the sense of community, of seasons and change and closure, that always comes near the end of deer season, in the West, in the mountains: the way autumn gives itself up to winter.

But this deer wasn’t ready for any of that. No spirit mumbo-jumbo, no ghostly wraith-of-the-forest relinquishing itself back to the spirit of the wild; nor was there to be any edification of the sense of the rural community and its place in the hunting-and-gathering cycle of things on the account of this deer, this snowy night, because this deer wasn’t dead. It was just knocked out.

The hunter had knocked him down, aiming for a heart-and-lung shot to keep from spoiling the trophy head, but out in the woods (he was telling us all this) the deer had jumped up again and charged him. The hunter had fired a second shot from the hip, striking the deer in the skull, dropping it instantly. Miraculously, the second shot didn’t even break the skull or shatter the antlers.

That had been at dusk. The hunter had started to clean the deer, but it had gotten dark, and the hunter had decided to do that in town. Wanted to get his picture taken with a whole deer, not some diminished bloodstained gutted thing.

The cold ride off the mountain had revived the deer, however. The concussion wore off as we were all standing around admiring it. The great buck lifted his head like some European stag, and started kicking and thrashing. It slipped out of the ropes that had it fastened to the hood. It slid off the hood and bounded down the street. It ran down the sidewalk and past the bank. The electronic sign on the bank building said 7:03, and eight degrees.

The hunter looked as if he’d just had his own guts pulled out. I thought he was going to howl. The baby started laughing and pointing in the direction the deer had gone.

The tracks were easy to follow in the new snow. The hunter grabbed his rifle and started after the deer. The hole in the deer’s side had opened again and was leaving glittering drops of crystalline blood, crimson as berries, which were already starting to freeze. It was just a little blood that the deer was leaking, but the wound would open up and bleed more as he kept running.

I knew this. The hunter knew this. We all knew it. Sometimes we know the language of deer perhaps as well as we know each other.

We all followed the hunter at a trot—the crowd of us, like a posse: men, women, and children.

It was as if the deer belonged to the whole community. It was a sense of loss for all of us when that deer leapt up and ran away. Only the baby was laughing. Her cheeks were rosy-red from the cold. She was clapping her mittens as we trotted along behind the hunter.

“How old is she?” one woman asked Martha as she ran alongside us.

The deer ran as if it knew where it was going; as if it had been in town before. It ran in a straight line, north, as if heading for the train station. Close to the mill, and close to the river.

The deer was starting to bleed more. We tracked the deer down to the end of Main Street and past the train station, across the railroad tracks and into the brush. It was headed for water, as any wounded animal will do.

Someone had a flashlight and turned it on as we hurried through the brush. Cold alder branches popped us. A few in the posse turned back, then: they had supper to cook, or bowling practice. Only about half a dozen of us kept on, having a strong interest in the way things would turn out.

The deer was losing more blood. How much blood did it have?

We found where the deer had slipped and had tried to rest for a moment, but it must have gotten back up when it heard us coming. If it had been my deer I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, would have let it go off and lie down to rest and die in peace, and then I would have tracked it, but it wasn’t my deer.

He was going to push it all the way to the river.

There was no way the deer would be able to swim the river. The current was too fast, and the water too deep.

The tracks went straight out across the gravel bar, disappearing then into the dark river.

“He’s in heaven now,” a woman said. We were all breathing jets of silver puff-clouds. The mill’s whistle moaned for the day shift to get off.

“He was real” the hunter said, near tears. He turned to us. The black river behind him seemed to stretch forever, laughing, now that that warm deer was in its cold belly.

“Did you all see it?” the hunter asked. He lifted his rifle, brandished it. “I want you all to know I shot that deer,” he cried. “I did it, I was the one. For a while, I had it lashed to the hood of my car,” he said. “Me.”

Most of us looked away, disgusted. Maybe he had wounded that big old deer, and he’d probably even killed it—and maybe it was a record of some kind—but he’d lost it, too, and it’s a sin to waste meat.

“Shit,” said the woman who’d told us the deer was in heaven, “that doesn’t count for fuck. I used to be in love with my husband, too—my ex—but used to doesn’t count for shit.”

A hunter in Idaho, seventy miles downstream, saw the icy corpse go floating by and retrieved it—lassoed it and dragged it in. He built a fire and thawed it out, took the carcass in to be measured, and it was true, it was the third largest whitetail ever shot, but he wouldn’t give the deer back, so nobody got the record. We saw the picture of it in the paper.

There were some among us who believed the deer had not drowned when it hit the water, but had somehow swum that whole seventy miles, and then had drowned. In the long run it doesn’t really matter, the deer’s dead, but I’m one of the ones who believes he almost made it: that he swam that frigid river with his head, and that huge rack, out of the water, plumes of ice-rime ghosting from his nose, swimming through the lonely cold night; swimming for his life, his head held high: and he almost made it; almost.

***

We live in one of those places I did not build a road into. A place of wildness and mystery. Our little girl looks out the window on a winter morning and watches a family of otters playing on the river ice. There are elk outside, looking in the kitchen window, like missionaries who’ve come to visit. In my dreams, I think of our bodies as being the color of flames, because for half the year, it’s so cold that the only place we can make love is in front of the fire, so that our writhing bodies take on the color of the fire itself. The skin at the ends of our fingers splits and cracks from the dryness of the cold. Our eyelashes sheet with frost when we go outside to ski or snowshoe. Ravens float above us when we ski, as if lonely for company in the huge silences.

We’re shifting. I tend to be the effusive one now, prone to gushes of euphoria followed by torrents of despair, while Martha seems to have reversed and become the sane one, the steady one, the wise one.

The country behind us, through which we have traveled, and through which I don’t guess we’ll be traveling again: I can see it now, lying slightly below us.

Like so many of us, Martha loves the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears, and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with—the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase, and all of the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself?” And then she’ll think I’m making fun of her.

Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science and more tolerant of mystery.

She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.

And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science, a little precision. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end?

What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.

***

So many things can end a deer’s existence. Not just predation, but also starvation, malnutrition, liver flukes, worms. Smaller things, a series of events that lead to a gradual deterioration in the deer’s well-being—a series of mistakes, or harshnesses of nature, are generally what leads to the end of the line. But it’s all part of a flow. I see that, living up here in the mountains. I see it in the ways of deer, and in the ways of the seasons, and I see it in us, too. It’s neither good nor bad: it just is.

***

Martha’s doctorate work included studies about the nutrition a deer needs when the going gets really rough. She would measure cell wall content of forbs as a percentage of dry matter; would measure lignocellulose content, and the nitrogen in dead vegetation in winter, and she would formulate digestibility factors for the deer. The rains of fall and snows of winter degrade the cell walls and leach nitrogen from the plant tissues. I like to think of it as the land taking back those elements that it had loaned to the deer for the summer, for the joy of that quick life. Martha’s old technical papers tend to express it a bit more dryly:

“Calcium has a large role in blood clotting as well as maintaining neuromuscular excitabilities and in the acid-base equilibrium of the body. Dietary calcium at a level of 0.40% of dietary dry matter in the presence of 0.25–0.28% phosphorus is adequate for postweaning fawns. Chlorine occurs in body fluids, where it helps regulate osmotic pressure and maintain tissue pH levels...”

But in the long run, I want to know about the mystery of it, not the fucking pH of it. Now I want to know about the roadless areas.

***

She used to do autopsies on winter-killed deer that people would bring in to the university. For some deer the causes of death were obvious: the brittle bones of selenium deficiency, or the puncture marks in the neck from coyotes’ teeth. But for others, so many others, there appeared to be no reason for dying. They had just stopped living. It was as if there were something out there that could not be measured: a thing they needed but had run out of.

I remember the year when Martha said she didn’t love me anymore. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and she could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the beautiful landscape around us, reminds us to love one another. But that year when Martha flat-out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one.

You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates—it gets either stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.

It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her—them—go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me anymore.

But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.

A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.

***

Martha and I went on a field trip once, up the North Fork of the Whiteflesh River in northern Montana: right where the country crosses over into Canada. It was for a wolf study project that Martha’s class was doing. We were supposed to follow a thirteen-mile transect due north and count how many moose, how many deer, how many elk. We were supposed to howl every 400 meters and count the wolves that responded.

It was on Thanksgiving Day. It had snowed hard the day before, two feet, and then dropped to twenty below.

We had to cross the river naked: holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.

It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light, as if we were in some new stage of heaven. All day long there was a light on our faces almost like firelight. The snow was frozen hard in places, so that we could walk across it like concrete for two or three steps, but then we’d hit a soft or weak spot that our feet would punch through, and we’d collapse up to our waists. It was exhausting work. But we were so in love: so in love.

We came across a small pond back in the woods that was completely frozen. Wolf tracks led us to the pond and to the dead deer that was out on the pond: nothing left to it but a few bones. Even the ravens had finished with this carcass.

“That’s how they do it,” Martha explained. “The wolves try to get the deer out onto the ice where the deer will slip and go down, or will even punch a leg through and get stuck.

“Then the wolves move in.” She made a whistling sound, drew her finger across her throat. “And then it’s over.”

We examined the bare bones and the tracks of the wolves; the brushed-out areas of snow where the ravens’ wingtips had swept across the snow. The pittery-pat markings of the coyotes that had come in to lick and crunch the bones after the wolves were through.

We continued north, then, into the beautiful day. There was some undefinable essence out there that day, which seemed to shout, simply, in the name of every mountain and every river, every deer and every wolf, that Martha and I belonged together, under that odd lingering salmon sky. I have never forgotten that day, that feeling, and I still hold on to it.

***

Because you love wolves or other predators, you have to study their food source, which is deer. It’s like learning to play the piano before you learn to play any other kind of music. You must understand deer long before you can understand wolves or anything else. I understand this, though still it strikes me as odd, mysterious.

It seems like trying to say “I love you” without using the word “love.” It’s like trying to say, “It doesn’t matter how much you change, or I change, we will always be in this country together, and whatever changes come, whatever mysteries, will be as wonderful and scary as they have always been.”

It’s like trying to say, “Let’s not let each other become small or weak or diminished.” It’s like saying, “There will always be some amount of ice beneath us.”

It’s like saying, “We must go on, I love you, there is no choice.”