On a May morning, in the glad renewal that is spring, two lives collided.
One was that of a young man who knew and loved wildness, but was not wild. The other was that of a child, five weeks from newborn, who was. In the moment they met, he was so fascinated by her beauty and innocence he was drawn into her world, and she was plucked from her world and coerced into the strangeness that was his.
There, in time and the world between, affection might have deepened between them, but it could never be serene. For their meeting fated them dangerously atotter the callused fulcrum between love and hate.
Thirty seconds earlier, a few divergent steps this way or that, and neither would ever have known the other. But thirty seconds later, when their paths did not separate, they did, and nothing could ever be the same again. Whatever must be, neither could ever return to where they began.
He was slipping along the grassy border dividing a beaver swamp and cutover that morning, reveling in the plethora of summer ducks that secreted there…the little gray hens with their tiny, trailing broods that wound through sunlight and shadow about the flooded timber. Though it was something more that had stolen his attention, something small and furry that had moved just ahead.
Bouncing up and back, it had appeared again, and quickly he moved to see. As he approached, it had flattened to the ground, seeking to hide, then attempted to bound away. He saw that it was young and vulnerable, and acting instinctively, ran to gather it up.
And so they had met, neither of them in the moment afforded the difference.
He had cradled her in his arms in the natal seconds of their acquaintance, marveling as ever at the irresistible perfection and allure that is signature in all Nature’s children. She had lapsed submissive and docile, and had looked up at him once, with the soft morning light in her newly amber eyes, and, God, she was oh so small and so very beautiful. So enthralling that his only thought was to steal her away.
The weight of what he was doing had not burdened him then, and she had no course but to go with him. Perhaps he should have left her there.
Somehow it came to him that her name should be Eve, from Eden, though it had not arrived to him yet that, faultlessly, she had tempted him into what might equivocate to the original sin.
Each day that followed, she grew more beautiful, more the temptress, and he held her in his arms, and looked into her eyes, and knew that his feelings for her were threatening to swell beyond his control. The more it seemed, she submitted and enjoyed his caress, as well. Beneath, however, burned the flames of wildness, and the evergreen yearning for freedom.
“Eve….” He would whisper her name, each time he held her. As love flickered timidly above the smoldering coals of affection.
She had been his secret for a week before he had told anyone, and then only his truest friend, and three days more before he told his father. For, mountain and glade, the considerable farmland holding that was home to them both was his father’s. And within that sustaining homeland fortress, there was the one thing he knew Sam Weston hated most, that he himself had been taught and expected to despise as completely.
It carried beyond that. It was a hatred that raged cruelly and almost universally among men. And he realized now, with every passing moment he kept her, he more greatly incurred its wrath. Which he alone might endure, while more vilely and less certainly, would she.
There came the dreaded moment his father had arrived, with him Cottrell Hatley, a long-time friend. And his first thought was to protect her, knowing the division and dilemma of doing so.
For in his arms lay the living seed of his father’s greatest revulsion: a coyote, a female, well-spring of the more.
His father had looked at him, then the pup, his features etched with ire. Hatley speaking first.
“You know it’s a hell of a dilemma you’ve laid on yourself?”
The young man looked down at her, safely at ease in his arms, did not reply.
“What will you do now?”
“What he should have done then,” his father said.
The young man looked up at his father. His father’s face did not change.
Still his son did not speak.
“What were you thinking when you found her?” Hatley asked.
“Nothing,” the young man replied, “not at first. It just happened.”
“She was tiny and beautiful, and I thought then maybe to keep her, and she would be safe and comfortable with me.”
“And how many of her have you killed? Shot or trapped?” he asked. “Unknowing, you would not have hesitated to shoot her mother or her father. Her too, was she full-growed, and unknown to you.”
“Why not her, then?”
Again, the young man did not reply, for the answer was obvious.
“You’ll never take the wildness out of her, or be able to fully trust her,” the man vowed. “She’ll maybe bark at you, wag her tail, be glad each time to see you. But she’ll never understand discipline, and leave you if she can.”
Again, the young man was silent.
“Hell of a thing now you’ve kept her. ’Cause you know you ain’t gonna pick up a stick now, and just knock her in the head. I couldn’t. Prob’ly not even your daddy.”
His father did not speak.
“There’s plenty o’ people that would.”
“If I was going to do that,” the young man said defensively, “I would have done it where I found her.”
“Git rid of her to somebody,” his father again. “You need to take her,” he said to Hatley, irked by what he had said.
“No.” Hatley shook his head. “Not a coyote.”
“Bradly Staley wants her,” the young man said, only to hear what he already knew.
“All he’ll do is sell her to the dog hunters for fenced trials,” Hatley declared. “Throw her in the big pen to half-starve with two hundred others, then die from disease or get so weak the dogs catch her.”
“Best just knock her in the head, than that.”
“Maybe a zoo.”
The young man looked down at her. “She’d just be in a pen all her life,” he replied.
“They’d never take her nohow,” Hatley said in after-thought. “Not a coyote. They’re too damn common now.”
“Nobody wants another coyote.”
“She’s bound to have worms,” his father said. “Your dogs use the same yard; they’ll have ’em too.”
No one spoke for several seconds.
“There’s maybe the one better option,” Hatley said. “Raise her up a little further, then turn her loose.”
Sam Weston threw him a Judas stare.
“Not here!” he spouted.
“Give it all back to Fate, like it would have been,” Hatley finished. “Give her back her life, go on with yours.”
“Turn her loose on your place!” Sam Weston said crossly.
“No,” Hatley declared quietly.
His father had tired of the matter, was not happy with his son, not happy with the situation at large. He turned and left.
Hatley hesitated, then followed, nothing left to say. But he had kept fox kits himself, when he was young. It was foxes that were hated back then, he thought, when nobody east had hearda any coyotes.
Minutes after they had left, the young man still held her, beautiful and tiny, in his arms. Not wanting to let her go…though thinking all might have been better had he just turned and walked away, left her there, never to bring her into his life at all. But it was a hard thing to accept. Even though he was a man now, understanding the accountabilities of maturity, and their consequences the more.
She looked up at him shyly, and quickly back, and in the moment he wanted to hold her forever.
But now, as not before, he saw the two faces of Eve.
One was that of a baby, an infinitely perfect, beautiful and helpless child of the wild. A child of complete innocence, who knew nothing of the immense hate the human world held for her, of the small value and tenure of her life in it. Who had no rightful reason to. Who knew little yet of life itself, who only tried one moment-to-next to hold desperately onto it. To enjoy the warmth of the newborn sun, the scent and softness of a lush bed of clover, the forest under the satin light of a full moon. Who knew nothing of guile, but only to be what she was meant to be. Who knew only the nature she was born to serve…to live wild and free, to hunt and eat, to avoid death and to preserve her kind.
And he loved her for it.
The other was the visage grown, fierce, burning eyes and bloody canine teeth, with gore dripping from her jaws. The blood and gore of countless woodland creatures, of tiny, bleating fawns he had seen taken down and torn apart before his eyes, of quail, turkey, rabbits and songbirds born and dead almost before they ever lived. Scattered pieces of hair and feathers around a den, pieces that abetted the incredible fecundity and cunning of hundreds of others of her in every annual cycle. A muzzle that lifted to the sky in every twilight, joining the myriad, growing others, signifying the genesis of another waneless bloodlust. That waxed uncontrollable despite every conservative effort contrived to contain it.
And he hated her for it.
But are not Nature and God the same? Who should step between? Where was the tipping point?
Two weeks later he walked into woodland again.
He held her in his arms as before. She was a little miss now, even the more beautiful and at ease with him. Gathering the leash and undoing the small collar at her neck, he held her moments longer, then stooped, slowly lowering her to the ground. As he stood, his hand crossed to the pistol at his belt.
Realizing her freedom, she had bounded a few paces, then turned, pausing for critical seconds to gaze at him a last time.
For several minutes, the young man lingered there, contemplating the undisturbed silence. Walking slowly then out of the lowland bottom. Dusk was falling. Already the full of the moon was up, shimmering upon the mirror of the water.
In the May woods, in spring, two lives had collided.
Many years would pass, and Nate Weston would become an old man.
Each evening at twilight he would sit on the porch, as hunting songs lifted eerily into the darkening sky.
Always he would think of her.
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