I dug more holes, and because I could not dig a hole without wanting for something to put in it, for the first time I began to kill what I did not intend to use: In one hole I buried a muskrat and in another a rabbit and in another a wrench-necked goose, caught by my own hands after it squawked me away from its clutch of goslings, themselves doomed beneath my frustrated heels. My wife still maintained her garden, but in those days I also kept one of my own: For every rabbit I took from the woods, I buried two more in the clearing made when I’d cut trees for our house, so that others might grow from whence they came, and so they did grow—except that with each passing season they returned leaner and lamer, limping where they might before have hopped. It was not just the rabbits who failed, diminished by my poaching: Remember now a mink without its fur or else this beaver without the squared hatchet of its teeth, gnawing useless at a trunk it had no chance of opening. Remember this duck born with dulled beak, this peacock ill feathered to attract its mate. Remember all those other animals, blunted and endangered by my hand, and yet how could I stop, and yet what could I do except to mitigate through their bodies my most recent darkest thoughts, which always required some burial somewhere, with some thing, in some hole of my own digging.
As the foundling grew I too changed, hardened into who I would be, and soon I was burying whole deer in too-shallow holes, stepping down into their graves to snap the lengths of their antlers or else letting their branches point through the dirt, made accusing knuckles of bone. In this way all the beasts and birds of the woods gave themselves over to my traps, so that never was there a morning when I found nothing, where no fur or feather filled my gathering fists.
All the beasts and the birds, all except for one: The only animal I dared not trap was the giant bear, who I correctly feared would not suffer me to try.
Some mornings, I arrived at the burying ground to find that the bear had uncovered my plantings, had torn the flesh from off their bones so that it might eat of what I had killed but not for food—and also to bring back what it did not require. This is how I thought the bear showed me what it claimed, even unto and after death, and also what it thought of my poaching, as if I did not already know the bounds of its domain, and of all others: That the woods belonged to the bear. That the house belonged to me, or else had before, but was owned now by her, my wife. That if I wished to reduce my trespass, then the lake would perhaps be a better place in which to store my dead—if only my wife could have stomached the sight of my dragging their bodies across the dirt, of the scraped clay wounded red.
During the day, the foundling roamed often upon the dirt, sometimes in the company of his mother and sometimes alone. As he grew in size he grew braver too, but still he remained unwilling to step under even the thinnest outer trees, those still shot through with sunlight. Even with his mother at his side, holding his diminutive hands, his fingers too small for his age, even then he was afraid of everything he might have guessed lurked within those living woods, his imagination making up for his lack of experience—but could what he might have imagined be worse than the truth? Much of what happened in the woods was then my secret, and the fingerling’s: the trapped and the dying beasts; the dug and filled graves; the bones thrust through the dirt, uncovered and freed to new life by the bear, then trapped and buried again.
The foundling was most afraid of the bear, that beast I had spoken of often at the table, despite the hushings of my wife, and also he was afraid of me, of the fingerling inside, that brother the foundling did not know but that I believed he sometimes heard in my voice. His fear of me disappeared only fleetingly, now and then in some lucky forgetfulness of childhood, and eventually my wife stopped bringing him near the woods, so that he would not wail at the sight of the trees, my traps, bloody me; and as they withdrew into the safety of our house I too retreated, spent more and more of my daytime on the wooded side of the tree line, that threshold’s divide.
How every day I watched the foundling always choose his mother, how he preferred her lap, her end of the table, her body to curl against when dreams of the dark woods and the darker cave trembled him awake.
How his lisping voice was still better for singing than my rough and rude timbre, and how this too was a realm they shared, to which my talents granted me no entry.
How when he wanted a story, he wanted it only from her lips, and so it was her stories that formed him, never mine.
How whenever he was not with her, the foundling seemed listless, exhausted, and while she did her chores he fell asleep in odd places, tucked into a corner of the sitting room, hidden in the shaded hollows between the furniture; or upon a pile of dirty furs, ready for the washing; or in the dark slimness of the space under the bed, where I would find him snoring so slowly, balled up, legs tucked below his belly, hands folded beneath his face; and if I tried to shake him awake he would not stir, not until my wife returned to lull him from his sleep with a song or a soft word.
How the eighth element she taught the foundling was called moon, but when the time came my wife pronounced it moons, as if hers was no copy but rather some proper and equal addition to what had come before, that original to whose workings we were not then or ever privy.
How, like his mother, the foundling preferred the meat of the woods to the fish of the lake, so that always I ate alone, even when we ate together.
How even if we had not been so slowly separating, even then the fingerling would have kept us sometimes apart, his threats against the foundling enough to double my own reluctance, my own inability to father.
How I told myself I held back for the boy’s safety, but how that was not the whole of the truth or even the most of it.
How by the time the foundling was with us several years—by the time the fingerling had floated within me nearly double that span—how by then I could admit the root of the fracture on our family, of the distance between my wife and I, between me and her son: Despite all my long wants, I had never thought rightly of how to be a parent or a husband, only of possessing a child, of owning a wife.
MEMORY AS NEW APPETITE, AS hunger and harriment: To wish to try to join my family in its diet, but, because I would not take back my public objections, to do so always in secret, eating only the parts of animals never eaten before, parts my wife and the foundling would not miss.
To trim the sinew from around the vertebrae of a raccoon, to gnaw a woodchuck’s knuckle, to save the ears of a hare in the back pocket of my trousers.
To crack open heavy nuts taken from the cheek of a squirrel, trapped while storing its winter stock.
To throw away the stringy flesh of groundbird after groundbird, keeping only loused mouthfuls of feathers to swallow later.
To do everything differently because what was already accomplished had failed to provide what life I wished, and only some new way seemed likely to save our family from this long fall, this world beneath the slow-sinking moon, this home where there was only husband and wife and fingerling and foundling in the house, only the bear in the woods and whatever-was-not-a-bear in the lake, of which I have barely yet spoke: We knew by then the ninth element was called bear, and for a time nine was enough. The tenth element was in those years only intuited, and what it was best named I did not know, whether whale or else squid, else kraken, else hafgufa or lyngbakr; a monster to match a monster, to oppose the other merely by its existence opposite the woods, in the lake on the other side of this border of dirt, the thin territory upon which we had staked our tiny claim.