of animals she never glimpsed, they came at night circling the food, trailing away toward the pond or the woods. She remembered the fox inspecting a plate of stew she’d tossed out because she had no appetite that day, depressed as she was, sitting in the kitchen where a single white plate on the table seemed to shout her loneliness (why was supper, of all meals, so hard on some days to get through?).
Fox and Meal
she titled it, this animal that had swept away her self-pity, caught in swift strokes of charcoal, then tones of its deep red coat so brilliant against the white field, the strewn scraps of carrot and turnip and beef, dark gravy staining the snow. The fox sniffed cautiously each piece before it took it in its mouth, chewing with its head turned slightly sidewise, pausing to eye the crows pacing, waiting, planning a grab not far away, and later she’d included them, on wing or scrabbling on the ground, fun to watch anyway, their social antics and play. She’d seen a rabbit nibbling grain she’d sown there for birds until a big grey cat sprang out of a bare thicket and sent it exploding through the soft snow. She did the rabbit in fine pen lines, she had Dürer’s hare in mind, that exquisite detail and compression. And the frozen carcass of the beaver, its big teeth, the texture of its fur, the famous flat tail. The coyote had shocked her, she thought it a dog first, how it had regarded her, poised above a tomato-red lump of pasta, its long skinny legs set, its ears back, eyes eerie with intelligence, it knew exactly what little it had to fear from her. Would it have run from a man, from Red Murdock? Surely the coyotes were behind the wild yipping she’d heard late one afternoon, discovering the next morning at the edge of the pond the hind leg of a deer, intact but where it had been ripped from the body, bled out, pink stains in the light snow, bones bit through, crushed, tendons torn, and further out on the snow-covered ice where they had chased the deer, where its hooves would have slipped from under it in its struggle, a large dark patch of something she could not make out, bloodied remains maybe. By lunchtime the leg was gone.
She had material to explore and she bore into it with scarcely a break but for domestic chores and walks to the shore and up into the woods as far as she could venture. Tears came to her eyes at odd times, she couldn’t say just why. Some vague sadness kept welling up. Not for losing Chet, that was the end of a long trajectory from what they had years ago—a loss she could feel sometimes in a silent winter forest. No other man had she been close to like that, and she might never again. That only happened when you were young. Didn’t it? Chet believed it could come again, and it had, for him. How that gnawed at her, that now she might be kept from that kind of love with another man, that her capacity for passion might be fading.
And yes, she missed friends, certainly, women, men, their company and their mutual points of reference, shared allusions, assumptions, a warm embrace, nearness, the feel of someone she enjoyed, a sometime lover. She hoped this sadness was not rooted in fear, fear that she couldn’t hold out, that the choices she’d made were more eccentric than she could accommodate. Still, she had survived her baptismal, she was stronger. After all, back home she’d lived in a terrarium really, a pampered, sheltered city that could smother ambitions that elsewhere might have caught fire. You couldn’t always tell ahead of time, could you? Everything here had been a test, and sometimes, yes, it made her feel both solitary and exposed, her aloneness like a feeble beacon above the house—stay away. Those first weeks, doubt, like ice, had threatened her footing.
And yet she had achieved a kind of comfort. Comfort in simply not having to engage with another person, not having to explain herself, her actions, her silence, defend anything she said or did, not having to
Fox and Meal
she titled it, this animal that had swept away her self-pity, caught in swift strokes of charcoal, then tones of its deep red coat so brilliant against the white field, the strewn scraps of carrot and turnip and beef, dark gravy staining the snow. The fox sniffed cautiously each piece before it took it in its mouth, chewing with its head turned slightly sidewise, pausing to eye the crows pacing, waiting, planning a grab not far away, and later she’d included them, on wing or scrabbling on the ground, fun to watch anyway, their social antics and play. She’d seen a rabbit nibbling grain she’d sown there for birds until a big grey cat sprang out of a bare thicket and sent it exploding through the soft snow. She did the rabbit in fine pen lines, she had Dürer’s hare in mind, that exquisite detail and compression. And the frozen carcass of the beaver, its big teeth, the texture of its fur, the famous flat tail. The coyote had shocked her, she thought it a dog first, how it had regarded her, poised above a tomato-red lump of pasta, its long skinny legs set, its ears back, eyes eerie with intelligence, it knew exactly what little it had to fear from her. Would it have run from a man, from Red Murdock? Surely the coyotes were behind the wild yipping she’d heard late one afternoon, discovering the next morning at the edge of the pond the hind leg of a deer, intact but where it had been ripped from the body, bled out, pink stains in the light snow, bones bit through, crushed, tendons torn, and further out on the snow-covered ice where they had chased the deer, where its hooves would have slipped from under it in its struggle, a large dark patch of something she could not make out, bloodied remains maybe. By lunchtime the leg was gone.
She had material to explore and she bore into it with scarcely a break but for domestic chores and walks to the shore and up into the woods as far as she could venture. Tears came to her eyes at odd times, she couldn’t say just why. Some vague sadness kept welling up. Not for losing Chet, that was the end of a long trajectory from what they had years ago—a loss she could feel sometimes in a silent winter forest. No other man had she been close to like that, and she might never again. That only happened when you were young. Didn’t it? Chet believed it could come again, and it had, for him. How that gnawed at her, that now she might be kept from that kind of love with another man, that her capacity for passion might be fading.
And yes, she missed friends, certainly, women, men, their company and their mutual points of reference, shared allusions, assumptions, a warm embrace, nearness, the feel of someone she enjoyed, a sometime lover. She hoped this sadness was not rooted in fear, fear that she couldn’t hold out, that the choices she’d made were more eccentric than she could accommodate. Still, she had survived her baptismal, she was stronger. After all, back home she’d lived in a terrarium really, a pampered, sheltered city that could smother ambitions that elsewhere might have caught fire. You couldn’t always tell ahead of time, could you? Everything here had been a test, and sometimes, yes, it made her feel both solitary and exposed, her aloneness like a feeble beacon above the house—stay away. Those first weeks, doubt, like ice, had threatened her footing.
And yet she had achieved a kind of comfort. Comfort in simply not having to engage with another person, not having to explain herself, her actions, her silence, defend anything she said or did, not having to
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