Walter McDonald

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It's spring, and soon they'll be gone above timberline, climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home. He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that. Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring. Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

Barbed wires on rusted nails can’t hold lone bulls at home when they smell pasture. They thrust their bone skulls under barbs, tongues quivering for a taste of strange and shove until the post gives way. Days later, we find wires sagging, reset the post, and tighten bent wires like a fiddle and rope the worn-out bull, wishing there was only a fence between us and our heart’s desire. But something with spurs and a rope would find us, cursing and yelling on horseback, cutting us from escape down arroyos, dragging us frothing and wild-eyed back to the sun-bleached yellow range, the same whirlpool of buzzards.

Crouched before dismantled guns, we found war souvenirs our uncle padlocked in the attic, a brittle latch easily pried off. Stiff uniforms on top, snapshots of soldiers young as our cousins, a velvet box of medals as if he fought all battles in World War II. Bayonets, machetes, a folded flag, two hand grenades with missing pins. We picked up teeth like pennies, loose, as if tossed in, a piece of something dark and waxy like a fig, curved like a question mark, a human ear. We touched dried pieces of cloth stuck to curved bones and held them to the light, turning them over and over, wondering how did uncles learn to kill, what would happen when we grew up.