A Story of Taste

or sense or snow or a future.

Secondarily Wild
By Eric Westerlind

•

A crippling wind breaks the stalks of long wheat in bunches, and a fire rages over the mountains; horses gallop black-to-grey in the smoke. It gives me pause. I stand on the one rock on the knoll and the air clears enough for me to catch wind of something burning I can admit to not knowing, but recognizing.

There is a circling up that's done. Each of us admires the rock for being one of a kind and then we're off.

This range is full of familiar scents — bovine, bear; we pull up at the pond lined with teeth to let my daughters drink and try to catch the mud-dwelling amphibians because to play for something more elusive than berries or insects is good for their instincts if not their energy. They don't tire but will be hungry later.

I introduce us to the bear and her cubs who've overheard the children. It is lamentable that we share their range as we know that in our old clime, without the bears there would be more food. The mother bear is mild and we have already met in our first season here, so this is only manners. It is good to see my daughters hold themselves with appropriate custom.

The bears pass and we are off.

My oldest treats with her mother and they thread the willows finding grub. The remaining three circle up behind me with my brother. The smoke is clearer and the air crisp, relaying a boundary scent. They all take note and a bird is thrown amongst us, surprising my brother who has grown senseless since the fire. We will be heard if anyone is near and though I suspect they are, I am hungry, as always.

We are cracking the thin bones when the strangers arrive.

Introduction is always without preamble and rarely without tension. I circle and the children's mother behind and my brother behind out of habit. Our daughters try to participate but it’s out of courtesy, off-nose — whatever we are, our daughters are — but these stranger sare both unfamiliar to custom and odd in approach. Such deep folds in their faces and no set to their pose. They are whipped and unlikely to survive long from the looks of their meager bodies.

We circle up together, our family, as these four slink back towards the long grass, one remarking that we'd met.

The smell is fearful, and their largest leaves last, looking back.

It’s laced with that other smell, recognizable but unknown. Staring at where the strangers came through the grass, I'm looking backwards in time, before the fire, well before the fire.

I'm left sucking the bones of memory, dry and done.

We rest here for the night. The chill means snow tomorrow and the plump bird breast means it won't be the last. The girls will heat soon and I haven't found food enough for that.

•

In the snow is where we find old Moose. Even in death I recognize the cuddy richness he'd exhale. Long jaw removed of its good fat, gut swarming. He's been at rest just long enough for it to foul the stomach, but the girls hardly knew him so it's only an exchange between my partner and I that signals any appreciation for the dead friend beyond meat to get us over the mountains.

We follow the river sleeping in old dens that smell of re-use, cotton. It's easy for the girls to get lazy here, and I sit often with my back to where they all sleep in a pile, watching the clicking sky, waiting for a gap in the weather.

My brother loses his head and plunges into the river. We howl at him but even he should have known the snow-bridge he was on was loose, unsound. Something was wrong and had been. He didn't look up from the torrent or stretch for shore, and faster than it happened, we were seven no more.

This does something to my oldest daughter that makes her distant. She sleeps apart, flattens her affect so that no matter their cajoling, she will not eat her normal share, nor break snow or chase game.

She breaks heat at the ridge. I consult my partner, and we solid agree that if the girl were carrying children, it would mean our end. The tension between knowing this and the way I am consumed is unbearable so through to the lowest hills, I run alone. The track I leave won't serve them at all and I am nearly dead when they break the crust of my snow camp and wake me with their warmth.

I am fortunate for them. They press around me like an aura.

We wait through blizzard and blizzard, growing quiet and cold.

The stranger wakes us, the large one. My two youngest greet him with the same pose he presents. What he survived on alone concerns me but he is strong still, far stronger than I. He camps with us though, and takes to the girls as they heat, each of them. He seems to know something I can't, seems to smell something I can't.

I lose the edges of my eyes and the odd odor strikes me again, and with a start, he leaves. My youngest trails behind, carefully. My partner goes. He communicates strangely and did not ask for this. My oldest and her sister watch me lazily in their late pregnancy.

There is a voracious sound. The girls, the stranger's inane howl. I shiver and stand and walk to the edge of the den. They have something by the throat on the snow in the ground, its long thin arms pushing at them. From atop a platform, the stranger is pulling a great cask until it topples and throws up a ploof of soft powder. I run forward as best I can.

The thing the girls have is something I've never seen. A single eye. No fur, the skin of a frog or snake. It does not give off any smell. It must not have expected the fury of my pack and does not move as they shake it by its throat.

There is a click. The stranger's peculiar paws work the other bump on the edge of the cask and with a sigh, the silver cask opens. He works inside again, pulls a tin out with his jaws and pushes it open too. My eyes are drowned in water.

We devour what's inside each tin, ten, twenty within the cask. We pull others free from the platform, girls tugging together, the stranger's curious grip making the surprising click again and again.

The lights of the platform cease blinking eventually and its loot dries up just as the snow that's gathered over the leavings and the creature we've killed begins to melt. Spring.

New children emerge, different than us, but ours nonetheless.

We circle up and are off, following the stranger down to where the fire has left the ground twisted and new.

•

•

Thanks for waiting through the small break. Much needed and rejuvenating.

I ended up spending some time reading an article on posthuman dogs and what they might be like. The article suggested (and I tend to agree) that centering texts on the world outside of mankind was important. It also said that, of the one billion dogs on the planet (estimate), some 20% or so are pets. A staggering number.

It presented a graphic: wolf + man = dog, followed by dog - man = ?, and suggested that the domestication of dogs is the longest (accidental) genetic experiment in our history, as canis lupus familiaris has been with us on the trail for anywhere from 15 to 40,000 years, and that in that time, they’ve been control-bred for affability/sociability with humans, and in the more recent two hundred years, aesthetic novelty.

The article suggested that should humans die off enmasse, depending on the reason, that dogs would suffer a fate, but not an entwined one, and that many of the traits that have developed as a result of their exposure to us would be tested in rebuilding their place in the wilder, more diverse community of what remained.