Hunters, Gatherers

1 Late fall the white fur grew up your spine thick as the tail of a marten. You built up the fire, wrapped your legs with skins, but how that chill wind broke through sill and jamb. We stuffed paper in every crevice — an uncle’s will, the writ that changed your name, a certificate of Degree of Indian Blood and one that said O positive. Still we shivered, your eyes yellow in the lantern’s light. Always, they were out there, in a field of boulders the size of bears hunched over. O, you were silky with fur, with a sharp smell I could not get enough of. I fell into a dream of milk and skin, on the bed of pelts in the winter cabin. When I woke they had taken you or you had gone with them. And didn’t I, so green with sleep, track you the three days until new snow fell? 2 I packed flint and tinder and a compass whose face shines in the lowest light. I learned a song to map the way and one to call you back. I crouched over every footprint, sniffing. And here was a broken branch and here something like hair caught by a bramble. I followed and followed — all the yellow hours, until I came to untouched earth and waited in the clearing for the snow to come down white as the winter blanket you long had wanted. 3 In the spring when you come down hungry from that other mountain the space between one rib and the next deep enough to lay my finger — how much of you will remain or linger — bone or mouth or memory of the first sadness of humans? Will you dig from the crevices the paper where they wrote you down as this instead of that? Or startle at the clatter of plates? The creak of the wooden bed? Will your skin shake off its fur, your claws remember they were fingers? And the hands, meaty as paws, soften into what I once could stroke or suckle?