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| Ours does not need to remember a mythology. Because we have all been helpers, we live comfortably in our skins. Our desires are for women though we shut out our women from time to time--in the rough talk and the talk of the tools of hunting and fishing. We know it is killing. And that is good. We are not sheltered by the cellophane deceptions of supermarket meat. There's something honest about the blood of grouse and black bear sweet and purple on our hands. And how we must clean what we eat. We live in a shack built with our own hands, warm ourselves with wood we've made, in a fireplace built of fieldstone we hauled from the field ourselves. We cook. We clean. We maintain. Talk of politics and ghosts. Argue whether the side-by-side double sixteen works better in the field than an automatic three-shot twelve. Debate the virtues of St. Croix or Orvis. Teach how to hunt and fish. How to keep the sun constant over your shoulder so not to get lost in the deep woods. We lie about our conquests, confess our anxieties about women guiltily. But are not ashamed to praise beauty, hearing the sweet conversation of bright trout streams, discriminating between the kind of sigh the wind makes in oak and then pine. We watch the new green of spring emerge and the treasury of gold and red and russet and yellows of fall's retreat. We are made silent by Schubert, and chickadees and white throats and the plangencies of the evening thrush, and holler to see the dancing aurora. The meadow fills with geese and crows and deer and bear; and a coyote garmented in rust and white ambles along the wood line followed by a black six point buck. Though we are helpers, we live easily without our women for a time in the skins of animal, water, and wood and are happy in the company of men. |
Steven Fortney
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