In silence far above them swallows follow the hunt, the least and sweetest predators.
A contrail feathers out white over the eastern ridge.
As my eyes begin to have to look away from the slow intolerable brightening I close them and inside the lids see the long curve of the ridge dark red, the darkest red: above it a band of green, the purest green. Each time I look and close my eyes again, the band of green grows wider, burning clear, unmitigated fire of emerald. Then at its center appears a circle of pale, unearthly blue.
I open my eyes and see the source, the sun, one glance, and look down blinded, humble, to the earth, the dull black lava pavement of the path.
The warmth of the sun is on my face as soon as its light is.
After the tremendous thunderstorm of afternoon, tall shivering towers of rain that swept across the pastures, wind that writhed the great old willow like seaweed in the waves, after all that was over and the quiet dusk was filling up the air between the ridges, the horses got to frisking. The little roan and the three bays nipped and kicked, ran and reared, chest to chest; even Daryll, old paint swayback boss, got into it with the colts a bit. They teased, they galloped across the pastures, hooves drummed that wild music on the ground. They quieted down, drifting off north along the creek. Old paint’s white flank glimmered like fireflies in the willowy dark.
In the night, awake, I thought of them standing in the wet grass, among the willows, in the night.
I stood on the doorstep in the deep night. Cloud-veils crossed the blazing pavement of the firmament and passed. Above the eastern ridge a shining blur, the Pleiades.
On the Second Night
On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.
On the Third Day
In the afternoon the ravens of the western ridge flew with their children across the air between the ridges, calling in their language full of r’s. The youngest talked a lot, the elders answered briefly. Then all at once there seemed to be five ravens? six?—no: these were vultures, materializing from the sky, eleven, twelve, nine, seven… soaring, vanishing, appearing, circling, playing with heights and distances and one another in their marvelous, calm, and never broken silence.
After a while they all drifted off back south toward the mountain, quiet lords of the warm towers of the air.
Walking up the road from Diamond after dinner, we heard way off across the fields the shrill, uncanny chorus, a coyote family. A nighthawk’s twang. Metal rattled loud where a hoof touched it in the effortless leap: the doe flitted off into twilight like a rolling-falling wave. Then, from the old, tall poplars hoarding darkness, voices spoke softly with complete authority. Under cloud, the red sun shone out, sank, was gone. The owls said nothing more. The old trees released their darkess finally.
On the Morning of the Fourth Day
Sunlight fills the open valley half a mile away, but here between the rimrocked ridges I sit in windy shadow; half an hour yet to wait on the lava doorstep, while the rain from yesterday’s thundershower drips from gutterless eaves onto my head and book, for the brightness over the dark bulk of the ridge to gather and center into the sun itself.
The big black cattle munch industrious on rain-gift grass just outside the wooden fence around the house. A peacock pulls his poor, slattern tail along through molting August, pride reduced to sapphire head and rajah’s crest and the brassy, meowing, melancholy jungle cry.
The banty rooster shrills: It-is-a-clarion-call! It-is-a-clarion-call! The big rooster exerts the unjustified superiority of a deeper voice. The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sailboats over the grass. Now they begin to chatter, to gather back to the henyard: Gretchen has come out to scatter feed.
The contrail shines where it has each morning, drifting now steadily north and east to where the sun will rise. It slowly passes, iridescent, behind the ridge that darkens as the brightness grows.
It is risen. It is risen in beauty.
The reliable miracle, a couple of minutes later and a little farther south each day.
The lesser miracle, the brief transubstantiation of black lava into glimmering red-violet and blue-green light in my observing and delighted eyes, has occurred, is over. The rough black rock keeps its secret.
The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability. He is drawn to my orange tea mug.
The big black heavy cattle munch and breathe and gaze, each with its following of small black birds. All living things work hard to make their living.
I sit on the rough black steps and try to tell the secret that they keep. But I cannot.
They keep it.
On the Fifth Afternoon
Hundreds of blackbirds gathered in the pastures south of the house, vanishing completely in the tall grass, then rising out of it in ripples and billows, or streaming and streaming up into a single tree up under the ridge till its lower branches were blacker with birds than green with leaves, then flowing down away from it into the reeds and out across the air in a single, flickering, particulate wave. What is entity?
Read More Nonfiction from Ursula K. Le Guin
About the Author
URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. She is the recipient of a National Book Award, six Hugo and five Nebula awards, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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