engulfed it and held it toward its center with a hand’s breadth of wood. They walked back into the timber.
“Look,” said John. “There’s a kinglet. Look.”
“Don’t stop walking,” said Sarah.
“No, wait. Look. Right over there.”
Sarah stopped, and was immediately bitten by a vicious mosquito.
“Over there,” said John. Then, “This place is full of mosquitoes!”
“I told you.”
They continued on to the picnic table Marion McDuff’s father had built. The pasture had been his wife’s joy, and as a symbol of devotion he had built a table and a fireplace recessed against a sharply inclined bluff, in a partial opening of elms (the cursed tree), her name written in the fireplace cement. John and Sarah loved the little wild park. They fought off the bugs by cupping their hands and swinging them by the sides of their heads, and built a fire with the paper Sarah had brought. The gnats tenaciously hung on through the smoke, but retreated with the rising heat.
Then they sat on the picnic table and drank iced tea with lemon and honey. Out of the basket they took the warm turtle meat and ate it with salt, brown bread and butter. They talked about what animals it would be preferable to be, if you had to be born one.
“I wouldn’t want to be domestic,” said Sarah. “I’d rather be wild.”
“It’d be nice not to have to be afraid of people, though.”
“Domestic animals are afraid of people too.”
“I’d like to be a dog,” said John, “if I could be one of my father’s.”
“I wouldn’t. I’d be a wild horse—a mustang!”
“Anything wild has to spend all its time scrounging for food, or being afraid of bears.”
“Bears wouldn’t bother a mustang,” said Sarah.
“Of course they would. A horse wouldn’t have a chance against a bear.”
“It’d trample it to death with its sharp hooves. Jab! Jab!” Sarah made pummeling gestures, her fists representing hooves.
“That wouldn’t be much of a threat. Bears have claws, you know, and have enough strength in their arms to whing a horse, especially a mustang—a very small horse—several feet in the air.”
“Bears aren’t that strong. Nothing’s that strong. A fierce fighting mustang stallion could smash the biggest bear in the face.” And her fist came down on the table.
“Many times bullets don’t even penetrate a bear’s head. It’d just pounce on a horse’s back and it’d be all over.”
“A mustang stallion,” said Sarah, “would grab him off and fling him up into the air.” And with her clenched teeth she imitated the action.
“I’d rather be a fish,” said John. “A mud cat.”
“And get caught on a hook,” said Sarah, pouring out only one third a glass more of the iced tea, so that there would be two glasses left for later.
“Not just an ordinary fish. A smart one.”
“I see what you mean, I think,” said Sarah. That would be nice, she thought, lying in the deep holes during the day, sleeping on the bottom and watching the watery things . . . in a kind of liquid dream, the sunlight shimmering on the rocks, greenish yellow, all sounds soft and low—cows in the distance. Then going out at night into the shallows, hunting for smaller fish like a cunning, silent submarine, feeling the faster water carry you downstream, in among the roots of the shore . . . seeing the moon from underneath and hearing the oars of the Dark Lords in their long black boats, their footsteps on the bank, their fires winking across the tops of the ripples, deer drinking. Woodchucks eating green shoots. Leaves and water insects on the surface.
Their clothing inundated with smoke, an insect deterrent, they set off in search of birds, taking with them both binoculars, the thermos and the wildlife book. Sarah carried the blanket around her shoulders. She frequently let her thoughts be carried away by merely walking, or by the embroidery of the grasses. They waded in the stream, and she found smooth stones with color veins and put them in her pocket as remembrances. John saw a bobolink. They tried to catch crayfish until he became obsessed with finding an owl’s nest, and they tramped over what seemed to her several miles. But the reward so outweighted the walk she could hardly contain herself and broke into laughter when she raised the glasses and saw as though directly above her two huge, round, dusty white horned owls frowning at her. “Who,” she said. “Who. Who.” That made her laugh more. John was so excited he could do nothing but talk about how owls’ eyes were made and how, per square inch of flying surface, they were lighter than all other birds, their feathers softer, and how they had asymmetrical, adjustable ears nearly as long as their whole head. He read out loud from their book every scrap of information about them, and remarked that because there were two, it was a good year for owls and was an indication that the land would support them even through the winter. They seemed so comical because of their size, helplessness, dumb interest and aloofness—their unshakable faith in their own invulnerability at that height. They were also going to sleep.
Reading and thinking about owls made John want to find a place they could sit until it was dark in hope of seeing the parents hunting, gliding over with wild, burning eyes. They drank the last of the iced tea. They found a tall hayfield and lay down in it so that they would be invisible except from directly overhead. But despite the spectacle of the cloud formations, as subtle as frozen breath, with the darkening air came the bugs, and they were forced to give up the vigil and return to the fireplace. Several broken logs placed on top of the coals soon revived John’s defeated spirit and they sat against the nearest elm and watched the flames. Darkness descended around them with the cooler air. Sarah went over to the fire and put on more wood and let the warmth saturate her clothing until just that point where it was too hot, and moved back, turned and began on the front side.
John looked at her silhouetted against the leaping colors, then at the colors themselves, and began to daydream. The daydream tapered back to the fire and he found himself looking at Sarah again. He went back to daydreaming but returned again to the seat of the denim pants; and when she gave a little jump back from the heat, her face glowing red, the air full of her smell, he felt his desire rise. Unsuspecting, she came back to the tree, stretched and sat down. He put his arm around her, and she moved closer, still unknowing. He sat with his desire for a few minutes to see if it would stand the test of time, then unbuttoned her pants. “Oh, John!” she said. “Not here.”
“Why not?”
Sarah’s senses (already inflamed by fear and embarrassment) nearly exploded, like a barrel of fish dumped into a river, when she felt her pants being drawn off and her bare skin exposed to the open air. She began to loosen John’s buckle and pull his shirt down his arms. In his search for something to put under her buttocks, to protect her from the hard ground and to get her a little way up in the air, he found the blanket. “Oh, John,” she cried. “Love me. Love me,” closed her eyes on tentacled Hercules, and let her passion carry her to the other side of the doors of death, primeval darkness, and back again. Afterward, sweat rolling from where their bodies had touched, they dressed and made coffee, boiling water in a tin pail. They sweetened it and poured in cream from the little canister. Contented, and at the table, they sipped it.
I
