![]() ![]() They scavenge what wildfires don’t devour. Cows barge through barbed-wire fencing and trail it like a bride’s veil in their quest to find something edible. Deer drag themselves across open valleys, tongues out and lolled. Charred and beetle-infested trees scrape at a dim sky, skeletal and smoking. RUBY IS FOURTEEN when the romance of summer withers. Mass extinctions and forced migrations.Īs she stomps off to her room, I wonder, Isn’t this the age where we should be at loggerheads over curfews, boys, and clothes? 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. 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 respect her choice it’s based on sentience and suffering. Cradled, Ruby looks up at me, her hazel eyes now shining the deepest green.įIVE YEARS after this feral moment, my daughter declares herself vegetarian. 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. 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. 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. Dinner’s a long way from being on the table. ![]() But there’s work to do-skin and quarter, scrub bone saws and knives. The feet of her pink fleece onesie are soaked in fresh blood the air is cast iron, sharp with the sanguine scent. The animal hangs gutted and upside down in the shed while our three-year-old daughter toddles in circles on the tarp beneath it. It’s archery season in southwestern Colorado, and just beyond our fence line, H has taken a buck with a recurve bow. From timbered, meadowed high country to red, chalked desert below. Across our mesa, through stands of scrub oak and piñon. Orion’s belt straps the eastern horizon to a winsome San Juan Range. AUTUMN’S FIRST COOL NIGHT seeps through the sky’s scrim like ink on fine paper. ![]()
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