After the last snowfall, the earth cracked open under the sun’s strange heat. The mountains sighed and spilled shimmering streams to gather at their hems; the water rolling east down into the valleys as veins to nourish and awaken the dormant earth to a new spring. The water bodies
rose; the fish returned to spawn.
My father warned me not to go fishing. He said, if I fell in, the river would take me whole. I wouldn’t be able to fight the cold water. I imagined myself consumed by the ripping torrent, splayed and stripped bare, my bones adrift somewhere halfway to Pateros.
I imagined the spring Chinook and summer Trout, unbothered and indifferent witnesses to my water burial. Maybe they would string my teeth into necklaces or play catch with my toes, build nests with my tibia. My sternum would lay sunk in the riverbeds, used as a lawn chair or a diving
board, a cradle or a grave.
As my father cast his fly, I walked the river banks, hunting the Methow for things that once lay quiet below the snow: mayfly exoskeletons clung to petrified driftwood, snail fossils, and ashes of a past forest fire. Bright brass and silver Steelhead scales painted the silted banks like stars in summer’s evening sky. I dug two cow teeth from the mud, their enamel worn and rotting. A feast, I imagined—for a coyote or a bear? Perhaps a celebration held by a pack of wolves who got lucky, the hungry guests stripping and gnawing at a cow who hadn’t meant to stray far from the ranch upstream. The remnants of the party, the vertebrae and skull, now caught in the tawny
fescue.
I heard my father’s line go swinging and the whipping of the new spring air. I heard the taming of a fish and the reeling of a line against a fast current, and yet I did not go near. I crouched in the trees where the dirt met the river rocks, arranging shells and beetles with sun dried salamanders and feathered wings dressed in white and yellow yarrow. In the shaded douglas fir, I was the rememberer and animator of seasons before the snow fall. Alive again were the fish bones and the horse hair.
I saw a brown something under a sagebrush, a half-hidden thing sweating in the new heat. I pulled, and it came to light slick with fresh blood. I lost my breath in surprise and stumbled back.
A deer leg severed at the knee.
A mangled thing. A dead wet thing stinking and staining the pine needles red. I picked it up and put it on my pile, and it lived again. The riverbank was a boneyard–and I with cradled hands the architect of animation, a sexton to sanctify snail spirals and bird beaks.