Crossing the breezeway to the servants’ side, the younger brother felt that the wind was, if anything, fiercer and colder than before, and he knew that if there was no phone he’d have to head back out into it. The stories said so. His brother had hypothermia. His uncle was out there dying. It was fittingly up to him, the smallest, the weakest, to save them both. The younger brother checked the thermometer on the breezeway’s post. Sixteen degrees. Warmer than he’d thought but that was without the wind. Inside, shivering, he studied the kitchen’s walls, beams, countertops. There were dead animals on the walls here too, though he’d not noticed them earlier, scraggly little servant bucks wearing colorful bandannas, their poorly glued lips sagging and misshapen. He lit a few lamps and a candle and searched the maids’ dining room, then the maids’ living room, consciously inspecting every section of wall. When he didn’t know where else to look, he began checking closets, bathrooms, storage rooms full of draped furniture. He entered the pantry and found bare shelves, four refrigerators, two freezers. He was bewildered. Electricity was one thing, you could use propane for the appliances, kerosene for the lamps, but who the hell didn’t have a phone? He opened a heavy metal-lined door and found himself in a room full of human beings.
He pedaled backward, hollering, and dropped his lamp, which went out but did not break, did not erupt into flames. He stood in the darkness. The storm raged quietly beyond the thick walls. A tarp was fluttering somewhere. He shut his eyes, lit another match, then found and lit a candle in a holder on the wall. The room was full of statues. Or mannequins. Nine or ten of them. Human likenesses fashioned from driftwood and shoe putty and strips of old tire rubber. The boy was crying, gasping. Their faces and hands resembled 3-D medical drawings, a skinless display of bones and muscle, and their attire was that of old-time guides: ratty corduroys, flannels with rolled sleeves, bandannas around their necks, leather boots, brimmed hats, one or two wearing spectacles. One held a lantern in a raised hand. Another wore rawhide snowshoes and had a rusty double-barrel shotgun slung over his shoulder. One had eyes of freckled songbird eggs, a set of decayed animal jaws for teeth. The boy picked up the lamp he’d dropped and studied its glass bowl for fractures. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if it had broken. A whoosh of kerosene and flame. When he saw no fractures he lit it again and then kicked the closest of the guides. It smashed to the floor and its ribs caved in and one arm clattered off at the shoulder. He knelt and stole the boots it wore. He knocked over the guide with the snowshoes. He stole a scarf, a heavy flannel shirt that smelled of turpentine, a pair of woolen britches. He made three trips between the artist’s studio and the great room where his brother slept. Then, aware now of what he had to do and how hard it would be, he visited the pantry.
When the older boy woke, his brother was kneeling by the fire, pouring melted snow from a pot into a crystal rocks glass. A cast-iron skillet and a second pot of bubbling water were nestled in the seething coals. The skillet held a few chunks of half-frozen meat. On the floor by the fire were a few rusty and unlabeled cans, a mouse-chewed box of spaghetti, a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of capers, some cocktail olives afloat in mold. On a sheet of damp butcher paper the older boy saw the words Doe Fillet in barely legible cursive and a date fifteen years elapsed. He looked at his watch but it wasn’t ticking. What time is it? he asked. The younger brother shrugged and said the clocks disagreed with each other. The older boy surveyed the rug by the fire. Two pairs of ancient leather boots, a pair of snowshoes, two scratchy flannels, a leather slicker, a pair of fashionable second-skin gloves. They’ll send help, the older brother said, Mom will call. They won’t get here, his younger brother said, there’s three feet of snow. They’ll snowmobile. They won’t get here in time. The older boy nodded. Not for him, he said. They sat for a while. The older boy realized now that he had never believed that the brutal events described so attractively in the uncle’s tales might have been true, and terrible to experience, and that the tales when lived must have had many possible endings in the minds of their protagonists. He felt betrayed by this—the reality of stories. The younger brother poked at the hearth with a bronze fire stick. We have to decide who goes back, he said, and who goes for help. I’m not going fucking anywhere. We have to, we’ve got the gear. A bunch of ancient summer clothes didn’t qualify in the older brother’s mind as gear. Give me some of that water, he said. His whole body ached, his head more than anything. The younger brother watched as he drank, sipping from his own glass now and then. I let you sleep a bit, he said, you hungry? The meat didn’t look good. Each piece was a shriveled little disk, green and blue and maroon, its flesh ridged like a walnut. I’m not eating a steak that’s older than I am. To this the younger brother merely shook his head.
The pasta more or less disintegrated as it boiled, and the steaks cooked into hard little pucks, and the boys smothered everything with mayonnaise and ate more than they thought they would. It was not unpleasant to sit there full bellied by the fire, drowsy, listening to the blizzard smashing blindly at the windows while the warmly lit animals kept watch. I got a question, the younger boy eventually said. The older brother could barely keep his eyes open. The younger boy poured them each a last glass of murky pasta water. Did I hear you calling for Dad out there? The older boy drank, squinting at the fire. He didn’t answer. Is that a no? I was calling for you. That’s not what I heard. The older boy shrugged. His eyes fell shut again. You can hear whatever you want, he said. The younger boy stared at his brother for a moment. Then he took the empty pot outside, filled it with tamped snow, and came back and put it on the fire. Snowflakes melted brightly on his eyelashes and shoulders. Do you remember telling me I’m the boss? The older boy opened his eyes and half smiled in his dangerous way. You aren’t going out there. He’ll die if we don’t. All he was wearing was a fucking flannel shirt, he’s dead already. The younger brother gestured at the lantern, the gloves, and gear. Look, we have all this, we’ll be warm, we have light, don’t be a pussy. The snow sizzled and shrank from the pot’s hot walls. What are you going to do that we haven’t tried? the older boy asked, wander around calling his name? No, I’m going back to town, or to the main road, to get help. The older brother took a long, musing pull of starchy water. It’s, what, sixteen miles? He yanked a dusty fistful of mink fur from the jacket he wore and threw it into the fire, where it shivered and glowed. You hear that? he said, gesturing to the windows and the noise of the storm. They aren’t going to find his body till spring.
The younger boy rolled to his knees and began surveying the gear. There’s only enough for one of us anyway, he said, pulling on the mismatched wool socks. When the older boy’s eyes slid open he found the younger brother looking at him challengingly. He closed his eyes once more. The younger boy donned both flannels. He cut a head hole in a wool blanket and pulled the slicker on over it. He took one of the oil lamps and messily filled the storm lantern with its kerosene. The older boy saw several options, but no good ending. He could let his brother go or make him stay. He could fill one of the pack baskets on the wall with the supplies his brother would need to survive, with matches and spare kerosene and yet more blankets, or he could disarm him, maybe break his legs with the fire iron, keep him here. Their mother would eventually realize they were missing. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night. Rescuers would come. But nothing the older brother could do would make it any less late for the uncle. He was out there. Lost in dark and wind and snow. Sitting with his back to a tree. His rifle out of bullets. He probably didn’t even know where he was anymore. His mind would have turned inward, shrinking like his blood toward his core, going through one last rendition of those old stories, or through other stories, through private warmths that he’d not seen fit to share. It was too late. It had been too late when the snow started.
The older boy stood with his big fur coat swaying halfway down his pale thighs. For a moment he held to the polar bear. His legs quivered and ached. No, he said. The younger boy, ignoring him, slid
his feet into the mannequin guide’s huge boots, slid the boots into the snowshoes, and began trying to make sense of the desiccated leather straps. You think you’re hot shit now, don’t you? the older brother said. You’re a big boy now. His eyes had the same troubled gleam as the eyes of the animals. Blood dripped from his bandaged hand to the floor. The younger boy, pretending not to notice, cinched the straps tight, lit the lantern, and lifted Angel off the couch. He smiled. How do I look? he said. As he waddled toward the door, the snowshoes skated and clacked on the floorboards. The older brother stepped trembling into his path. Get out of my way, the younger boy said. When the older boy did not, the younger boy casually unslung Angel. You think that’ll work twice? the older boy said. Angel’s safety clicked forward. Yes, said his younger brother.
The younger boy’s cheeks were windburned, his nose chapped and crusty with snot. He did not point Angel at his brother. There was no need. His brother was a semblance, a memory of power who, as the younger boy watched, sank to the floor beside the lonely wolf. The younger brother stepped past him and stood in the open door, looking back. Snow spun through the screen onto the floor and the fire seethed and the animals in the room seemed enlivened by the cold air, their aged hackles shivering once again, their tails playing in the breeze. The older brother was wrapped tightly in his coat, and his feet were drawn up under its hem. The wolf’s teeth were yellow, and it was forever panting with its painted rubber tongue. The younger brother raised the lantern and stepped outside. I’ll send someone for you, he called back. They’ll be here in the morning. After the door swung shut, the older boy heard his brother’s wooden footsteps on the porch, then he didn’t, and though he strained with his ears, he heard only winter, roaring unabated. Winter and the awakening of flies.
Lynx on the shore of Loon Lake, near Lake Wanapitei, Ontario, Canada, July 1902.
George Shiras, National Geographic Image Collection.
George Shiras: The Heart Is the Dark
Cole Swensen
Eighteen seventy-one, summer, two days’ walk with a Native American guide to Whitefish Lake, about twenty miles southeast of Marquette, Michigan, fairly within the realm of romance every summer for the next seventy years, there is a deer caught in the bright light of ignited magnesium, there is a deer grazing at the water’s edge, its reflection ruffling up its coat, there are two white deer searing the darkness, there is a lynx on the shore of Loon Lake staring straight ahead.
Shiras photographed the night. He was trying to photograph the nocturnal life of forest animals, which he did as well, but above all, he photographed night as a material substance, and askance; it’s in his backgrounds that night is caught in all its drift and grip, in all its utter lack that shrieks, layered over sky.
July 23, 1898 deer, tail-white in lake of same some lost line from eye to brain the eye holds tight anchoring the line to the far shore in a mind that night made precisely funambulist precarious all these animals in their private sky
climbed on through, a constellation of glinting mammals merely startled for a moment on their ancient way.
Shiras had hunted since childhood and only began taking photographs so that he could continue hunting past the end of hunting season without breaking the law—something he may have been particularly attuned to, as he was himself a lawyer. A sense of law as overall a deep and steady pulse driving a core held in common among his animals in all their numbers: heron, raccoon, and deer upon deer. Small owl and its eye on something even smaller.
Caught infinitely in the immediacy of their living. Which turned Shiras away from hunting into a strange inversion of gun and camera. The one ends the animal’s life instantly; the other extends it indefinitely.
Which is not to say eternally—the animal remains tied to time but in a way that lets time itself thin a bit. Jean-Christophe Bailly, in his introduction to the catalog for the 2015–16 exhibition of Shiras’s nocturnal wildlife photography at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature in Paris, says directly: “They are not ‘timeless,’” but he places them in an “animal time” that he finds quite different from our own, which suggests that these photographic artifacts create a bridge between the two modes of time, and they do so, ironically, by stopping it, as if by stopping the two modes at the precise instance of their intersection, they would fuse, allowing those living in one to join the other. Perhaps it’s the suddenness, embodied in the dramatic contrast of lighting, as if light were, in fact, nothing but the shock of stopped time.
Shiras wasn’t the only one extending the hunting season via photography; there was, in the late ninteenth century, an emerging subgenre that considered such photos as hunting trophies, and magazines such as Forest and Stream were publishing them. Shiras’s unique contribution was the night. There’s a raccoon out on a limb over Whitefish Lake, date unknown. There are two muskrats crossing a body of water on a very thin branch, Yellowstone Valley, Montana. The body resounding, a bell within a blackness startling presence into the precision of attention.
And perhaps such photography, such a shock of sight, constitutes the apogee of attention—attention as the occupation of the other, an attendance on her or his presence so entire that it becomes your own.
So he stopped hunting and devoted more and more time to writing articles encouraging other hunters to abandon their guns in favor of the camera. So quietly in the boat gliding slowly.
As if the addition of framing, the restricted field inevitable in a photograph, emphasized the animal’s own agency, focusing it in a way that manifests its centrality, allowing Shiras to see animals in a radically different relationship to their surroundings. Now the center of the scene, the subject of their own gaze, rather than the object of his.
And their surroundings, which included him, not an outsider, but an integral part of the whole and its boat
slipping deftly, emanating a care rooted in night’s language of gestures, glances, reflections, refractions. The syntax of darkness articulates each motion through the sound it makes through the air it displaces—the wing of a moth shifting a bird in its sleep. Or the owl, nocturnal, mute, which is its greatest resource, and its acute ear, its surest weapon and isolation—“Snowy owl perched above Whitefish River,” 1900, how the dark will echo, how the response is always a texture—that of a lack of light between two hands clasped, even if they’re your own.
There are two people beside a lake beside a deer larger than them both. The deer walks through their eyes in steps as precise as musical notes. A lake is its own winter, making the deer fall silent, trapped in the light of their eyes, lighting them into life.
He spent most of his nights outside. He spent the light of his eyes in spreading his eyes across the eyes that met his across a lake. The sight of seeing established, composing the countryside as the flank of an animal striding lightly through the dark, soft breath, the shadow in the heart of the shadow of his hand, the breathing hand that is the camera too, taking optical measure in various dimensions that branch out from those hands.
Shiras traveled widely; he stopped practicing law in 1905—that I might be free to interpret the laws of nature rather than those of man—and devoted himself increasingly to photographing animals at night. Gliding over the black water in the quiet of a canoe, against the background of wings rowing across the air overhead, the footsteps of a raccoon deftly across a log, skating over the sky and its blinded stars, a camera mounted in the bow.
The first flash photographs and the first trip wire triggered, the animals wearing night like sleeves, the moose half dressed in light, Loon River, 1903, the magnesium dusting like the dust a second splits, the beaver hauling her leafy branch into a dam, date unknown. And behind her, night goes on forever in a way that daylight never can.
Shiras used a modified version of a hunting technique employed by the Ojibways called jacklighting—a bright light is placed in the bow of a boat; the animal looks up, fixed in the light, the light firing the eyes that shoot it back again. The Ojibways used fire in
a pan; Shiras used a kerosene lantern.
Once the animal’s attention is caught, spray magnesium over three spirit lamps, blinding the flames and the animals, including the people, and the boat glides on.
Jacklighting for hunting was eventually outlawed throughout most of North America because it was considered “unsportsmanlike,” while, on the other hand, wildlife photographers argued that their practice displayed a more refined sportsmanship than hunting because it takes more skill to capture an animal with a camera than with a gun.
From the early 1890s on, Shiras became more and more a conservationist and used his years in the Pennsylvania legislature (1889 to 1890) and as a congressperson in the US House of Representatives (1903–1904) to forward the cause. In later years, he featured prominently in several preservation projects—the Petrified Forest National Monument, 1906; Mount Olympus National Monument, 1909; the 1918 Migratory Bird Act; the 1925 Shiras Gun Law, discouraging poaching by making it illegal to carry a gun in hunting areas outside of hunting season.
Nocturnals Page 13