Scratch. Steve Himmer
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her. Both of you need it.”
“Alison? She’s my foreman. Forewoman. She works for me.”
“And that could work for you too, huh?” Gil laughs so hard at his own joke it hunches him over, coughing into his fist. He’s hoarse when he says, “That one’s a catch. Give her a call.”
Martin slides up the torn sleeve of his jacket to look at his wrist before remembering the rule he set for himself about not wearing a watch on Sunday. “I’d better get started if I’m going to hike.”
“Bet she’d go. Bring her son along, too. Be good for you. Good for all three of you.”
Martin’s face gets hot. First the lucky guess about his desire to move into one of the houses, and now Gil is urging him toward Alison, too. Either he’s easily read, or he told his neighbor more than he meant to and more than he remembers. Lately he’s been drinking more beer than his body is used to, and—at Gil’s insistence—more whiskey than he’s had in his whole life until now. The hangovers have been slowing him down in the morning and he suspects he’s putting on weight. But it’s part of the project, part of getting these houses raised: Gil’s a loud voice in town, he’s the only neighbor the houses will have, and apart from all of that, Martin genuinely likes the old hunter. He’s never known someone even remotely like Gil before.
“I think I’ll go alone today,” Martin says as if this will be an exception.
“No good to spend so much time by yourself, Marty.” Gil scratches his head through his hat then adds, “Be careful, though.”
“Of what?”
Gil pops the cap off his head, and plays with the band of plastic snaps at the back. “Well. End of summer, animals can get a bit strange.”
“Strange how?”
Gil’s face tightens and he says, “Ah, I’m just talking.” He slides the hat over his thin white hair and settles it back into place. “It’s nothing. Elmer Tully’s tellin’ folks he saw a mountain lion up at his farm, but, hell, you’ve met Elmer.”
Martin nods and recalls the night last week when, as he and Gil talked and drank their beers on the porch, a ropy old man—no older than Gil, but much worse for wear—wound his way down the road like string on a breeze. An unlabeled brown bottle dangled at the end of his arm. Gil called out, and waved, but the man moved by without looking up and as he passed Martin overheard a stream of incoherent muttering. Gil said it was only Elmer out for a walk.
“There are mountain lions around here?” Martin asks.
“Not for a long time. Elmer sees things when he’s drinkin’. Still. You be careful.” Gil lights another cigarette and slurps from the jug. Martin waits for more explanation, but at last the lingering dream in his legs makes him antsy and he says goodbye to Gil before crossing the road toward the woods.
Last night, Gil told him how important it was to keep hunting, to keep the forest in check. It struck Martin as paranoia or cabin fever, maybe a townie playing it up for a city slicker new to the woods, and he assumes this new warning is more of the same, the imagination of an old man who’s lived alone on the edge of the woods for too long.
Still, he can’t complain about his new neighbor. When Martin first came to inspect the site, he spotted the single house across the road looking as if it had been there forever, part of the landscape almost, and he anticipated a long, expensive struggle to get his development built. He expected the old-timer to hold out until the price became painful, and to recoup his loss by building additional houses on that side of the street. But before he’d had a chance to approach him, Martin was shocked in a town meeting as Gil spoke up in favor of the construction proposal and told the selectmen he’d be glad to have neighbors. That as long as there would still be room for him to go hunting—only sometimes, because he’s retired, he reminded the crowd, drawing laughs all over the room—then he wouldn’t mind the new houses. And once Gil had spoken, opposition dried up and the permits came through. The town could use some new revenue, it was argued—a bigger tax base was good for them all, so long as they didn’t get pressured for sidewalks and services that might have a place in the city but never out here.
Martin has imagined, already, what his buyers will say about the sound of Gil’s guns in the woods near their homes. For most of them this forest will be an overgrown city park—a safe space to send their children to play. They’ll hang salt licks in their yards and will watch from the windows as deer approach for a taste. They will shoot them with smartphones rather than rifles or bows. He hopes Gil has thought through what the number of houses, and the types of people most likely to buy them, could mean for town politics. That it won’t erupt into big problems later. Those sidewalks are practically paving themselves even now, and the streetlights sure to be demanded in time may as well sprout from the ground.
These changes are always a trade-off. If enough trees are cleared, your kind make hunting illegal because the shots come too close to your homes, but if too much of the forest comes down those of us living in it might as well have been shot anyway. It isn’t much of a choice.
It’s not that I’m against hunting. I survive on it myself. But there are no tools to keep my hands—or paws—clean, and I don’t have any walls to mount trophies on. There’s no one to tell me I can kill this but not that, to draw lines too fine to be seen. Eat or be eaten is a nice theory, but it would be easier to swallow if the balance were between tooth and claw rather than bullet and bone. Some of the shapes I’ve worn at one time or another were slain by your bullets while I was in them, and though it didn’t kill me, the experience isn’t one I recommend.
Still, there are advantages to wearing a body that takes you along when it dies. There are times I wish I could walk out of this forest and there have been times I tried, but I always end up where I began. There can’t be much I’ve missed in the world, there can’t be much that hasn’t passed through these woods at one time or another, but I get curious from time to time. And the more men like Martin clear this ground for their homes and the homes of others like them, the more often I find myself on the edge of the forest when I’m standing in places once at its heart. I’ve been through this before, the forest creeping back and forth at its edges. It’s the history of this place, that’s this land’s nature, but it happens so much faster these days and there’s no time to adjust. There’s no time to reshape our lives—and never mind our stories—before the next changes come. There may not be enough forest left for me to stay here much longer, whether I want to or not.
I’ve watched your power lines stretch down mountainsides and carve treeless gullies through forests. First single wires, then three and four side-by-side, then those skeleton pylons veined with black cables that hum and crackle so loudly I can’t hear the world where they run overhead. We learned to avoid them, to plan our routes—when we could—to cross under those wires as rarely as possible, then the air filled with a hum that doesn’t need wires and we hear it wherever we are, filling the forest the way only dreams did when your signals still needed to follow straight lines and avoidable wires. It’s hard not to wonder what’s at the other end of those wires, and it’s harder now not to ask where those signals come from. They’ve made the world seem so much bigger, even as the forest tightens around us.
AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST, MARTIN SPIES A LONG ORANGE body slipping through shaggy green grass. It’s the first fox of his life so he gasps, and the animal stops short at the sound and turns yellow eyes toward the man. Martin takes a step forward then waits a few seconds before taking another, but the fox—perhaps late heading home after a night spent in town, running riot in trash cans and amongst the buffets left beneath picnic tables—bolts for the scrub and Martin watches a white brush of tail vanish into the woods.
The rain has increased from soft mist into hard, stinging drops, but the change has been gradual and he only notices now that he’s still for a moment. He wants to follow the fox; it’s a strange urge, hardly conscious, the way a tongue needs to test a loose tooth, and before he thinks