Lured here, they half-knew, like prosperous but tired but happy tourists who at a tipping point had heard of this place unspoiled, this territory recently annexed by our nation for its own good from our northern neighbor. It was to have been an unplanned get-together, a tryst set up by us to give them some quality time, a rest from months of strife, talk, partial truth, ignorant armies. When all the time we had this trail to follow if we would, as the intimation came to meet us in our dream that this new territory just annexed might offer a special campsite to resolve or retool or half silence all this talk. No roaring camp, no big two-hearted river (though who knew?). Waiting maybe for a three-day blow…these two chatting quietly.
As God was their witness, their limbs loosened with the toilsome months along the trail, the campaign to turn the nation not just to words but with great leaps upward to health, wealth, sense.
Knowing each other curiously, negotiating their situation politely, gathering wood, reconnoitering the clearing. Negotiating the next few, well, hours in an exchange almost jocose at times, argued like two lawyers in cahoots across the hard ground. Though feeling each other out not undarkly, nonetheless, the still green branches of blow-down she found herself gathering into a pile upon which to place she knew not what cloth or fur to pillow the spirit from the night of trees, of animal life that would contemptibly dare to take advantage of her — attempted rape by the unknown that did not know it was already known by her even as also we are known as scripture will say in even such a place as this.
Did silence fall between them? He found his matches, she a personal flashlight in her bag; she complaining that the administration seemed unconscionably undecided whether to call this new region a territory or a district; he that a one hundred and some foot Coast Guard cutter had just been flown in — yes, she had heard that too — to close that part of the new northern border that was a huge kidney-shaped lake known for fifty-pound walleyes; she, that among multiple other things, it reminded her of a dangerous and ravaged part of Africa she had visited; he, that there were thirteen ways of looking at the lake — a charming word from him, an echo somehow for her, as he approached her now, and she said a storm was coming up and maybe they’d be among the first to help the survivors; he, that the weather coming here might well be artificially precipitated by the Administration. And just like that they sat down, they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, grounded, she remembering she’d wanted a vacation in Michigan for some reason, demographics, waterscape, no reason, and then they heard their stomachs growl, it reminded her of her husband…Yet it was the woods, wasn’t it? And they were up in a second standing back to back, buttock to buttock, for they were hearing more than their inner selves, but what?
We know they were in the woods soon afterward, where lingering music of late sunset layering its touch among the trees led beautifully beyond a huge hemlock to a bouldered den and a shock it held in store. Here the man, the woman a few yards behind him, had surprised an animal he had never seen, fangs tearing at the yellow-pink hams and inner thigh of a fawn caught in a trap like those sold in our country to tourists. About to come at him, gory teeth like eyes, this dark, bushy-coated, heavy-clawed wolverine-like creature (unlike what we’re familiar with along the northern borders of our nation) — longer-tailed yet almost bearlike, its claws disproportionately heavy for its body — turned back to feed a moment — yet that proved almost a ruse or a stark evolutionary vagary of the creature poised to spring. Yet as, suddenly, the man, always game himself, dodged its strike, and dodged again — and would have grappled fatally with it in a moment, had there not flashed into his hand a blade seemingly too long for the compact switch-blade unit housing it, a blade unfolding somehow out of lengths of itself — a shot now exploded from behind him in an instant smashing the wolverine’s head to blood, the animal already incredibly by two strokes of the man’s knife disemboweled.
The stuff of legends that moment when, seeing this angry glutton indigenous to our northern neighbor about to rake her rival’s arm shoulder neck rib groin, the woman had drawn from a side pocket of her tailored camouflage fatigues a pistol she liked the feel of, the heft, the history of freedoms in, though had never fired: a souvenir slipped her somehow in public by a forestry-and-marketing professor at a truck stop where she’d gone formica to formica, hand to hand, at midnight — liked her—as a woman—and admired her animal eye-color change from hazel to blue to green, one of her recent feats a feature of her no-holds-barred campaign answering her opponent’s own iris-pigment menu, still more his simultaneous look left and right embracing a range of people and what is in them.
How could the man have skinned and butchered and cooked their prey and left quality time before they settled down for the night? We may never know. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he mutters at his work. “I could taste him,” the woman said standing by as the man peeled away in a mess of harsh hair and fur a section of hide and flesh warm with then intestine that fell crawling around his wrist and as he reached the blade to grope for rib between rib and said, drily, “It’s a sow” (wondering if that was the right wolverine word for a female, if this thang was a wolverine), in the corner of his eye he saw the partly eaten fawn move, the dead wolverine’s prey, for the act of inhaling had slid its eye to one side, and its breath-out then was its last — and the woman, “An inch or two to the left and it would have been your head,” and he, “It was what it was,” and she (for the fawn did breathe once more), “Thanks, are we gonna eat the baby too?” yet he (meaning the pistol), “How did your handlers let you…where did you…?”
— as time, whose quality or qualities once upon a library table he had found for himself with science, philosophy, and international law all working together in his thesis — what was it? — extended audaciously our own look back into where we are, Time’s aspiration imagining we grasp what grasps us and our institutions. His knife does its work. “Getting some experience,” she murmurs, needing to defend herself now against who could quite say what. Experience is also the lack of it, experience is experience, he thinks, and cuts himself almost unnoticeably in the thick of his work, and what will happen next, he asks, eating and sleeping and in the sky and tomorrow? A boy’s thought, she replies. The lost sun speaks dark wind now. Well experience comes from you not just to you, he said. She gasps. “There you go again,” she cried suddenly and he looked over his shoulder to see her pocket’s cargo where it belonged, but it was the wind she had cried out upon, from the cliff, the cold grace that knows us in the sky, she recalled someone thinking. “Well I hope you can cook,” she said like a mind reading what a girlfriend — was it in college? — had said to a guy when he had done something…what was it?
Home again, the fire rises to the occasion, it is not angry at the meat, the lean, the gristle. The storm somewhere near the clearing but not here, the flames gnaw at the night. She has found a thinly surfacing spring running past a corner of their camp and brought him to wash his wound, water in a dented beer can left in the fire with other plausible litter provided by our advance team that traveled this trail of our future leaders, which was reopened after a racist sniper from our northern neighbor or a separatist, or both, shot two hikers a fortnight ago evidently tragically just as they turned, hand in hand, to look each other in the eye outdoors.