from "A Fox in May"

        Indeterminate sounds, whisperings and clickings, emerged from the night woods. A flap of birch bark scraped against a branch. A spruce cone completed a fall to earth it had begun months earlier. Jed, standing over the undisturbed bait hole, turned his head with every new sound, thrilling with rapid, instinctive shivers. Staring among the trees, he heard the rustle of the fox a second time, and this time he followed it in, in past the edge of the woods. Soon he glimpsed the muted auburn of the fox’s fur, a sleek horizontal flitting among the trees, among the dark spruce and the paler birch.
        When he lost sight of the fox, Jed crouched in the moss and waited. Wide-eyed, he pressed his hand to the earth and strained to penetrate the gloom. The chickens squawked nearby; the neighbor’s hounds were barking in the distance. The dogs had only just ceased their spatting and the quiet returned to the woods when the leaves near Jed exploded in a violent thrashing.
        The upheaval lasted for upwards of thirty seconds. Jed didn’t breathe in that time. The shadows spun, they crackled, the shrubs whipped around in the surrounding darkness, Jed staring blindly into it, unable to locate the source of the ruckus, his leg muscles convulsing in spasms. Knowing the fox was close, he released the safety on his rifle, and had hardly done so before a terrific shriek went up in the woods, a high-pitched cry of pain that raised the blood on his back.
        What a havoc!

 

from "Caribou, Paxson Lake"

        While she was outside he stuffed their trash into a gallon bag and brightened the lantern by jacking the fuel pump. Then he sat and toyed with the GPS set, bending his head over the device and working the keypad with his fingers. It was August 9, 1996.
        On returning and seeing him busy with it, she slipped out of her sweats and took a French bath while the rain pattered on the tent roof.
        "Will you keep it?" she asked.
        He looked over at her. She was kneeling in a corner of the tent washing herself with water from a canteen. Her face was towards him.
        "I don’t know," he said.
        "If it’s too good for you I’ll return it."
        He considered her remark, weighing the GPS in his hand. "This thing changes everything," he said.
        "You’re in one of your Luddite moods."
        "No."
        "Buried treasure’s no fun anymore." She mocked him. "Throw away your compass while you’re at it. Throw your rifle away. I’ll do without birth control, you do without sex."
        "Hurry up, you’ll catch cold," he said.
        She pulled on her sweats and came over to him.
        "It’s just a big house of cards anyway," he said. "A big fake Jerusalem of words, justifications, hype, technologies. I’ve got no problem with this, it just never gets us any closer to anything but our limits, whatever out there’s beyond us. Of course I’ll keep it."
        They drew the sleeping bag around them then and made love. The fire in the lantern wavered and dimmed and they replaced it with the light of a pearl-colored candle. The candlelight tussled with their shadows and through the sheer stuff of the tent cast a flickering glow outside on the moss, visible in every direction, a momentary beacon over the lake.
        There was a whisper, a laugh, then the radiance vanished and their site on the hill was dark. The windward side of the dome tent contracted and buckled. The rain fell steadily on the tent. It fell steadily on the mosses and lichens, the shrubs and spry trees.


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