Half-Frightened Wild Animals

by CHRIS SHEEHAN

Now the front gate stands near the road as a hazard, red reflective tape taunting delivery drivers to pass through and risk backing into posts on uneven gravel and often packages are left in rain and snow. There are no streetlights on the narrow road and in winter we hear of drivers turning around before they arrive at the house because darkness is uncertain and they must worry the road suddenly drops into the canyon. This is not true, of course, as the road continues below our house and into the canyon until it becomes trail-like and terminates at a seasonal creek. I have replaced one of the posts a few times—the ground steers you in this direction. The gate at the bottom of the property is as wide as a doorway and only for access to deer trails among the expanse of woods and dense brush and we did not think to open it after our dog passed until a fawn snuck in one day, the herd outside the field fence as the fawn screeched and bounded the fence line. The fawns are too young to clear the fence, January.

“I saw a coyote at the mailboxes,” Sam says. “And a wolverine last night?” She’s waiting for an app to load video of our late-night visitor on her phone. The bank of mailboxes is a few miles from the house, a mile as the coyote runs.

“It looks like one,” I say. It’s hard to tell. The animal moves away from the camera up the driveway, a second, two. Within the week, sure, a mountain lion is bothered on the deck, a black bear considers the front door. The red fox, she lives in an abandoned car nearby, she’s our only frequent visitor. She comes for the yellow jacket nests and voles and likes to bring her two cubs around in the mornings.

Sam’s worried about the fawns. It’s been a few days since we’ve seen any of the herd. They use the narrow gate to feed on acorns, a towering black oak. Maybe we feel responsible this fawn season because our dog passed or we never could have children; we’re early into a pandemic, however, locked down, a captive audience.

“Maybe it’s a yellow-bellied marmot,” Sam says, a backpacking trip we took decades ago, a rodent chewing our packs, not something we’d see this far down the Sierra. We’re sitting across from each other at the kitchen counter on bar stools. The television is on and we aren’t watching it. Light beer and a joint.

I’m unemployed, retired, whatever, I should add—plagiarized myself writing content for the automobile industry, once some lawmaker plagiarized some decision, outlawed writing, among other things, once the company couldn’t pay their freelancers, though the end of this story mostly involves Sam finding me a bed, a thermos of bourbon and ice on a drive to a detox facility, high-fiving doctors in the hallway of an emergency room. Normal pandemic stuff: on the wagon, off. I doubt Sam and I will be around much longer, our old paces, and sometimes that’s okay with us.

“Is that your spirit animal?” I want to tell her about the fawn, the three cubs playing by the kill site, but I feel a need to protect her, whatever the fawns have become in quarantine.

“A deer?” She pulls out her spirit cards, the cards she checks every morning, her infinite potential.

“A marmot.”

She shuffles the deck and picks one from the middle. “I’m an eagle,” she says, and laughs. “Isn’t that what everyone says?”

I find myself staring at the driveway, where the skidder gashed a lane, where the gravel is covered in pine needles and branches from the north winds ahead of the storm. “What do people do without land—what did you say?” It’s not that we’re bored, like Sam says, it’s something else. I look up and Sam’s staring at me, big eyes, like she’s waving for the camera, brown trout and granite, and I suddenly feel the joint wash across my forehead, namelessly and endlessly familiar.

“Watch the internet. That’s what people do.” She laughs. “I wish we could go to the Mine Shaft and have a beer.”

“We’re having a beer.”

“It’s different, entirely.” The wind is high in the trees and gusting along the ridge, pulling up the mountain every so often like a freight train, a pulse of green in the air. Sam looks to the window, shakes her head. “Cedar dust in January?”

The pollen is everywhere all at once, collapsing in sheets as the wind redirects. “The trees are confused,” I say.

“It’s started to snow.”

It’s the second day of our drinking, I mean to say, Saturday, and I feel a slight tremble in my neck and arms and hold a hand under the counter and glance at it to convince myself it is not shaking. The snow is comforting, always at first, though it likely means shoveling out the generator in the morning so we can shower, make coffee.

“Do you need another beer?” Sam asks. “I’m getting one.”

I nod. In the corner of the room: towel, bucket, water line, cedar sapling. I’ve mostly forgotten, though I can still taste the pollen and dirt and mold in the back of my throat, a rot in the air, sweet, the way dead things smell before they’ve permeated the breeze. I follow the edge of scrub brush through the trees along the abandoned road that cuts through our property, imagine deer waiting tentatively at the tree line for a car to pass. “We should transplant that sapling,” I say. “Pick a spot in the yard.”

“Shouldn’t we decorate it first?” She slides a beer across the counter, looks to the kitchen window as if nostalgic for a no-window bar and I remember The Hard Luck a moment, tacky elbows, noise, cocaine. “I see one,” she says. A fawn hesitates through the gate, looks toward the house. The deer trail is empty and the fawn’s legs unsteady as she glances down the trail into the trees. The snow is beginning to catch in the saplings, excess fencing, brushing the pollen on the round posts and deadfall white, though it’s light on the branches.

In the morning I don’t have patience for a hangover, stretch another blanket over Sam, stoke the fire, leave for the liquor store. It’s a Sunday and there’s a subcompact sedan outside the gate when I return and the driver pawing at snow behind a rear tire, a package outside the gate, packages filling the windows of the sedan. The snow has stopped, the storm on to inconvenience the Great Basin, though it’s loud, snow dropping in erratic blasts.

The melt is violent off the trees and the driver’s panicked, sure, wants to walk up to the county-maintained road, talking about snowplows and civilization, why there’s no one who will come out and help her. Because she’s tried, she’s called everyone. I can hear generators on nearby properties and know the power’s out, wonder how I missed that this morning, glad I stoked the woodstove for Sam. “I couldn’t stop moving forward,” she says. “And then I saw your address.” She’s backed into the green and white house number staked off the berm, backed into a rill ditch she can’t see under the foot or more of wet snow.

“Today’s Sunday?”

“I don’t work for UPS. FedEx. Whatever,” she says. “Just trying to make a dollar.” She’s breathing heavily. “I have a job. Another.”

“Maybe wait for the snow to melt,” I say. “Next time.”

“Don’t have room for it,” she says. She’s caught her breath, looks down the long driveway, small gambrel hedged in snow, and I can see her profile now, see she’s expecting. It’s awkward, talking to someone, and I realize I haven’t noticed her eyes, sunken and hollow.

The box is big, and light, and I have no idea what could be inside. “I can’t leave you like this.”

“I’m fixed either way. Already lost two hours out Greenhorn.”

I can hear a wind over the thumping all around, hear it surging below into You Bet, Jones Ridge, suck back, the forest alive with branches crackling from trunks, a tremor in the air. “Banner’s not far,” I say, and tell her I’ll tow her to where it’s plowed, tell her to get in her car and run the engine while I grab some things from the house. She stays in the car while I shovel around her, doesn’t appear interested in getting out. I shovel out toward my truck and idle onto the cleared road and strap her chassis to the tow hooks on my front bumper. I back her carefully out of the ditch, her subcompact bouncing sideways mostly until it finds my tracks. And the look on her face, as we wait for a bear to drag the carcass across the road, the look on her face, three cubs running every which direction in the snow.

“What was that all about?” Sam asks, once I’ve stripped out of my sweaty clothes.

“Delivery driver got stuck,” I say. She’s still under blankets on the couch, watching trees shed snow. The woodstove’s found influence throughout the house, though the thermostat does not show the temperature, which reminds me the power is out. The generator. I find dry clothes, shovel a path to drag the generator under the carport. I study the path through the frozen ground as I wait for the generator to warm. I bring in the package, beer. It’s cold, the beer I’ve sunk in snow, and the sound gets Sam off the couch.

“I’ll have a beer,” she says.

“It’s Sunday, after all,” I say.

“I’m not going to work tomorrow,” she says, tugs at her shift. She’s taken a job at Mother Truckers, a rural grocery store, just to get out of the house, she says, though I think it’s because she misses the boomers on the ridge, our off-grid phase, old friends.

“Me neither,” I joke.

“How were the roads?” she asks.

“Not bad,” I say. “Enough to call out of work tomorrow.”

“Is Banner plowed?”

“It’s clear.”

“What’s in the box?”

“No idea. It’s light.”

“Must be the comforter. How did they get stuck?”

She’s wondering why it took so long, the beer. It’s nearly noon. “She was blocking the road. I had to help.”

“Who’s helping the deer in this storm?”

Sam likes to ask this question: I like to tell her a deer’s coat is hollow, they can’t feel the snow on their backs, though I don’t say it today. She turns on the television and the generator creases, clatter. “They’re wild animals,” I say, and consider the fawn, the playful one, the one who liked to chew on the soft copper line from the propane tank. I check the thermostat: 75°F. The well pump digs against the strain of a commercial, drops the generator. The television loses its signal, it’s trying to find it.

“They don’t know that.”

“Should I have left her in the middle of the road?”

“We’ll have to wipe off the satellite dish,” she says.

“Let’s have a beer first,” I say. I take a seat at the counter, look out the kitchen window. Snow like fog as a thin cedar, a fir, straighten, posture, a rush of white into the air. She’s gone upstairs and when she comes down, she’s dressed, gloves and hat, big coat. “I should tell you about a fawn,” I say.

“What can you tell me about a fawn?” she says, her eyes like a half-frightened wild animal, sure, a bear cub left to watch over a kill site.

“We’ll decorate that tree when we come in.”

The snow has drifted across the driveway, above our knees as we walk to the satellite dish at the top of the property. There’s a clear shot to the sky above the tree line. I veer into a stand of firs where it’s easier to walk, see deer bedded down. Sam’s brushed off the satellite dish, likely won’t notice the herd, could be deadfall. I remember watching a doe try to teach a fawn how to dig a place in the snow to sleep, the doe putting her hoof on the fawn’s head and pushing him down, as if to say, pay attention, pay attention.