Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 33

by Kelly Link

  Later I remembered the guys I saw near here one afternoon the month before, on the rocky bank doing SCA-style combat with their bamboo swords. I could almost imagine them fighting this young stag with their DIY halberd snare.

  Okay, probably not.

  What I knew is that I didn’t know what killed the deer. Other than to say it was this place, where the city sneaks into its woods.

  2.

  Places like this urban river corridor are portals into deep history, if you let them tell you their story. The waters are shallow and slow enough here that you can walk back and forth across the channel, as the deer do when no one’s looking. The rock bottom up by the dam is scarred with long ruts that you eventually figure out were made by wagon wheels. Turns out this was one of the main low-water crossings for the Chisholm Trail, where cowboys would drive the semi-feral longhorns they rounded up from the open ranges of the borderzone to railheads hundreds of miles to the north. Most of that trail is an interstate highway now, the preferred route of narcos and Nafta trucks.

  Take em to Missouri, Matt.

  Where there’s an old pioneer trail, there probably was an Indian trail before that. And where there were Indian trails, chances are the route was first charted by animals. The knowledge embedded in the land is sometimes recorded in books, usually weird prewar tomes written by highway engineers playing history buff. Turns out most of the American highways of the southeast were paths blazed through the topography by buffalo. And the route from Detroit to Chicago was the trackway of mastodons.

  Mastodons walked where you are driving. Their ghosts remind you that most of the native megafauna of North America died off after the Clovis people showed up. Mastodons, mammoth, American lions, dire wolves, giant beavers. The species that survived until the Europeans landed with wheels and guns mostly came from Asian ancestors that had evolved with human predators—bison, moose, deer, grizzly, pronghorn.

  After I moved here I read the memoir of a guy named Frank Collinson, who followed a relative from Yorkshire to Texas in 1872. He learned the cowboy trade and became a buffalo hunter during the years of the great hunts that almost completely exterminated the species. Collinson tells how in the spring of 1877 he and two partners managed to slaughter enough buffalo among the three of them to sell eleven thousand hides, six thousand buffalo tongues, and forty-five thousand pounds of buffalo jerky. They would have made more but the salt was too expensive.

  Looking at those old pictures of buffalo skulls stacked so high they can’t fit into the frame, the death of one urban deer seems trivial. But for the next week after I found it, I couldn’t get the gigged stag out of my head. The knowledge that it was still out there, stuck in that position of total indignity, complete corporal violation. The mystery of how it got that way. The nagging sense that it was the result of active cruelty more than accident.

  I told a friend about it over lunch. He said how our editor friend had seen strange people coming out of those woods, looking like they had been involved in dark rituals. He could not be more specific. You should call her, he said.

  I composed an email, then deleted it before sending.

  When I mentioned it to the veterinary assistants, they said I should call animal control. At least they can take care of the body.

  So I called animal control. The officer asked me to send her pictures. That’s pretty disturbing, she said, when they came through while we were talking. I am going to show these to my supervisor.

  She called back ten minutes later. She said her supervisor looked at the photos. It looks like the deer got its rack stuck in the wire, then got caught up in the vines. It happens pretty often.

  No, she said, dead animal collection won’t go out for something like that.

  Only much later did I really think about the fact that the municipal government has a subdivision called dead animal collection.

  The cross? The cross could have been left by someone who found the deer, she said.

  I bought that postulate at first. I’ve seen other markers of death in these woods. Memorials for drownings and a dumped body they found a few years back.

  Is it okay for me to go cut it down?

  That would help, she said.

  So the next day I went down there with a machete and a shovel and hacked away at the wire and the tough scrubby branches until the deer lay down on the forest floor. I buried the deer in leaf litter and hoped it would quickly go back to the earth.

  The smell followed me all the way home.

  3.

  The domicile we built in the pipeline trench was designed to be a feral house. A green roof folded into the ground, the whole lot nurtured back to prairie, an attempt to articulate the edgeland by pulling nature right into the living room. Turns out it’s not that hard. We were so successful that we turned the patio into an optimal habitat for coral snakes. It’s amazing how well the mnemonic pops when the serpent is there outside your bedroom door after you get home from a movie. Red on black, friend of Jack; red on yellow, kill a fellow.

  The coralillos come out of the grass looking for the lizards that lurk in the shadows under the windowsills, waiting for bugs to eat. The oldest insect residents are the harvester ants, who are so hardy they can survive a full frontal assault by a major oil company.

  Like us, the harvester ants are road builders. They blaze long trails through the grass and spend the summer days trucking seeds back to their subterranean metropolis. This colony built their home next to the pipeline access valve box at the center of the lot, using one of the steel walls as part of their own structure. The entomologist next door said the ants probably tunneled fifteen to twenty feet into the ground and numbered over 100,000.

  When Chevron sent its special team out to remove the pipeline, they called the ants that had moved into their valve a “biohazard.” We didn’t want to kill them, so the foreman had his guys bury them in a pile of excavation dirt. They reappeared a few months later.

  The crew that built the house re-buried the ants and put a concrete retaining wall right through their habitat. It took longer this time, but they came back again.

  Where the tunnels used to be, there is now a dark room where the utility services enter the house and can be monitored and controlled. The blinking modem that connects the house to the global telecommunications network is the first thing you see when you open the door.

  Only later did we learn that the harvester ants are governed by the same algorithm as the router. There was a story about it in the newspaper, explaining how harvester ants regulate their foraging based on the rate at which returning foragers meet outgoing foragers at the entrance to the nest, almost mathematically identical to the way packet pings regulate Internet access.

  It made me wonder if the two systems could be combined. Whether the system of human governance based on decentralized algorithmic control we seem to be building in this century will resemble that of nature’s hardiest ants. Would such a system mediate our relationship with other species any differently than our existing regime of property rights earned by exercising our dominion over nature?

  This is not the exact question I was looking to answer when I went back to the site of the deer a couple months later. I think I wanted to see if I could figure out a way to show the deer to others that let it convey its meaning on its own terms. Not to suggest I knew that answer, either.

  I showed the pictures to my neighbor, a mystic healer, community activist and earth dancer who sings a song about the plastic island in the ocean. He said it’s like the Indian crying in that TV commercial from the 70s.

  I imagined a black and white print of one of the photos, so big it fills the wall of a museum.

  Which gave me the idea of physical proof.

  When I went back, I took a trash bag with me, and gloves.

  The deer was no longer where I left it.

  I walked around the area a bit until I found part of a leg.

  A while later I found some other bones. Two ribs. A hip.


  The living forest is an efficient recycler.

  I gave up on finding the head after walking around in that creepy spot for half an hour. Only to find it on my way back, at the edge of the zone, on a different path.

  The skull was still fully covered in fur. The eyes were gone, and one ear had been partly nibbled off. The wire was still tangled around one of the antlers, the part I couldn’t get off before.

  I put the skull in a bag and took it home.

  On the Anternet, I found a page from some university biology department explaining the preferred methods to preserve the skeletal remains of animals. To get the soft tissue off the bone, the best method is submersion in water with a little bit of enzymatic laundry detergent.

  The next day, I put the deer skull in a red plastic bucket and filled the bucket with water.

  As the water covered the head, all these bugs came swimming to the surface.

  I left it there just like the instructions said, sitting there in the bucket on a table in the backyard, with the antlers sticking out.

  It was there for months.

  I changed the water on an inattentive schedule, and it was even more disgusting than you would imagine, to no apparent effect.

  My son texted from art school and asked me to 3D scan the skull for a project he was doing. He explained how you can do that with a phone app now—you just have to take like forty pictures from different angles.

  That was the first time I looked at the underside of the skull. Later I saw how the Autodesk algorithms read and render the soft tissues of a decomposing brain stem.

  Finally, when company was coming and household patience exhausted, I went to change the water and all that was left was bone.

  By this point I had been feeling for some time like I should have just left it there in the woods. I knew my sense of stewardship was human hubris rendered absurd by the grisly weirdness of this particular application.

  As dusk fell the first bats came, from the giant colony they made under the main bridge downtown. It was an accident that the apertures in the concrete made a perfect habitat for 1.5 million Mexican freetails, who swarm out every summer night to eat 30,000 pounds of bugs and impress the gathered crowds.

  I used the wire to hang the skull from my back fence, empty sockets staring back into the woods, and wondered. What would happen if we made homes for other animals inside our concrete lairs, on purpose?

  Illustrations © 2015 Christopher Brown.

  Another Afternoon in the Garden

  Ingrid Steblea

  “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” –Genesis 2:19

  Adam grips the tool loosely in his left hand, poking at the dirt.

  He cocks his head and studies it, backing away, brow

  furrowed. “Trowel,” he says. Then, “Spade.” Eve watches

  from the quince grove where she has just finished grafting

  the shoots of a new cultivar onto rootstock. Hands full,

  she scratches an itch, rubbing her forehead against tree bark.

  It has been a long day. She rose before dawn. While Adam slept

  beneath the fragrant frangipani, she checked the stakes

  of the fruit trees, the branches for signs of canker.

  She made the morning meal. He pushes figs into his mouth

  with his thumbs, his jaw working like one of the cows

  in the cornfields, muttering, “Chew, chew, chew.

  Munch, crunch. Masticate, ruminate. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.”

  After washing the bowls she nicked and notched

  the espaliered pear. She watered and mulched the scarlet

  runner beans and weeded the amaranth beds. She cannot

  remember what color her hands are when they are clean.

  Her hair bristles with twigs. She reeks of sweat and labor.

  Adam’s soft hands smell of the rosewater she brews

  each full moon. Clutching the chisel, the knife, the lopping

  shear, she prowls for something else in need of tending.

  The grass is thick beneath her feet. Bushes droop

  with heavy blossoms. If she knows Adam,

  it will take him all afternoon to collect the flowers

  for the evening table, whispering, “Efflorescence,

  inflorescence. Umbel, panicle, cyme.”

  The garden spreads before her, green groves, florid

  floral profusions, the golden fields and the meadow beyond.

  An eternity of weeds to wrench from the earth,

  a damnation of black flies and gnats. Day after day,

  bending and stooping, the ache in her back like a curse.

  He drops the spade and the dandelions he plucked

  and ambles over to the tree. That tree. The one he cannot name.

  He cannot name it if he cannot touch it, he whines; cannot taste it.

  “How about persimmon,” she urges him. “No . . .” he sighs.

  “How about bittersweet, then? Chokecherry? Kill-a-man?”

  “No, no,” he groans, braiding daisies into his hair. “That’s not it, not it.”

  She rolls her eyes, heaves herself to her feet

  and leaves to dig the irrigation trenches for the banana trees.

  He rolls over in the deep grass nap, mumbling, “Arduous. Onerous. Hard, hard work.”

  If only she were not utterly alone here. If only there was another like her.

  Is it too much to ask that he show some initiative? Is it too much to ask

  that he pull his own weight, wash a bowl, get his hands dirty? Behind her,

  Adam calls her name. She turns on her heel, thrusts the shovel’s blade into the soil. “What now?” she says.

  He scrunches his nose the way he does when he is thinking, or smells rotting fruit.

  “Did you hear that?”

  She looks to the branches where she heard the hiss,

  catches a flash of copper scale, a flicker of pink tongue.

  Adam scratches his chin. “Unknown,” he offers.

  “A mystery. Crisis! Opportunity.”

  Starling Road

  Alena McNamara

  The man slumped on my mother’s threshold, pain and hunger paling his already light skin. The whiskers of the winter’s first storm blew snow against his soldier-green coat.

  A woman my age bent empty-handed over him. Her quick, uneasy glance caught mine, helpless: she had been half carrying him before he fell. The light from our fire made her brown skin rosy, as it did mine, but her scraped-back hair showed her a woman from up-mountain—past the Empire’s furthest claim on these slopes.

  I might have stared all night, but the soldier groaned and shifted, and I saw his face.

  “Mother!” I called. Our neighbors peered from the warmth of their own doorways, glad no doubt this trouble had not landed on their laps. “Our soldier’s back!”

  The woman flinched at my voice, but she stood firm. Her broad shoulders collected as much snow as the soldier’s unmoving shape.

  My mother said, “Well, get him in, Nisima.”

  Somehow the woman came too, helping us bundle him close to the hearth and then perching on a stool out of the way.

  “Could be worse,” my mother muttered, then smoothed back his scraggling hair. Under drying blood, a plum-dark bruise lurked on his temple. She let her breath out in a hiss and had me make a poultice while she bathed his forehead.

  When I had measured the herbs, the water had yet to bubble. I looked at the woman sitting gravely in our house, at her braided hair knotted at the back of her neck as they said the stone-singers wore it, and she looked back at me. With an ironic smile she displayed her wrists, ringed with scabbing sores.

  The water boiled then, and my attention went to it. But later, while my mother adjusted hair and blankets and poultice, I approached
the woman with clean rags and salve.

  She let me handle her wrists to bandage them, stoic even when I jarred the sores. When I was finished, she tipped her first fingertips together and kissed them. “I thank you,” she said slowly, her accent as strange to me as mine must have been to her.

  “You are welcome,” I said, as slow and clear.

  She was the purpose of the soldiers’ movements, the one they’d stolen from up-slope: stone-crafter, magic-singer, she who was my Starling.

  When the soldiers had come that first spring day, we feared they meant war with the mountain’s people. The ceaseless tasks of the village—sow seeds, drive goats to pasture, spin yarn and weave and sew—paused. Only after our Emperor’s soldiers told us they were here to build a road had anybody moved.

  And build a road they had, through summer and late enough into harvest that they had to beg our winter’s hospitality; but come spring they marched up-slope past the end of their road. We awaited retaliation like a held breath, even when the Emperor’s soldiers trickled back down into autumn splendor and the harvest’s frantic work.

  Now, over-late, injured, the soldier Cibran lay at our hearth. He never woke. In three days’ time he died, face wracked with fever and the creeping bruise. By the end I might not have recognized him as the man who’d read us printed ballads in gratitude for a winter’s hospitality.

  Throughout his dying, Starling quietly remained. Once when I woke in the middle-night I saw her sitting by his pallet, speaking to him in a language I did not recognize.

  No soldiers had come through the village since he arrived unconscious, so we could not ask them for his burial rites. Anyway the ground was frozen. We burned his body and afterward buried what remained.

  By then, the snows had drifted deep. Starling set out the fourth morning and returned that eve, annoyance clear enough on her face to need no words. My mother looked at Starling’s open, callused hands—at the knot of her braids—and said that she could stay, so long as she helped out with our chores.