The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

  For ten years this has been his life. His beard, like mine, has faded and silvered. Arthritis prevents the slick application of his manhood and his daughters have become his lovers and for sake of quality breeding, I will have to set him loose into the woods, where he will meet his end in the crosshairs of some suburbanite’s rifle.

  Mangold bugles again. The men take off their Stetsons as if in church. They look at each other, and then the forest, where another elk sounds, then another, their lowing like some vapor released from cracks in the earth. The wind rises and embers trail from the firepit, across the ground, breezing away to disappear and eventually become part of the night.

  Sonora has a round, beautiful moon of a face like her mother. They share the same eyes, too, brown broken up by chips of yellow. When she stares, unblinking, you would think she was making a Polaroid. It’s spooky. She does not talk. The words hide in a cave deep inside her. Except when she sings. And she can sing in a way that makes you believe in heaven. Much of her day, she spends cuddled up with her portable radio, tuned in to the honky-tonk stations, all steel guitars and voices drawling their truck stop sorrow.

  As a baby, she never cried, even when learning her legs, falling on her butt a lot. She never liked to be held, never wanted to play with other kids. She would not make words, not even to call me daddy, but when we snapped on the radio, she would hum along with the music and stare into some middle distance. When she gets angry, she slaps herself, yanks out clumps of her hair, a Hank Williams CD is the only way to calm her down.

  The doctor said, “Autistic,” and he must have liked the way the word tasted, because he said it nearly a thousand times. He said it so many times it stuck and stayed true. There is no fixing her, nothing I can do.

  Except listen. She is a singing little fool. She could sing all day. I put an ear to her bedroom door and listen to her songs and imagine dancing her around the house, twirling her through the kitchen, dipping her to the floor.

  Sometimes, though she is close enough to grab, to hug, she seems so far away I might as well be looking at her through the wrong end of a rifle’s scope.

  The spice of hay and animal fills up our heads. I take my clients—this time a group of computer programmers—through the holding pens and show them the calves. I say, “Put out your thumb and they’ll suck on it like a nipple.” And they do. And smile in a bedroom sort of way.

  I hire a few Mexicans to help around the ranch. They’re filling up the grain troughs now, pausing to tip their seed caps. “Good job, amigos,” I say and fit a warm piece of straw along the corner of my mouth.

  One of my clients—grub-pale skin, long fingernails—scoops up a handful of grain and lets a calf lick his palm clean. He smiles at me, asks if she has a name, and I say no, no names, not for something so soon dead.

  I feel responsible. I feel like I made her wrong. I feel like Willow blames me for Sonora. So many years ago, a group of us traveled to Vancouver to hunt bear. The dogs bayed when they caught a scent. We followed them on ATVs, with mist and mosquitoes swirling around our tires. From a manzanita thicket, a grizzly untangled itself, lean and blond and growling louder than our engines. It shambled toward us in a charge. I brought my .338 to my shoulder and aimed down the line of it when the bear showed off teeth the size of fingers nested in purple gums.

  It took three bullets to turn its charge and two hours later we tracked it to a cave with ice and blood around the entrance. Here we piled up dead branches and lit them on fire and minutes later the bear shot from the cave and met its final bullet.

  That night I was messy with gore, wild with whiskey, more beast than man. In the tent I found Willow and we made our pact in the dark. I remember her screaming no, no, no. I remember her little fists. But I could not stop myself. She later said it was like a monster, the tearing inside. From this came Sonora.

  I light my pipe. Smoke drifts from my mouth and smears the moon. Stars wink like quartz in the black pool of the sky. Autumn has come. Frost varnishes the forest floor. The leaves have brightened with color, and when the wind rises, the aspens rattle with what looks like branches full of gold coins.

  The elk are calling to each other, making their music, when I hear something join their chorus, something high and sweet, like an enchanted flute. My eyes get wide as I recognize its source, Sonora.

  I jump out of my rocker and cup a palm to my ear. For the space of a minute I listen to the trees whisper—and then she calls out again, this time with a high-pitched moan. I pound down the steps, along the gravel path, toward the corrals. She belts out another call, as deep as her vocal cords can manage, and this time the elk answer. The forest erupts with their bugling, a sound that makes me feel like knives are sliding in and out of my ears.

  I hold my penlight before me like a weapon, stabbing the dark with its yellow beam. In the corral I find Mangold, motionless as a waxwork, his antlers veining up into the dark. Across his back lies my daughter, his hump a pillow for her head. I see her breath ghosting the air, her eyes glowing, yellow and brown grains snowing through them.

  Her lips move. She whispers and his ears flutter. He stamps a hoof and huffs and steam trails from his mouth. They are having a conversation. My stomach tightens with jealousy.

  I creep closer, and when I do, she shows her teeth. She will bite me if I reach for her.

  I stand there a long minute, my hands opening and closing into helpless fists. Finally I tell her to get down—get down now—before Mangold hurts her. She sits upright and points at me and makes her mouth into an O—out of which pours the most horrible banshee cry.

  I shiver. My body feels lost. But I manage to push through the noise. She slashes the air with her hand and I grab hold of her wrist and yank her down.

  She screams at me, a nonsense scream, and I scream back, “What were you telling, Mangold? Why won’t you talk to me? Talk to me.”

  Then Mangold kicks me. His hoof catches me above the knee and charlies the muscle into screaming knots. I stumble back, dragging my leg and Sonora.

  He has his crown lowered, sharpened into white points from rubbing against fence posts.

  His chest swells and he charges forward two steps and opens his mouth and thunders out a scream wreathed in steam, so loud I hold up my hands to ward away the sound.

  He stamps his hooves and shakes his antlers. Steam tusks from his nose. I can only wish for a gun to grip, a bullet to chamber, when he rises up on his haunches, hoofing the air.

  I hear the rusty shriek of the gate opening. Willow races toward us in her white nightgown, ghosting through the dark. The sight of her startles Mangold and he snorts and twists around and clomps off to the edge of the corral. Willow says, at a panicked shout, “Get away, get away, get away,” and I don’t know who she means, whether me or Mangold.

  I drink my way through a cooler of beer and wake on the porch, salt in my joints, eyelashes crusted together with frozen tears. While I slept a light rain fell and now the world is dewy with it. Clouds still hang here and there, gray puffs that reach toward the ground.

  I go inside to make a pot of coffee but retrieve my revolver instead. When I march toward the corral, whips of lightning flash between the clouds and match the feeling inside me.

  Mangold rests his chin on the corral fence, staring off at the dark forest, no doubt dreaming his way into it, struggling through the trees, sipping water from a milky glacial stream.

  Dreaming. A human word. I can’t prove he feels and thinks and dreams, like us, but I believe it now. His eyes regard me with fury or fear—I don’t know—when I swing open the gate and say, “Get lost.”

  He takes a few steps, raising his antlered head like a king, then stops. Maybe he believes I’ll slam the gate in his face. Or maybe he doesn’t want to leave. Maybe he is afraid. When he huffs, the sound of his breath makes me think of one of those old steam engines ready to charge down the tracks.

  “You ought to be afraid,” I say, my voice rusty with exhaustion.

  He
takes a few more cautious steps, jerking his head as if to rake me aside, and I draw my revolver and now the feeling is mutual.

  The first shot I aim at a cloud. It flares with lightning as if set afire by the bullet. When Mangold remains footed in the corral, I fire a second shot into the dirt between us, and he jumps and kicks and then goes galloping through the gate and across the meadow and into the woods, lost.

  I watch Sonora watching the wall. I don’t speak but try to be the good father, standing in the doorway as if to say: I’m here for you. The other night clings to me. In the dark, atop Mangold, I caught her—and at that moment she looked at me, really looked at me, in a way she never had before. With feeling. It might have been hatred, but it was a feeling nonetheless, something other than blankness.

  Somewhere in the woods, Mangold roams, ripping through the trees with his giant antlers. I hope he is afraid, bewildered, but I worry he might be happier than he has ever been, reunited at last with his family, claiming his forest throne. I imagine elk and other creatures dancing around a fire like a bunch of savages, each taking turns licking his horns, sticky with sap from sharpening against trees.

  Sonora is as rigid as a piece of furniture. I try a Patsy Cline CD, but instead of snapping her fingers she slaps her face and shakes her head until I turn it off. I try Merle Haggard. I try Williams and Cash and Tillis and Parton, but nothing makes her happy. Finally she rips the cord out of the wall. For a moment we stand in silence, then she drops to fours and puffs out her chest and bugles—from the thin reed of her throat—the language of elk. It is wild and startling, but more natural on her lips than if she said to me, “Love you, Daddy.” The windows and walls seem to tremble. I clap my hands to my ears.

  Autism means wrong in the head. Autism means withdrawal into fantasy, and Sonora, I figure, works how my clients work. They visit my ranch, their heart having pumped a lifetime of diet cola, thirsty for whiskey. Their wives and their bosses have made them feel small and dickless. They’re tired, looking to wake up. Here they find a remedy. Through the scope of a rifle, the world narrows and sharpens into focus, completely under their control. They are, for a moment, a kind of god, thrilled by their power. Every man’s fantasy made real. My clients are all autistics. Maybe we’re all a bunch of goddamned autistics.

  My daughter used to dream her way through the sad soundtracks of country crooners. Now the elk speak to her. Their strange music calls her from the cabin, away from me.

  I say, “I’m here, Sonora.”

  But it’s Mangold she wants. I know this because when I try to hug her, she slaps the floor and shows her teeth and sings in a language I don’t understand.

  “God!” the man says. “This is truly God’s country, ain’t it?” His mouth lingers on the word “ain’t” as if its taste is unfamiliar. He drives a silver BMW shaped like a bullet. A diamond flashes at his ear. I have never understood jewelried men. He puts out a hand, says his name is Francis, a woman’s name.

  At breakfast—Spanish omelets drowned in salsa—I overhear him talking to my wife. “What’s your name, honey?” he asks, and when she tells him, he says, “I like your name. It makes me think of a creek bed and weeping willows draped over the creek.”

  She calls him a poet and he reaches across the buffet line to touch her wrist. “It’s a real pretty name, Willow, because it paints a pretty picture to go along with your pretty face.”

  After we eat, I escort him and the rest of my clients to the butcher parlor and shark them into a frenzy. They stare at the red curtains of meat, the cluster of tangled horns, a bucket full of guts. In here, the air smells like a bullet tastes, oily, metallic. In here, blood drips from every corner. Just like that, one of the hunters faints, his head striking the concrete floor with a dull thud. All of us gather around and wait for him to wake up, and when he doesn’t, I slap his cheek firmly enough to leave a red mark.

  His eyes snap open and a minute later he’s laughing, saying, “It’s the altitude. It’s altitude sickness. It’s happened before.” He complains of a headache and goes to get an Aspirin, but instead of returning to us, he hurries his bags into his car—one of those SUVs you could feed a trailer park with for a year—and slams the door. Gravel kicks up behind his wheels as he follows his shadow back to Portland.

  The rest of the clients get a kick out this. They shove each other around like old pals and Francis says, “Man, what a puss.” A little after 7:00, they set off across the meadow, into the woods, wearing safari pants with Velcro pockets and all sorts of buttons and hooks for hanging knives and compasses.

  Where the trees meet the meadow, Francis turns and shows me the palm of his hand, and then the woods swallow him up.

  Three hours later, the screaming begins.

  I stand in the empty corral—the dirt pocked with hoof prints—and through the open gate I see Francis running from the woods, across the meadow, toward me. The closer he gets, the worse he looks, his face bloody with pine needles stuck to it, his eyes wide enough that I can see their color, a liver green.

  I pull my pipe from my mouth and say, “What the hell got you?”

  He falls to his knees and says, “The biggest elk in the whole world!” His forehead is gashed. His clothes are muddied. His breath gusts from his mouth. He says, at the edge of a meadow, he came across two bulls in rut combat. The older of the two, Mangold, didn’t stand a chance. When their antlers came together, several of his horns snapped. He struggled to fight, but his knees gave way and he collapsed into a heap. The bull gored him—jabbing him through the ribs—and Mangold mewled and lay still and the bull snorted his victory and trotted away and left Mangold’s heart to pump the life right out of him.

  Francis went for the mercy kill. He aimed, cracked off a shot, and knocked a hole in Mangold’s flank. But the elk would not die. He pulled himself up then, with blood siphoning fast from all his holes, and stumbled toward Francis.

  I study the gash in his forehead and wonder briefly if Mangold chased him down, opened him up, but Francis explains that he turned and, in his panic, ran directly into a tree. But he kept on, afraid to look back, with Mangold crashing after him.

  His face is a bizarre mix of colors: from pink to purple to red to brown and black and everything in between. The tree tore him up pretty good, the gash on his forehead like a second mouth just below his hairline. I say we ought to get him washed up.

  A great bunch of noise interrupts that plan. Off in the forest, branches snap, pine needles sizzle, hooves thud against the hard-packed dirt. From Francis’s hands I snatch his Remington, tug the bolt, chamber another round, just as Mangold emerges from the trees. He pauses, some twenty yards away, eyeing me.

  Then a bad fit of coughing makes his whole body shake, and his head droops until it nearly touches the ground, as if following a scent there. A bloody oyster drools off his tongue and dampens the soil between his hooves.

  I watch him through the scope, and when I see how his legs tremble under his weight, when I see he is no danger to us, I keep the pressure off the trigger. Through the scope everything is so close—the black pigment of his eyeball, each spike of hair, the white curve of his ribcage—and under such scrutiny I know what he wants, his corral, the safety and food and love that come with it. I understand completely.

  His ribs bleed like crazy and scabs try to gum up the mess. Not ten paces away he stops and stares at me—right through the tunnel of the scope—and I feel the gears in my throat tightening with sadness. I motion with the rifle, toward the corral. “Go on,” I say with my pipe clenched between my teeth. “Get back in there. Get back where you belong.”He raises a hoof and puts it down again. And then, as if some invisible string has been cut, he collapses. Just then a flock of swallows swirls from the forest, over the salt-grass meadow, dappling us with shadows.

  As if on cue, a great bugling blooms from the forest, a mournful mixed-up sound.

  Behind me I hear laughter. I lower my rifle and shade my eyes and look toward the cabin and see
Sonora framed by a window. She does not notice me: her eyes and ears are focused on the forest. A look of joy creeps across her face and she is giggling—a high-pitched tinkling that reminds me of wind chimes—and I know she is not without the capacity for love. She opens her mouth and sings along with the animals and I want to comb her hair with my fingers, I want to pepper her face with kisses, I want her to wave, acknowledge me in some way.

  But just like these woods, she is out of my control.

  Mangold is dead. So is my pipe. I tap the bowl in my palm and scatter the remaining ashes over him. And then, in a flood of emotion, I puff up my chest and sing along with the elk, with my daughter, and as we sing, our voices tangle and fuse and become the same note, lonely, sorrowful, but for the moment, together.

  The Colony

  We like it here. We never want to leave. Not ever. I’m talking about the 300 acres Seb Holmes bought at auction for a song. He sold chunks of it, and because I had some money, and because I knew Seb, I bought a pretty big chunk, thirty acres. I can walk a half hour and not leave my land. Not many people can say that. Not many people understand what you can do with this kind of space.

  We live in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains, bearded with old-growth forests that give way at higher elevations to huckleberry and manzanita and beyond that, lichen and glaciers and rock. This is a twenty-minute drive from Portland, if you can believe it. Twenty minutes and you’re in the middle of nowhere.

  All together there are ten of us. And we are not just anybodies. We were chosen by Seb to serve a certain function. We have a mechanic. We have an accountant. We have a chef—and man, can he cook. We have a doctor and a dentist and a preacher. We have an agriculturist. We have to have an agriculturist, Seb says, for the food we grow, the sweet corn and the yellow onions and the Irish potatoes, the Red Delicious apples that taste as good as they sound, and for the weed.