The End of Living, The Beginning of Survival
The ground is crusted. The window translucent with condensation turned to ice through which the midday only glows. The door bangs shut. It feels like snow…
Striding the marshland, colossus in miniature, I cross the rude plank bridge and turn toward a cold sun. It hovers heavily above the cold and empty ocean heaving silently beyond my line of sight. The sky which should be blue on a day like this is duller than dull and nothing today but gulls. Black-back. Herring. Or was that a Bonaparte… They soar and dip and disappear behind the grassy dune into the brine where lies the only open water. Every course snaking through the marsh is frozen, not solid enough for Hans Brinker perhaps but sufficient to impede all the birds at sea who otherwise might sojourn there.
How empty the marsh is. No tracks. No wind. If the river flows you’d never know it. Even the wind sleeps. Mind makes all the small talk you will hear today and Breath that freezes, and wheezes…
Then unexpected deep and clear I hear the song of geese in flight.
It is late for migration but that is what it seems, the geese haggling loud, their wings rowing strong, striding true as the Southern Cross in that powerful V. For Vector, for Veritas, for Vigilance and Valor purposeful and unyielding.
Voices ringing from 12 o’clock high they peel off and plumet from the sky.
What seems like abandon is a precise and well-learned rite. In the same way and for the same reason planes land hot in a zone of war, one after the next the geese invert their wings, dump air, tumble in. They take no chances. The hunt is on, for their fat and feathers and for the joy of it. How to pass judgment on this? We do not need the meat and cannot justify the sport for sport alone and yet, these are the men who love the out of doors and live the out of doors and by rights own the out of doors. No armchair however filled with goodwill can hold a match to that. In a world of weather, of eagles and hawks in the air and a ground of deep snow and bobcats and foxes, the geese would prefer at the least to be rid of us and all of our intentions, kind or malign. But it is no longer so simple as that.
Somehow, the flock finds the only patch of open river in several thousand meandering acres. Here the channel narrows, fast water pushed into turbulence so ice cannot form. At splashdown, the speedboat wakes of the geese spread and clash and bounce off the banks, crossing, fanning out again. The flock taxies round, turning toward the bend where they glide into the safe and hidden water there.
All that remains are the silver trails they’ve left behind.
There is a way of testing precious metal by stroking the piece across a black stone. With experience you can tell silver from pot metal, red gold from green gold from yellow gold from brass, and the karat, fourteen or eighteen or twenty-four. Those without skill require acid which they drip upon the traces, thus in the quest of knowing destroying the thing they would know. Better the camera of the eye which leaves everything as we find it but that is not our way anymore.
In the distance sound of guns. Who lives, runs.
© 2008 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
