Hunters, Gatherers

Late fall the white fur grew up your spine

thick as the tail of a marten. You built up the fire,

wrapped your legs with skins, but how that

chill wind broke through sill and jamb.

We stuffed paper in every crevice — an uncle’s will,

the writ that changed your name, a certificate

of Degree of Indian Blood and one that said O positive. Still

we shivered, your eyes yellow in the lantern’s light.

Always, they were out there, in a field of boulders

the size of bears hunched over. O, you were silky

with fur, with a sharp smell I could not get enough of.

I fell into a dream of milk and skin,

on the bed of pelts in the winter cabin. When I woke

they had taken you or you had gone with them.

And didn’t I, so green with sleep, track you

the three days until new snow fell?

2

I packed flint and tinder and a compass

whose face shines in the lowest light.

I learned a song to map the way

and one to call you back.

I crouched over every footprint,

sniffing.

And here

was a broken branch and here

something like hair caught by a bramble.

I followed and followed — 

all the yellow hours,

until I came to untouched earth

and waited

in the clearing for the snow to come down

white

as the winter blanket you long had wanted.

3

In the spring when you

come down hungry from

that other mountain

the space between one rib

and the next deep enough

to lay my finger — 

how much of you will

remain or linger — 

bone or mouth or memory

of the first sadness of humans?

Will you dig from the crevices

the paper where they

wrote you down as this

instead of that? Or startle

at the clatter of plates?

The creak of the wooden bed?

Will your skin shake off

its fur, your claws remember

they were fingers? And the hands,

meaty as paws, soften into

what I once could stroke or suckle?