A Fortress of Hope and Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers.

–Emily Dickinson

I do not where this is, and my memories of other places are fading quickly.  I shall endeavor to relate what happened, and how I came to be here.  I shall start at the beginning, then, and race my memory to the end.

I always wanted to be a deer.  They are nature’s ballet dancers, graceful and, I like to imagine, quietly grateful.  It is a sense of delicacy and simplicity for which I always wished, and knew that I would never have.  It is an unabated temps lié sur les pointes, and it was with affectionate envy I searched for them on a Sunday afternoon.

It was deer hunting season, and I was wearing a blaze orange stocking cap and a worn, red and black flannel.  Although we’d had no requests for hunting upon the family trust–a parcel of land that includes some 75 acres of woodland and a sizable pond–it is always wise to wear something bright and..well…considerably different from the attire of your average deer.  The land borders a state park, and over-eager, rifle-toting, beer-guzzling carnivores have been known to stumble from public land upon private land marked only by a string of numbers in an assessor’s office.

The pathways intersected at odd angles in strange places; game trails forked in and out.  I was romantic, drunk on nature, and the woods smelled like creation, like genesis, like the thin edge of knowledge.  Although it’s silly, childish, maybe even a little bit stupid, I wasn’t walking.  I alternated between jogging, skipping, and galloping.  And although I hesitate to say it, I even gathered some leaves together, laid down, and rolled through them.  I only know the planet is spinning when I’m rolling down a hill, and sometimes, without the crinkling of leaves, I forget I’m popping and snapping inside.

It’s glacier country, hilly and rocky, soil gathered and scattered by sheets of ice thousands of years old.  Glaciers retreat, with Wisconsin winter the rearguard.  The hills are short and steep, bordered by brush that hasn’t seen a fire in decades.  It’s oak savanna–lightly-forested grasslands dominated by fire-resistant oaks.  The Celts believed that the oak was the tree of doors, a place where a portal could be erected that would connect two separate worlds.  They were right.

Wha-cheer, wha-cheer, weep weep weep weep!  A male northern cardinal was a flash of red on a low bough, it’s head cocked back, belting out a song.  It stopped, and regarded me curiously.  Wha-cheer, wha-cheer, weep weep weep weep!  It hopped to a new bough, away from me.  Having turned and put its eye back upon me, he once again exhorted me, Wha-cheer, wha-cheer, weep weep weep weep!  I followed it through the woods, pushing through low branches, snagging on every raspberry thicket.

The cardinal was losing me in the thick flora, so when a particularly tough patch of brambles stole my hat from my head, I resolved to leave it behind.  Blaze orange, I knew that I wouldn’t miss it on my way back.  I crested a steep hill, one with little vegetation on its rocky slope.  At its peak I had a perfect vantage point of the surrounding terrain.  The maze of vegetation wove in-and-out, but there was a tiny splash of black-throated red directly in front of me, staring right at me.  I stepped forward.  The ground gave way beneath my feet on the reverse slope, the earth pitched my feet behind me, and I fell face-first into a tree.  The world fled.

I awoke some time later to a headache and a song; wha-cheer, wha-cheer, weep weep weep weep!  I was at the bottom of the hill, now, curled around a tree, and covered in a mess of brownish mud.  Directly above me, not more than just a few feet, was the northern cardinal.  It still regarded me curiously.  Looking around, I nearly gasped.  A doe, a white-tailed deer, grazing.  Close enough to touch.  I watched her silently, keeping perfectly still.  Brownish-gray, she was preparing for a long, harsh winter, a season she desperately feared and wanted to see.  Her eyes scared me; what did she know?

Standing meticulously slowly, I made sure to make no quick movements or sharp sounds.  My motions were as precise as the moment.  On my feet, I stayed crouched over, practically on all fours, and I studied the deer.  She considered me, hunched over, covered in mud, and I realized that I looked positively deer-like.  She was small–maybe a hundred pounds.  I’ve always wanted to pet a live deer, and now that the opportunity presented itself, I wanted to make certain that it did not go awry.  I reached out a hand.  Slowly, so slowly, the deer tensed, almost there, grasping now, and…

Bang!  Something punched me in the side of my torso, fingers tearing through sinew, bone, and viscera.  I looked up and stumbled, placing my hand upon the tree.  The doe sprang off with a grace I always envied and knew I’d never have.  I put my face against the tree, an oak tree, a portal between worlds.  Something screamed; a man, a man in blaze orange, rapt with horror, running towards me.

"Sorry," he whispered as I fell backwards.  The turned trees clung to the last of their leaves, shivering and dull, like tarnished bronze or a dying fire.  Trembling.  Brighter, now, like a coruscant halo about his head.  Dimmer, then, and dimming.  Is this graceful?  It’s this simple?  "Sorry."  I always wanted to be a deer.  Tunnel vision to a single northern cardinal singing a new tune: what fear, what fear, sleep sleep sleep sleep.

I do not know where this is, but there are birds here.  Millions of them, a fortress of hope and feathers.  Flighted and flightless, large and small, singing, squawking, chirping, and cheeping.  Button-quail, kingfishers, grouse, albatrosses.  Bonin woodpigeons and spectacled cormorants.  I’ve nothing to write on, here, nor a working memory of the written language.  So I find myself a black swan–cygnus atratus–and speak to it.  I tell all, with love, with teeth.  I infuse it with a faint memory of a memory of hope, and it flies away.