Nov '02 [Home]

Hunting and Predation

Poetry Feature
(continued)

. . Antlers and Udders
Thom Ward


If not cows, then certainly deer,
like these eight, mantled in lights,
blinking yellow and red on the Eckert's
front yard, this counterfit team
once again trundled from the attic,
configured into shape by Fred, his kids,
so much pliable metal feigning the look
of swift couriers, paired up —
Dasher to Blitzen — and leading
the rusted shopping cart Fred

bummed from Kelly's Food Land, frayed
halyard looped around each buck, and set
in the hands of a burlap Santa
he stuffed together years back
for little Charlie's show-and-tell, eight
imitation deer blinking day and night,
the brainchild of Frederick T. Eckert
Heating & Plumbing, some weekend carpentry
to pay for Sarah's braces, the Hobie Cat.…
Surely, it was he, who, in the winter

of ninety-one, rebuilt the Pearsalls'
dilapidated shed, who let Matilda,
their beloved holstein, nuzzle the studs,
lick sheets of Tyvek, "our sweet
four-legged aunt," Dottie Pearsall often said,
and many agreed. Impertubable,
Matilda liked to give the Johnson
girls slow rides around the barn, out
to the alfalfa field, didn't mind
when they yanked her tail, her black

pendulous udder. She delivered
twice the milk of other cows,
each night slept in a private stall, spent
her waking hours grazing mustard,
timothy behind the mow, which was where
one February morning, Fred, his blowzy
partner Harris Knapp, came upon her, all
fudge and vanilla, starboard flank
smack against the earth, felled,
it seemed, by a massive heart attack.

They walked to the house, told Dottie,
and she, the intrepid Baptist, whose
favorite line:  "If you don't plant it,
it won't harvest" (a catchphrase on faith
and resurrection) was sown into her flannel
shawl, she asked them to give Matilda
a proper sepulcher and soon. Fred concurred.
He'd dug graves for a Burmese, a Beagle;
why not a Holstein? Yet, leaning into
their spades, straining to nick the loam

it wasn't long before they realized
this burial was a bitch — hardscrabble
and permafrost, the blades tore at less
and less, as new flakes spangled down,
Matilda, two paces away, stiffer
than a shot of bourbon. Palms
blistered, even under gloves, they continued
to shovel until they felt enough pit
had been dug, then loosed a couple
of nearby posts, wedged them

under the carcass, pushed and pried,
grunting in unison, with one
final shove toppled her over the edge.…
Now Fred could whistle tape
from a measure, but never bragged
about his vision — 20/400 at best —
and so here lay Matilda,
on her back in her grave, hooves
pointed to the heavens, each slim,
mottled leg extended far

above the earth, twelve hundred pounds
in a hole and not coming out.
Fred stood and puzzled, mid-afternoon,
the mercury dropping, irrevocable
rigor mortis. Harris tried to bend a leg
but flopped onto her frosted belly.
No doubt, Dottie would thunder
at the thought of Matilda half-interred,
and so Fred fetched a hacksaw,
grasped a pastern and without hesitation, cut

the rigid leg, frozen flesh and bone,
did the same to the other three, slicing each
a clean ten inches above the hock, arranged
the amputated pieces on her chest,
a makeshift cross, then the men
in a rhythm of scoop and pitch
returned the cold dirt, marked the grave
with a chunk of quartz-fat granite.—
Harris always said what happened next
startled him most, perhaps

out of respect to the widow, perhaps guilt
for such a hacking, whatever it was
it compelled Fred to reach
into his pocket, produce
a torn Gideon, open to the twenty-third
psalm and read aloud, repeating
the part about lying down in green pastures.
Closing his eyes, he waited a long
minute, mumbled Amen
and trudged back to the shed.

It hadn't been a year since Eckert's
impromptu bovine surgery, that Walt
Ramsey, his son Mitch, bundled orange,
brandishing twin Remingtons, following
a trail of fresh prints on the ridge
behind Pearsalls' farm, these men,
moving through graupeled snow,
caught a glimpse of Wild Schoolboy,
the town's infamous stag, eleven points
and a bloodshot eye, exaggerated

into legend for the April morning
he leapt through a picture window
in the teacher's lounge, raced by Nelson
Banowski, busy eating his lunch, who,
although corpulent, jumped over
chairs and up on the counter,
as the sleek, dun buck
galloped down the west hall, past
the art room, a few students
astonished from their charcoal and ink,

dashed through the back doors by the gym
left open for circulation, snapping
one of its antlers, later claimed
by Nancy Vanderbush and used in her prize-
winning multimedia collage.
Dozens of hunters have since tracked
Wild Schoolboy, never close enough
for a shot, at dusk sitting
on the hoods of their Fords,
tipping beers, spilling tales of the stag

who vanishes like dew. However,
on this November day, the sky
buckled chrome, decaf in their thermos,
Walt and Mitch, just a hedgerow south,
could see Schoolboy browsing
in a tangle of laurel and spruce
bordering the Pearsalls' winter wheat.
Hunched, they mover closer, taking short,
deliberate steps, their guns
carried low and perpendicular,

their breath small cumulus blasts.
Making their way to a swale
in the ridge, they dropped, prostrate,
watched the buck raise its head,
sniff the air and twitch its ears, step
into the undergrowth. Turns out
Justin Pearsall, Dottie's only son,
a janitor at Brigham High, who had
the arduous task of sweeping
the shards, the coarse fur spackled

with blood, was back of the shed,
stationed between saw horses, gliding
Swedish wax over cross-country skis,
looked up and saw Wild Schoolboy
disappear in the thicket, two
hunters scamper along the ridge,
fan out thirty yards from each other
then crouch in that same hedgerow's
underbrush, pop their safeties and wait.…
Justin knew, be it today or December,

the stag would have to retreat
through the copse, Jack McMillan's
electric Superfence, protecting acres
of rhododendrons, running east-west
on the far side. So it was that
Walt and Mitch, Remingtons cocked, listened
for the crunch of a twig,
as the flakes brushed their jackets,
and Justin, smoothing wax over new
fiberglass, happened to again

glance up and what he saw
made him rethink the whole concept
of evolution — six feet of buck,
eleven points and a bloodshot eye,
emerging from the thicket, a stone's pitch
below Walt, forelegs tucked under, moving
on its knees, shinning, without a sound,
across the field, both shoulders,
like greased pistons, pumping
back and forth to help propel, silently

pull its immense body, its head
turned sideways, eyeballing the elder
hunter's backside. Thus, the sudden
imbrication of man watching men
watching for a stag who was watching
them. It was then Justin wondered
who the hell might be watching him.
And when he looked back at the ridge
Wild Schoolboy had, indeed, vanished,
its ingenious body-drag over frozen

earth accomplished, unbeknownst
to Walt and Mitch, two orange splotches
among a scramble of shrubs, naked
wood, some wind and snow
falling on a patch of land
behind a ramshackle farm, a farm like
any other in Brigham-Smith,
where, given the right circumstance,
you too might see a Baptist
bury a cow, an old buck genuflect.