from the tyranny of stratigraphy
The morning was cool and a little windy. A small bird pressed against that wind with the subtle force of both of its wings. It hung in the air, outside of their car, just adjacent to Richard’s window. It, the bird, leaned slightly forward and held against the northward blow with a soft southward rhythm. It, the bird, brought to zero the force of gravity with the opposing force of the wind beneath the curve of its hunched-forward wings and shoulders. He, Richard, was not yet an old man, but was a well-seasoned man.
He was clean shaven, well mannered and, he thought with some pride, august. The sort of mildly successful man from which advice was often sought by the young men of the neighborhood and his extended family.
Richard watched the bird with reddened cheeks that looked as if he had just been slapped. Tiny tears welled in the corners of his eyes. He wiped these away at small intervals with his arm rising and then lowering with the consistency of a windshield wiper adjusted to the slowest possible swipe, and beyond the notice of his wife. He mumbled something about the smallness of the bird, which his wife did not quite understand. She did not ask for clarification. She looked at him only briefly and then at the bird and then at her fists which rested like white stones in her lap against a pattern of wrinkled magnolias in pale blue and yellow.
The wind shifted to westward. The bird countered exactly. It maintained its place. Equilibrium. The bird was not much of a thing, with a white body and spattered gray wings and a black head and red rings at the eyes. Beside it was another type of bird, even smaller and whiter. The black of its head was only a narrow stripe above the eyes. There were twenty-seven of them, intermingled, the two types of birds, in a long even row. They were each ten feet apart and all were suspended four feet above a trough of sluggish moving water. Occasionally, one lowered a wing and slid with that wing leading downward, with some minor twisting and thrusting, to the surface of the water. It then rose with a tiny silver minnow in its bill. Then the bird found its place in line again. Another bird dove.
“Sometimes I feel as small as that little bird,” said Richard, “I can’t believe it is May. Four or six times a year, I would take her out of school or summer camp or wherever and we’d drive down and just look and talk. She knew the names of all the birds, you know. The terns are the smaller ones. Those are good memories. It makes me a little optimistic.”
“Lets concentrate on things one step at a time, Richard.”
“Is it such a crime to be a little optimistic. Even a little? Well, I suppose you would like to know how it went then.”
She was silent. She lifted one foot and placed it back. She adjusted her fists in her lap.
“It was hard, very hard. I wish you could have been there. Not because it would have hurt you; but because, I think you’ll be missing something now anytime you try to understand her. It will always be a big part of her.”
“How so?”
“You had to have been there. I can’t explain exactly, but I think it will always be a part of her character. Part of the foundation of what she ultimately becomes.”
She then spoke to him in a very quiet tone that became louder because she sensed, through knowing him as well as she did, that he was not listening. His mind remained in that green room. That room had light-green walls and green vinyl and steel chairs that were stained with a black resin of dirt and oil or sweat or something that held the dirt around the edges where the seams were. He remembered scratching out some of the resin with his thumb-nail while they waited. The resin was still there beneath his nail.
There was the one cheap desk with the tidy woman behind it beneath the big sterile white-faced clock. He remembered looking outside through the windows with the bars. The world was entirely black and the glass reflected back the green walls and the girls face in the middle of the room with the girl swinging her arms first; and then the girl was held back by the arms of the three grown men. The muscular arms, the white uniforms and the girls face. The way the face was so large, it almost filled the room. And not with sound, but with a kind of fury that wasn’t part of the girl but was an animal fury that was there for the girl.
“For the fourth time Richard, tell me what happened.”
“It wasn’t right to have surprised her. We should have done it differently. This will be in her forever. To just leave her there so late at night.”
“How can you say that.”
“You weren’t there.”
They were on a an old dirt road with water on either side. The road ran out into the Great Salt Lake from the east. Before them, in the distance were the Promontory Mountains. These were low dry mountains which made a peninsula into the lake. In the rear view mirror another range of mountains, the Wellsville, hovered tall over the tired little town of Ogden, where they’d left the girl. Wisps of white still held to the uppermost ridges of the Wellsville. To the woman, those mountains and that town seemed far behind. The morning sun was low to the southeast. The last faint stripe of the salmon hue of the sunrise had dissipated in the lower gaps of the Wellsville. Above them the sky was an enameled cloudless blue. The long ranges out across the desert beyond the lake were also blue, a purplish blue; and were like shadows: just slightly darker than the sky.
He felt tired and worn. He’d arrived with the girl at eleven and didn’t leave until nearly one. He’d lain awake in the motel for most of the night. He insisted that they come out here, on the refuge road, before going home.
She agreed but was unhappy when they left the motel as early as they did.
“It was unpleasant.” He said this softly and not looking at her. He saw the room again and the thin woman with the long sleeves and short skirt and the way she handed him the pen while the girl writhed and screamed. Then he signed his name to all of the forms. It seemed like there were a hundred forms.
The girl screaming “NO” with her head seeming so large and her angular frailty thrashing against those big arms and white uniforms. He signed his name to the forms and she wasn’t there and that would always be a part of him and the girl also.
The dirt road, atop an earthen dike, followed the river into the refuge and wound through and encircled a large expanse of water within it. From this road, the low lines of other dikes were green and amber with bulrush, sedge, reeds and cattails. Wide salty flats lay beneath a lavender wheat-like grass. There were shallow pools which would dry to barren clay later in the year. There were long troughs which drain the fresh-water to the lake and sustain the flow of the river. There were open expanses of bluer water.
Further along, the ruts of the road were deeper, closely spaced and very jarring and she leaned with all of her weight pressed on one shoulder against the door and one hand on the dashboard. Along the sides of the road, the dikes and small long islands separated rectangular patches of shallow water. The water was a rich blue with the reflection of the sky and was flecked with gray chinks of wood and blades of grass from the previous year. Here and there, the road was submerged and the car passed through high fantails of spray. She winced as the car slid a little from side to side and the water rushed up beside her and out to the sunshine. Discrepant lengths of rusted barbwire fence followed the road along half-drowned wooden and rusted-iron posts.
“Look, yellow-headed blackbirds,” he said. “Related more to the oriole really.”
She nodded at this. Looking at the birds first and then at him with an expression of slight concern. The blackbirds sat in tiers on the fence-wire in groups of one hundred or more. They were vibrant with color and in motion. He drove very slowly up to them. Short lived squabbles and squawks punctuated a dulcet hum. The birds lifted en masse from the wire fencing. The car passed and the birds returned.
“We had to do something. She is sixteen. If we put it off any more, she will miss college and then she will have missed everything. We both know that. We both agree.”
“I know that we’ve agreed. I just think that the way it was done was unsatisfactory and now I can’t explain it to you exactly.”
“It was what was recommended.”
“I understand.”
There was a long pause in their conversation.
“It had to be. We couldn’t go on disbelieving. There are grades and college to think of. She’d become almost entirely wild. The drugs, alcohol, the friends.”
“I understand.”
“I’m glad that you do.”
Long-legged birds with stout bodies and long bills dotted the pools.
“The white, black and cinnabar are avocets. The red-legged ones are stilts. The iridescent indigo and brown and green are ibis.”
Each was prim and puritan, wading and feeding from the water and the muck at its feet. The birds glanced at the passing car indifferently; and returned to methodically stabbing or swishing their long black bills beneath their own reflections. The woman held herself as straight as she could. She felt the bouncing of the car in her back. She desperately wanted out, wanted him to stop the car; but she said nothing.
“That is a black-crowned night heron”, he said. He pointed in front of them on her side of the car. She nodded, again with a small look of concern.
The bird was crimson-eyed, majestic and fat. It sat on a small mound. It trundled, like a duck, slowly off and into brush. The wide river curved in and out beside them for much of the length of the road. The river was choppy with small white crescents along the ridges of small waves. There
was a high spring flow in the river and a breeze was blowing hard and across it.
Two large white birds were huddled on the water. They bobbed across the waves with heads down and overlong orange bills tucked above the folds of wings.
“Pelicans.”
“I recognize the pelicans.”
“A cormorant.”
“Oh.”
She followed his pointed finger to a silhouette: a large dark broken umbrella of a bird, which then separated from an emergent twisted claw of dead wood and began a long splashing run across the waves, up and down into the oscillating, winking reflected sun and took low flight. Along the road, opposite the river, another series of the gulls and terns, were diving in a long line. Further from the road were more of the avocet. Weightless shifts of down lifted and fell from their bellies and flanks. They sat perched on clusters of twigs and reed – above diverging serrated dark lines of wavelets on the sky blue surface of a pool.
“Was it clean?”
“What?”
“Was the hospital clean.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would have noticed entirely. It was not overtly messy or dirty if that’s what you mean.”
“I would have noticed.”
“Yes.”
Another pause. The sight of the girl to him. Being led away. No, it was carried away. Her arms were held by one of the men and each of her legs by the others. She was still screaming. The thin woman was there and she looked across her desk a little strangely after the girl had been taken away. It was as if the process was routine for her but she knew that it wasn’t routine for Richard and she never knew quite what was the right thing to say. She said nothing and he said nothing and looked at the clock and the dark windows and nodded. He took a copy of the form with the insurance information and left through the door he and the girl had used when they came.
“Did you ask about the food?”
“No, I suppose I didn’t”
They came to three small bridges. Two of the tiny terns were spinning and reeling and diving. The road was better now. She leaned back in her seat and was gently, silently crying. Her fist was up against her cheek. One of her knuckles was pressing to her teeth. The road followed a long trough of moving water on one side and a mottled aggregate of pools and clutches of bulrush and reed on the other. A stiff wedge, a dozen of the ibis, slid overhead. Lengths of wet, dripping reed hung from three scythe-like ibis bills.
“Nesting,” he said. She was silent.
The style of the ibis flight was ungainly. It appeared primitive, primordial. The water here was nearly free of birds. A cattail bobbed beneath the little weight of a red-wing blackbird.
“Those are grebes.”
A grebe with crimson eyes and a black tuft atop its long lissome light-gray neck moved with the current and suddenly slipped below the surface. Ellen watched carefully and could not find the place where it emerged. A second grebe appeared from a cluster of bulrush stalks. Two tiny gray chicks were riding on its back at the shoulders and a third was following close behind. The mother grebe looked at Ellen and passed swiftly back into the bulrush. The tawny hairs of the back of a swimming muskrat were just visible beneath the surface of the water. The road turned and a startle of the yellow-heads rose from a patch of scrub. They formed a hovering cloud and returned after the car had passed. Some of the heads were orange, almost red.
“Did she say anything, did she want to say anything to me, pass anything along, anything of substance.”
“Only ‘No’, she screamed ‘No’ over and over again. It was a complete surprise, a thorough abduction. She thought we were going there to look, to look and think about things. She didn’t think she could be admitted so late in the evening.”
“You are all right?”
“I suppose I am. I haven’t slept. Also, I wanted to talk a little last night, I think, but you were already sleeping.”
“She wasn’t living at home.”
“Herons.”
The road curved around the largest expanse of open water. The wispy necks of great-blue heron rose vertically, eerily, like snakes from the pond. They were evenly spaced like strange chess pieces. Portly Canadian geese stood in the road in groups of two and three and eventually moved to the side. One returned to the center of the road and stared as another gathered and led four yellow-green chicks away. A great-blue heron paraded along the pool’s margin. Richard slowed and then stopped the car to watch it. It stood stiff and straight with its head tipped fully to one side and one great yellow eye scanned below it. Its head dropped swiftly, too swiftly to see, and rose more slowly. Its dagger bill was empty. The long neck dropped to horizontal and folded tightly and it walked in deliberate cautious steps a few feet along the edge of the pool. It stopped and lifted its head and neck, straight and thin. The head turned to the side again and the eye walked carefully in and out of the grass and water beneath it. The head dove and emerged with a pale fleshy fish. A carp. Skewered through. The heron looked directly at Richard warily and turned and flew. He saw only its narrow back and broad wings with its long thin legs streaming flat behind it and the tail of the fish hanging below it. The car passed two other herons in shallow water. One stepped in a wide semicircle around the other with its wings held awkwardly, though gracefully, above the water.
“Must be some sort of mating dance.”
“Oh God, Richard”, she said this softly and without passion, looking at him with him looking at the birds.
The second heron similarly rose its wings and walking, countered the circle. Suddenly the first leapt into the air and stabbed viciously at the second and soared toward the center of the pond.
“Magnificent, did you see that? Magnificent.”
“When can we see her again.”
“They’ve asked for kind of a long wait, I think. It all depends on the insurance of course. She could be out in thirty days, twenty-eight actually. But, if she stays, and they’ve implied something that I’m not really comfortable with, if she stays for more than thirty days we shouldn’t see her for a couple of months. They think she’ll progress better without us.”
“Could the friends visit her in that period.”
”No, I don’t think so. I didn’t ask. I presume it should be family only for the entire duration.”
“What is it that you’re uncomfortable with? The two months?”
“No, they’ve implied. I suppose that it was an implication. That if her condition were more serious, her stay could be longer. The insurance company would cover it.”
“What do you mean that they’ve implied.”
“Well they’ve said that if she had threatened herself or us or anyone, it could be managed.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not comfortable with it.”
“I don’t know”
“Well what have they asked of us.”
”Nothing, it was strange, almost a wink and smile sort of thing. I’ve the impression that they will be working with her to accomplish some sort of admission on her part that makes the insurance applicable. It makes me uncomfortable. You know. To have her say something that they can submit to the insurance company to assure a longer stay. The admitting nurse or whatever she was mentioned it with some sense of disdain for the insurance company. The whole thing wrung a little sordid. I suppose. I’m a little concerned about the recording of it. Could it impact her acceptance to college or her working in the future. That sort of thing. I’m concerned.”
“You’ve said that. What should we do?”
He was silent.
“I just can’t believe what we’ve done. I just can’t believe it. We keep her there. At great expense, I might add. Expense to the insurance company. Which will certainly come back to us, somehow, I am quite certain. And what do we have to show for it. More antagonism than before. More hostility. The courses which she is taking in that place. That poor excuse for a school. My God. I can’t believe she’ll ever achieve much in college. I’m beginning to question if she is right for college. Two and a half months without seeing her. Two and a half months of something they call therapy. And where are we? They’ve all decided that we should consider what she wants. What life she wants. She’s sixteen years old. How could she possibly know? They say we’re spending too much time focusing on her. We’re overly involved in her. Richard, I’m just sick over this. Her grandfather was a great man. And, you. Well, you are a substantial man. What will ever come of her. I’ve given my life to this girl and what will I have to show for it?”
It was extremely hot. The sun was straight up above them. Perhaps one hundred and five or ten. Though it wasn’t humid. The shallow pools along the beginnings of the road were dry then and vacant except for the most meager patches of dry grass which was short and brown and laid flat in circular patches. The river ran blue beside them, a nice refreshing blue. The little waves of spring were gone, as were the wind and the coolness of the morning. The yellow-heads were still there but they were fewer and quieter. They were a dull and murky yellow. A cascade of the river flowed over an iron dike beneath the second of three bridges. The water on the river side of the iron dike was two feet above the water on the lake side. Large carp, enormous carp, were trapped on the lake side of the bridge and they threw themselves again and again against the steel dike.
Richard stopped the car on the bridge and got out to look at the fish. The bridge shook beneath him, thrumph, thrumph, thrumph. Occasionally one fish succeeded and flipped over the top of the dike and into the river. Richard walked further away from the car, crossing the bridge and he continued a short distance down the road on the other side of the bridge. He looked back to the shore of the river where it met the bridge. Twelve pelicans and one cormorant sat on a small island in the river. They were huddled together as if to keep warm. One pelican stood and stretched its bill out above the others and pulled it slowly back and preened beneath a wing.
Two ravens sat completely without movement, atop a leafless cottonwood tree on the bank above the pelicans. He walked back to the car.
“Get in Richard. Get in now. And go now and lets get this over with and get home. I know that for some reason this is important to you. But, it is awfully hot and we’ve already had a difficult day.”
The car rolled slowly out along the gravel and dirt of the road and the soft crackling sound of the tires on the dirt filled the vacancy left when she sat back and was silent. The air out along the road and into the lake was dense and textured. Incredible black clouds of brine flies and midges rose in columns above the road like the smoke of wet leaves burning. Above the water, a golden haze spread in long amorphous streaks and clouds with the quiet play of light in pollen. A ghost of a harrier, the marsh hawk, flew low above reeds beyond a veil of the pollen.
“Look,” he said, “the heron are skittish. They are each gone long before I reach them.”
“Of course,” she said, “the heron are skittish.”
The herons launched out above the water as they first heard the low roll of the car and they flew with their heads and necks pulled tightly back. The open water was a thick stew of wood and leaf stubble and brown and green algae. The expanse of open water was very pretty: a wide plane of variegated tourmaline, emerald and amber. A blue-gray dead snag of a tree jutted up at both ends from the multi-hued surface. A heron posed entirely still with slender body and neck bent in a sinuous serpentine elegant curve appearing as if composed of the same dry wood. At the center of the open water the algae was less and the water was blue.
“Look again,” he said. “Out in the middle, there. There is a cluster of pelicans. Five hundred I would guess. Look, they are coming and going in little groups.”
Then most of the pelicans lifted above the lake and they filled the sky above the car. Richard stopped and opened his door and leaned out and looked up at them. Their wings seemed very wide and straight and the ends of their wings were black. In the distance there was a long strand of the pelicans flying toward them. The line was probably a half mile long. A russet kit fox, with ears longer than the height of its body, appeared on the road and scuttled down a bank and into the brush. She saw it but did not mention it to him. A half dozen mosquitoes came into the car through his open door and she sat stiffly as if not perturbed but swatted at them occasionally with a large glossy brochure from the hospital, which she had folded in half and rolled into a thin slick tube. He lowered himself back into the car and now he drove with his window open.
“I think she’s met other friends who aren’t of the best character at the hospital. I’m not sure but I have that impression from the way she and a couple of the other children were looking at each other,” she said, looking directly and seriously at him. He didn’t respond or look at her.
They both heard a rushing sound, gradually increasing, and moments later they saw that it was torrents of water rushing through a culvert beneath the road on a long section of dike with open water on both sides. Water confined in the marsh was being spent into the lake. Small gatherings of white snowy egrets, with yellow legs and tousles of head feathers which
hung like bangs down across their yellow eyes, stood on the embankment of the road beside the culvert. They were very bright in the sun and Richard retrieved a pair of sunglasses from a jacket pocket in the back seat of the car and put them on to look at the egrets. One swept up and out over the water and dove at something churning in the turbulent rush of flow to the lake. It returned back to its place. The exact place that it had flown out from. Another rose, dove, returned; another. As the car approached, they scattered. As the car passed, they returned. Richard noticed that they each returned to the same position in the line that they held before they scattered.
“Look,” Richard said, stopping the car, “skunks.” A family of skunks wandered into the road.
“Oh wonderful, skunks,” she said.
The skunks moved like a snake across the road just in front of the car. The mother scuttled out first. She was fat and her belly was low and rubbed against the surface of the road. Ten children followed. Richard found it difficult to count them, they were so similar; each a tiny clean cloud of fur. They moved differentially and became a long line. Each time the mother stopped in her progression across the road, the babies caught up to her and swarmed beneath her and on top of her: an ebullient ball of black and white. Then the mother moved forward again and the line stretched out behind her.
“This is surprising,” Richard said. “This is really surprising.” He showed her the first little smile of the day. Even when he saw the girl for the first time in over two months, he hadn’t smiled. “I am surprised; baby skunks are adorable,” he said.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable seeing her so infrequently. She’s been there for almost six months and we’ve only seen her, what, four times,” she said.
“It’s what they recommend.”
“It’s ridiculous. They are all still sticking with this warped logic. That we’ve pressured her too much. That she needs to find the right life for herself. It’s ridiculous. I’m her mother and her future is our responsibility. “
Bright towering clouds rose up from the road in front of them and extended out across all of the lake. The breeze was very stiff and cool, almost cold. The sun was low in the sky to the south; the light was crisp; and the air was very sweet. All of the grasses were brown and black and amber.
“Well you said it was clean. That should make you happy.”
“I can’t talk about it any more.”
“Fine, lets not.”
“Fine.”
“This is the first time we have had an chance to see the parents of some of the other children,” she said.
He sat stiffly because he was driving very fast. She leaned to the side and held solidly to the dashboard again.
She penetrated a long pause of his driving with her searching the landscape for nothing in particular, “Well what do you think about what they are saying.”
“I don’t know. I thought you couldn’t talk about it.”
“They’re saying that if she wants to not go to college we shouldn’t pressure her.”
“I don’t know.”
“We shouldn’t pressure her. That is ridiculous. I’m not going to have a slack-about for a daughter. I’m just not.”
She looked at Richard and he did not look back at her. He simply drove rapidly and looked out the window with an expression of grave disappointment. The only birds that he could see were in a cluster of thousands, at the furthest point from land, at the center of the wide expanse of water. Richard thought that they must be ducks but it was
hard for him to tell because they were, at all times, too far away from the shore. The water was choppy and the surface algae was gone.
“Richard, we should discuss this.”
“Fine, what would you like me to say.”
“Say how you feel.”
“I think it should be the girls decision. About college. About everything. It is her life. We should be happy if she finishes high school. She said that she wants to see the world. She wants to experience the world and she doesn’t think that she can find that in college. We’re spending a lot of the insurance company’s money and I’m not sure that there is anything really wrong with her. I’m not sure that it isn’t our expectations that are the problem. She doesn’t feel that she can get the experience that she is looking for from a college classroom. I’m not sure. I suppose that I feel unsure. Couldn’t she do what she is looking to do and go into college sometime when she’s a little older and feels better about it?”
“Experience the world,” she said in a loud solid monotonous way. “What does that even mean. Experience the world?”
“I’m not sure,” he said overly softly to counter her loudness. “I suppose that I’m not sure.”
As they rounded the last corner of the road, Richard saw a group of seven ducks near the shore. He slowed and realized that they were a hard green plastic. He noticed the shimmer of three shotgun barrels extending vertically above splayed elbows and knees in desert camouflage on the slender bank below the road. Five birds flew at great elevation and distance from the group; and two men stood. Plumph, Plumph. The birds continued unaffected. A long narrow and flat green boat, with a large fan mounted on the back, rounded a corner and inspected the plastic ducks. It sat extremely low in the water beneath four heavy men.
“Those men should do some walking,” Richard thought.
“What about grandchildren,” she said, now with a low intense quiet.
He didn’t answer.
A gray mist covered the floor of all of the valley beneath the white-capped mountain ranges. The mountains seemed to be suspended, floating high above. They appeared more massive and somehow closer in. The sky was white and gray like dishwater. The road was empty, dry and lonely.
“Desolation, Richard. This is utter desolation.” She said this while leaning forward and pressing her hands against the hot air streaming from the heating vents of the car. Richard’s window was open to the December air.
A bald eagle was very high above them and slowly soaring beyond the fragment of the sky that Richard could see with his head turned, looking up and beside the car. The road was hard and frozen, as was the water in the ponds and troughs. There was some water left unfrozen at the center of the large expanse. Richard could see high waves and white caps in the strong cold wind. Grasses and cattails and reeds were clothed in a brittle filigree of white. The tattered yellow wing of a butterfly and three small white feathers were frozen at the base of a stand of dry and nearly lifeless bulrush.
“This new best friend is worse than the last.”
“You expected her to meet the ideal in a psychiatric hospital.”
“You’re right. There is no arguing. I just don’t see what step to take next.
Perhaps it is her nature.”
“The insurance people have made it clear. She should be released within the next couple of weeks. We need to find a situation which will work for her.”
“This whole thing. I don’t know. I still don’t see the ambition and life decisions that would make her normal. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“It was your idea. I remember it as being your idea.”
“We agreed.”
“Yes, we agreed.”
“Well what do we do with her now?”
“Lord, look at that.”
Richard slowly followed a bend in the road where the brown road lay between two broad open sheets of white ice. Spread out before them on Richard’s side of the car were ten-thousand swans.
“Swans,” he said. “There were once sixty-thousand counted here. They are whistler and perhaps some trumpeter swans. I like to think there are a few of the trumpeter. They are very rare; and are larger and more graceful.”
He paused and then began to speak to her. He paused again and looked at his hands on the steering wheel. His head turned to face her. “Do you know what Mr. Audubon said about the trumpeter swan?”
“No I don’t.”
His face was intent with the act of trying to remember.
“Imagine,” he said, “‘Imagine a flock of fifty swans thus sporting before you. I have more than once seen them, and you will feel, as I have felt, happier and freer of care than I can describe, … ‘ That is what he said. I think or something very close to that.”
“Free of care. That is difficult to imagine.”
“I suppose it is.”
He stopped the car and they sat in the cold car beside the ten-thousand swans for a long time.
The swans were gray and white and were spread out evenly across the ice like bed linen. Some lay in round solitary humps with their long necks wrapped tightly against their bodies. Others stood with their black rubbery feet spread on the ice. They stood on one foot for half an hour. Then they stood on the other. When the wind blew hard they placed their heads beneath a wing.
After sitting for a long time without speaking, the woman looked at Richard several times and he only looked at the swans.
“Perhaps it’s only her nature. Perhaps there’s nothing to be done.”
“I suppose it is her nature.”
She left the car and walked down the short embankment to the margin of the ice and very close to the nearest swans. Some were right up against the bank only a few feet away from her and didn’t seem to care that she was so close. She felt as if she could simply walk out on the ice and pet one of the swans. She began to walk along the edge of the pond, on the uneven frozen ground. She stumbled and slightly fell. As she stood up, erect, using her hand on the cold ground to right herself, there was a mild commotion first on the bank just ahead of her and then on the ice. It was nearly one hundred feet away when Richard first saw it. The coyote ran across the ice. It ran through the swans and the swans hardly seemed to notice it. Richard wondered that the swans must possess a natural sense of probability. They
moved gently out of its way. It ran well and straight in places. In others, all legs were splayed; and it moved very slowly. It became smaller and smaller and disappeared into the massive sheet of swans. When the coyote faded into only a mild blur, the woman returned her attention to the place on the ice, on the margin of the ice, where she’d surprised it. A solitary swan lay, with its long neck stretched straight and not curved, out across the ice. The neck was badly tom and bleeding. The blood was dark and a mist was rising from it and mingling with the mist that ran out in all directions above the ice and above the swans. The ice slowly became red in a small circle and pink in a larger circle around the smaller. The other swans stood and sat about the fallen bird as if nothing has happened.
As they drove east and toward home, the gray sky yielded a glimpse of a soft roseate hue in the west above the Promontory Mountains. Soon all of the sky and then the river and all of the pools and then the mountains and the road and grasses took on this color of faint red roses. They bumped slowly along the old road. She watched the sky and then Richard.
She said softly, almost to herself, “Perhaps it is just her nature,” many times.
“I suppose it is,” Richard consistently responded.
Richard extended his hand and took hers. Then he said with some finality, “We should enjoy her, regardless of your concerns, while we can. Life does not go on forever.”