FOX

Heard nothing. Heard nothing. Rained hard.
Leaves getting green. One vixen on third night.
Barks, chilling screams, oddly birdlike.

SKEET’S BODY SHIFTS IN HIS CHAIR. Just when I thought I had figured something out there is something new to organize.

Have you slept yet? he finally asks.

My eyes meet his eyes. He knows I am a lifelong insomniac. How profound working into the night has been. It always strikes me how odd it is that we live with such divisions, that we spend half our lives lying down, in a blackout.

I must have slept last night, before I drove into town, because I woke up in the kitchen, fieldbook on my knees, with the fizz of static, the scratchy piano playing on the radio, Chopin’s Waltz in D Flat, which has always sounded to me like a dog running in circles.

He twirls his finger at his ear.

I’ve not heard it for a long time, I say, ignoring him. It was based on an incident in the garden of Chopin’s lover, the writer George Sand. As I had understood it, she sat in her garden with Chopin watching her crazed dog chase after its tail, turned to him and said, If I had your talent, I’d compose a pianoforte piece for this dog. Which is exactly what he did.

Skeet goes to the kitchen and brings back the coffee. He pours both mugs full.

I ate one of my special macaroons, I tell him, which sometimes helps.

He laughs. And then you drove?

It helps with the pain. It goes marvellously, quietly into the bloodstream. I buy the herb from a handsome young Algerian man who wears trousers of such rough fabric I am convinced they are prison-issue. And I’m not talking about one of those escaped cons who impersonated a dentist. The Algerian, as I’ve taken to calling him, sells on market days by the scrubby river in Chinon where the youth also go to have relations after dark. I drive there, passing the white French cows, mythic against the bright blue sky. Though I prefer the closer town, Fontevraud. There is an illuminator there with gold under his fingernails. His studio is full of brushes and stencils and fourteenth-century vellum. It is the last atelier of its kind in all of France. Mme. Tissaud would have loved it.

My initial exchange with the Algerian was somewhat embarrassing. He thought I was an escapee from a nearby home for senile females, and I was convinced he was trying to rent me an expensive boat, the kind they use to fleece tourists. I think my nervousness sprang in part from no longer knowing how to act around an impressive-looking man, it being entirely historical. Though he behaves with a brusque yet serviceable politeness toward me, everything is awkward in our communications, which is compounded by the fact that I am always confused about the calibration of grams to ounces with narcotics. Are they metric grams? Is it an American ounce? Finally a teenager standing next to him blurts, Just ask for a bag, mémère.

God Frame, you’ve got to be fucking careful.

Skeet. Mostly I smoke and think and work. I speak to almost no one.

Old shy people are ridiculous you know.

Well I want to talk with someone Skeet, I say, sipping my coffee. Just not anyone human.

There is a long silence. Which series is this one? he finally asks, holding up an image of dense spoke-like lines of geometric shapes that from a distance appear to be a sequence of veined circles, each one different, like snowflakes.

We are adept at avoiding discussing what next. Skeet seems more absent. Normally he is focused and frank. There is a thin blue static in the room. And how really can we talk about this? What I have always left unsaid. There are so many things, I’m not sure what to feel. I have no language for it. For the time when there was the possibility of a child. When that possibility was taken away, I never mentioned it again. Not to anyone. There was no one left to tell. But it is an impossible topic to escape as a woman. Reproductive activities are, for whatever reason, eternally open to public opinion. I never spoke of it. There was nowhere for it to go. Realizing that I too was falling into the line of the wordless women that I come from but having no power over it. I feel pain in my lungs, worsening in my stomach, my heartbeat pounding in my body. It occurs to me that the pain is the letter.

Morpho eugenia, I finally answer. The delicate vibration of wings. It is the vibrations of vibrations, given that butterflies don’t hear, don’t make sound.

It’s amazing, he says, that you— He hesitates.

That I?

I don’t know. Aren’t you thinking about the letter at all?

The lower frequencies create less complex patterns, I say, my voice not right. But, I continue, the higher frequencies are dense and arguably more beautiful.

This one looks like something you would see on a rug, Skeet says, pointing to the Osiris blue butterfly. What’s this one?

Red fox.

Looks like a prehistoric insect. He turns it sideways and pauses. Or stoner art. He flips through the stacks of images and immediately sits down. He looks worn.

What is it?

Sometimes I can’t believe the scale of this project. I find it amazing that it doesn’t overwhelm you.

Well, thank god the feeling of defeat has always motivated me, I say. I’ve always disliked the feeling at the end of an experiment. I sometimes wonder if that is why I’ve taken on such a vast project. Though all my energy goes to this. It takes it all now. I still have not even seen the forest at the back of this property and I have been here for over two years. The house is let from a middle-aged American woman. Its provenance, a former chicken coop, went unmentioned in her brochure on the computer.

Skeet says, Don’t say brochure. Say website. It makes you sound old.

I am old, I tell him. Old enough that when he tried to lure me into technology by tapping my name into a computer, I found it dreadful that all this information about me appeared, available without my consent.

The house is made of pale heavy stone that has lasted for a thousand years and looks as though it will last a thousand more. The American suspected caves, then dug out centuries of dirt, down the stone steps, with her bare hands while on her stomach. Swimming through the earth. It would be impressive if you happen to think that digging is harder than drawing. Or mathematics for that matter. The countryside here is strewn with caves, attracting academics and tourists, though most have yet to be unearthed. The first white cave on the property, tall with three separate entries that lead to three separate caves, has a high curved ceiling, sonically perfect, holding each note I have recorded, crisp and controlled. It picks up any vibration and renders it crystalline.

The American says there are bats and rare butterflies and larks even. I can manage only to navigate this room and to drag my bones down the stairs to the caves. Out the front door is a narrow garden to the east of the house that glitters with dew in the early hours of morning. Its terraces twin the wide flat white stone steps, thick lavender spilling over, brushing my legs when I descend to the caves, the camphor scent drifting into the air. It is so much harder to move around now. Skeet does not understand. You cannot understand stillness when you have the full range of motion. We are all just bodies when it comes down to it. Though when you grow old, you are edged out of even that. How little you are able to inhabit it. You notice that pleasures always involve verbs.

Through the window the breeze brings the sounds of songbirds, throats open, chests beating, an unremarkable greybrown. After observing southern-hemisphere birds glinting in their garish electric-coloured athletic kit, their European counterparts seem exceedingly drab. It occurs to me as I listen to them now, confined as I am, that I’m the caged one. I look down at my book full of notes. There are no signs of rests in birdsong. I flick my wrists to shake out the numbness and the fieldbook slaps onto the stone floor. I feel a jab of hunger, though I am unable to eat, my stomach knotted. Normally I take the same lunch every day, a whole-wheat cheese sandwich washed down with scotch, sometimes sherry.

After I came home from the post office, I searched the closet for the grey archival box that holds the few old notebooks that have survived, now yellowed, ink faded to grey. Vibration of bones. Sounds not made louder by adding but by taking away. Small kingdoms of concrete music but with geometry, interstitial, ringing, humming, speaking fragments, unforeseen. My spirits rise so high that I laugh out loud. Jejune. Thrumming with purpose. Full of ideas, unfocused but alive. It is how life is. You think it will be so different after the accumulation of time, but when I look at this I am reminded that it is still me on that page. You don’t go anywhere. The past contains the future. What will become clean, unfettered observations of sound. I remember what I thought when I wrote that. I wanted to become a great artist. I thought I would uncover a new way of seeing.

With humans there is a speaker and a listener. The speaker informs the listener. With animals, it is often just a call in the dark.

I find one of my field recordings, a labelled gold disc, and press play. Howl and howl in that white silence, a high world of grey skies, hunched and shivering in the wind. Jaws clashing and paws creaking in the snow, whimpering, barking, freezing in the forest as the stars and the moon begin to brighten the sky. I play the track again, numbered, dated, and hear that the vocalizations that rip and cut and clatter and then become graceful, full of focus. It amazes me that after all this time I can hear it as both joy and agony. Fairy tales grow teeth all around them.

It is impossible to get near wolves without distorting the data. These sounds were collected with howl boxes. Devices that record and emit digital calls, broadcast from an eighty-gigabyte computer duct-taped to a tree. Skeet and I used them to research wolves following an aerial wolf-hunting expedition with its snares and poison—part of a spectacularly ill-conceived wolf extermination project.

In the Yukon, where we first meet, we stay at one of the only hotels open in winter. The restaurant is through the lobby, past the dead-eyed fish doing what appear to be choreographed movements in the aquarium. We eat eggs and unnaturally square potatoes that taste like freezer, spooned from a metal bin. They are tough and dry. The waitress seems generally annoyed at people who install themselves like this, but I think she is keen on Skeet so she allows us to spread out our fieldbooks and recording equipment on the Formica table and sit thawing in the large banquettes for hours. Skeet rests his arm along the back of the burgundy leatherette and says, Why is it that when something’s fake, they add -ette to the end of it?

The oldtimers who drink their coffee here believe that some of the ravens have seen the gold rush. The ravens know where the gold is hidden, they say. Ravens can only live about thirty years in the wild, but we don’t correct them.

We ride in a pickup truck with chains on the tires. It gets so cold you can see rings around the moon. Nothing moves in forty below. But in March there is a low dazzle of sun out until eight o’clock at night. The snow is so dry I finally understand why mukluks. I sip coffee from a steel thermos, its steam making receding patterns on the windshield. We wait. Then we see a large black bird, hungry, mangled feathers. It is alerting a wolf to a small rabbit below. The wolf runs across the snow, a flash of silver. The raven waits for the kill and then swoops in with its long black wings. They feed together, and then, astonishingly, they play. I am overcome. For what occurs to them, with their torn feathers and bloodied scuffs of fur in this great bleak horizon. Their daring is in seeing that even in death, there is life. I watch stunned, toes numb, knuckles swollen, taking off my gloves to work the equipment. Eyes pricked with slanted snow, eyelashes freezing together. How alert you become with this sharp startling cold. In this eternal present. The sudden hush followed by the creak of snow, the barks and shrieks, this sense of something about to happen. The inscrutable eyes, the murderous claws, the glinting fur. Today it is just braided footprints. Glyphs in the snow giving warmth and shape to the blinding white, telling me why I live for this alone.

On the ride back the grey racks of branches are corrugated with ice, a line of snow on top of every one like a seam. We pass tracts of black pines and blue ice. We don’t speak for a long time. I appreciate this about Skeet. A high-pitched intermittent squeaking jangles the silence. Skeet punches the dash with his fist. I jump in my seat, looking at him, surprised by the sudden violence. I wonder if it is something he learned from his teenage mother, or one of the boyfriends he has mentioned. How could he possibly have escaped his origins so cleanly. How can anyone?

Dash rattle, he says. Once you’ve got one that’s it. There’s no way of finding the source. I’ve been on a whole road trip with one. Sucked dogs.

Skeet unzips his jacket and takes out the recorder wrapped in his sweatshirt. He breathes on it to warm it up. He says that this snow is reminding him of the one other time he saw his mother. It was in a ski town out West, near where he was conducting research on reintroduced wolves. She was there with a boyfriend. She didn’t talk much, but when she first saw him she smiled and ruffled his hair. Skeet waited with her at the bottom of the hill. Neither of them could ski. It’s for assholes with money, she told him. The boyfriend came down and turned to an abrupt stop, spraying her with snow. She threw her cigarette ember like a dart, just missing his ski. It sizzled unpleasantly in the snow. He laughed and she said, You’ll pay for this, fuckface.

We pass dwellings long abandoned by prospectors. Rusted skillets and saws nailed to the silver wood. Woollen blankets chewed to lace by moths on feather beds. Raccoons the size of hatchbacks scratching in the attics. Sometimes these houses were left with coffee cups still sitting on the tabletop. Records husked from their sleeves, as though someone had meant to come right back.

A great black hawk drifts above.

Ah could my hand unlock its chain / How gladly would I watch it soar / And never regret and never complain / To see its shining eyes no more.

Emily Brontë?

It’s the only poem of hers I can ever remember.

I know the one. I like how she begins by identifying herself with her hawk, saying that they are both wholly alone. We are quiet for a while, only the shrill bleating dash between us.

She kept a lot of pets, I finally say, watching the blurring white out the window. Of which I know the animal liberationists would not approve, but I never quite knew what to do with the information I read about her catching her dog sleeping in her bed. She punched him in the eye until he was half blind. I mean, who punches a dog? And then you read those poems, and marvel at how people can be two things at once.

Only two? Skeet says, turning to look at me.

We are silent for a long time. After a while I begin to hear a fragile and beautiful sound that seems to come from him. It is underwater and dusky, full of faded chords. He tells me it is from a recording he once heard. A man with a harmonica and music box who believed he could hear and play the sound of the sun humming.

In the evenings, we have started going out for a pint of beer at the Snake Pit. I leave well before the alcohol insinuates itself as it does each night—chairs broken, teeth knocked out, the floor sloshing with beer. Skeet tells me that after everyone leaves, they bring out plastic bags full of sawdust and throw it on the floor to soak up the urine and vomit. Some of the people who come out to drink here literally have dirt on their faces. The kind of characters who sound invented to anyone who lives in a city down in the south. There is a misanthropic old sea captain with tattoos of naked women up each sinewy arm who has told us he wants to be taxidermied and positioned in this bar when he dies.

Taxidermy is a revolting act, I tell him. I’ve never understood why exactly anyone would choose to be in a room with decapitated animals. He grumbles something and moves to the next table. I see Flo tattooed on one finger. Flo must have been quite something to put up with that old brute. I find it extremely loud in here, shattering crackling swells of sound, the ambient crescendoing murmurs. It batters my ears. So attuned now to singular sounds made in near silence. I find noise being drowned out with noise torturous. It makes me feel claustrophobic.

Dear enemy effect, Skeet says after taking a long sip. Read it, never seen it. He looks around the room. Recognize and respect your enemy neighbour’s territories. Expend energy on enemy strangers only, he says, referring to the raven and the wolf from the field. I’ve seen it in that study we did with territorial songbirds. Skylarks can remember their neighbours’ songs from one year to the next and accept neighbours as dear enemies as a conditional strategy established over time.

I have witnessed the stranger-neighbour tolerances in owls and larks too, I say. They’ve used the sound files to conduct audio playback studies to test it.

But that wasn’t just tolerance, he says. They played.

I think that’s why we still have Paris. Dear enemy. The same thing applies in war.

How do you mean?

I don’t know. When Hitler supposedly screamed into a telephone, Is Paris burning?, it was not. Damaged, certainly. There were barricades, trenches dug into the streets, trees felled on the boulevards, buildings shot through with holes. But it stood, recognizable. People who weren’t there began to wonder. Had life in Paris under the Germans been a bit too easy? Who had collaborated? These questions were made even more uncomfortable by the unavoidable comparisons between the still-beautiful Paris and all the other cites of Europe, devastated and in ruins.

Skeet takes another sip of his beer and then unclenches his fingers and slowly swirls the glass on the wooden tabletop. I read that Hitler was a vegetarian.

And so what? I snap. He also preferred murdering people who’d committed no crime.

He remains silent.

I cannot help my emotions, Skeet. We had no idea that the Nazis were not going to win. Everyone now has the benefit of knowing.

Just then an intoxicated young man slides over. His friend has gone to the washroom. Skeet and I have noticed this friend, a Klondike boy one table over, who most nights sits peeling the label off his beer. You can see, even from a distance, that he has a glass eye and a rough patch of skin under his chin that looks as though it has been sewn on. Wide curved shoulders with blades that stick out like wings. Blond hair straight as iron filings. The young man asks us if we’ve seen his friend’s father. You know, the nutjob in town, he says. You might have seen him jumping in the freezing river. Balls flying out of his Speedo. He stares straight ahead. He’s a mean drunk. Messed him up enough that he wanted to blow his own brains out. He took his old man’s shotgun. He stops to sip his beer, making a trigger-pulling motion under his chin with his finger. He was fine, he says, swallowing. Then he laughs with an awkward force that makes his throat sound like a cracked reed. The bullet missed his brains entirely. Came out his fucking eye.

The boy eventually comes back from the washroom and his friend returns to their table. We sit without speaking for a while.

Listen, Skeet shakes out a cigarette, to that voice.

From the old speakers comes a stalled sound from the throat, rasp and alive, and there is a slow bang accompaniment that makes me think of horsetails blown horizontal in a wind.

Wanda Jackson, he finally says. Funnel of Love.

I look at Skeet leaning back in his chair. It is the first time I’ve heard him say the word love. He hasn’t mentioned a girlfriend. I shouldn’t expect him to. What he must think of me, too. But I think they are different now. Not a lot of emotion. I think they must see everyone from the past as fools. Everything has changed. Their telephones don’t ring. They are not writing letters. They communicate their bodies through the wires, not even wires. They don’t talk of it and divulge far too much to the world outside, both.

The next day we drive farther out, along the potholed highway near the glaciated Tombstone Mountains where sabre-toothed tigers once roamed. Once you are in the north there is always the myth of farther out. Nothing is ever north enough. At the bar they talk of Core, a man who lives upriver and comes into town each season for a new woman. We pass the granite mountains, flat and jagged like grave markers. In this tundra, there is the beep of the sound recorder and the dry creak of snow under our feet. A large white frozen lake sits silently, occasionally cracking like a gunshot, making us jump. We find a quiet place at the edge of an opening. I look at Skeet.

What?

Nothing.

Why are you looking at me like that?

I don’t know. It’s just. You’ve been doing this for so long, but then I see the way you flick the switch and get quiet, waiting for something to be revealed. As though you’ve always been living one way and the plane is about to shift each time.

Because it does.

When I ask him what brought him here, he says, Does it have to be one thing?

Well, I say, just what is it that you want to do with your one wild and rare life?

He sucks air into his lungs. I was on a vigilante ship in Japan. I got aboard an illegal fishing boat. I had stolen part of their navigation system. And as I stood there, I watched a fisherman hook a shark right in front of me. He gaffed it and then slammed it against the deck. It slid right to my boots. The shark was bleeding and gasping and flapping all around, frantic to survive, while the fishermen sat there trying to figure out how to get them out of their waters. They talked and looked on while this shark almost broke its own back trying not to die. They eventually cut the line and threw him back into the water like a piece of garbage. Like he was nothing. That’s when I knew.

And ever since you’ve never once stopped to ask, Am I doing the right thing?

No, he says.

Do you know why? Because you know you are doing the right thing.