Close to the Bone
AUTUMN’S FIRST COOL NIGHT seeps through the sky’s scrim like ink on fine paper. Orion’s belt straps the eastern horizon to a winsome San Juan Range. The animals are moving. Across our mesa, through stands of scrub oak and piñon. From timbered, meadowed high country to red, chalked desert below.
It’s archery season in southwestern Colorado, and just beyond our fence line, H has taken a buck with a recurve bow. The animal hangs gutted and upside down in the shed while our three-year-old daughter toddles in circles on the tarp beneath it. The feet of her pink fleece onesie are soaked in fresh blood; the air is cast iron, sharp with the sanguine scent. Ruby’s hungry. But there’s work to do—skin and quarter, scrub bone saws and knives. Dinner’s a long way from being on the table.
I go to the house to get a snack for her, and when I return to the shed, she’s dragged a bar stool onto the tarp and is standing on it, palming the swaying buck for balance, her eyes trained on the trunk, the piece of exposed flesh dangling above her. Before I can protest, she grabs the nearest side of the rib cage and ascends the bones like ladder rungs—climbing until she’s eye level with the bit of meat. She swings out, snaps once at blank air. Swings and snaps again. This time her teeth make contact, tearing away the prize as her slick feet shoot out from under her, as gravity pulls her off the animal, the stool. I lunge to catch her in my arms. Cradled, Ruby looks up at me, her hazel eyes now shining the deepest green.
Her mouth: Gnashes, swallows, grins.
FIVE YEARS after this feral moment, my daughter declares herself vegetarian. I respect her choice; it’s based on sentience and suffering. When she’s thirteen, a mealtime turns tense when a neighbor’s lamb simmers in the stew I’ve just made; that I’ve cooked my daughter a veggie version doesn’t assuage. I try to reason with her. We’re meant to eat meat! The animal was raised locally, sustainably, humanely! She says those reasons pale in the face of droughts, fires, floods. Mass extinctions and forced migrations.
As she stomps off to her room, I wonder, Isn’t this the age where we should be at loggerheads over curfews, boys, and clothes?
RUBY IS FOURTEEN when the romance of summer withers. Charred and beetle-infested trees scrape at a dim sky, skeletal and smoking. Deer drag themselves across open valleys, tongues out and lolled. Cows barge through barbed-wire fencing and trail it like a bride’s veil in their quest to find something edible. But they live, at least. They scavenge what wildfires don’t devour.
Here in the American Southwest, the now naked ground reveals hundreds of ancient spear points, arrowheads, and hand tools once buried in bunch grass and pasture. Quartz, jasper, and obsidian wink like SOS mirrors, an alphabet of artifacts spelling out a story of survival. The fine, fluted edges, impossibly sharp ends. The patience it required to knap such thick, rough stones down to near
