Stephen Behrendt

Pruning back the old spirea bushes that sprawled for years in summer's heat, I bared the snake skin, a yard and a half long: its naked empty length rippled in the streaming wind lifting its ghostly coils from the dead shoots that scraped the slough from the slithering body that shed it in that narrow, shaded space. I paused—who wouldn't?—shears poised, slipped off gray canvas gloves, extracted the sere, striated casing from the brown stalks that had held it, silent, hidden. I coiled the paper-thin curling sheath with care, delicately, eased it into a simple squatty box for keeping, for care, for my daughters to take to school, to show, to explain how some sinuous body we've never glimpsed, that haunts about our shrubs, our porch, left for us this translucent, scale-scored wrapper, this silent hint of all that moves unseen.

For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture: coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east where the deer have almost ceased to pass now that the developers have carved up yet another section, filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff. Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand; only three years past came great horned owls who raised two squeaking, downy owlets that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail. It was on an August afternoon that you drove in, curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek, that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight, three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze, who vanished when you turned your head. We have felt the presence on this land of others, of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up, turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals; their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.