Rabbit Boss
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THE FOX of the Earth was released. The Washo moved the stick in the dirt. His eyes tracing the dusty face of the Fox his stick had scratched out. The wind blowing between his bent knees tickled the drawing, blurring the face staring up at him. The Fox is sly and swift and he wondered deep within him why they were the Fox. All he had seen of them was slow and clumsy. He threw the stick, it landed by a pale rock and he was angry, angry that they filled his thoughts, stalking him through the days and into his dream. He knew that if he could not think of them through one day they would be gone, but that was impossible. He had seen the bones. He had returned to the place of their camp by the lake with his father to watch. The journey was effortless, the Earth had turned up black, the snows gone, but when they reached the place on the mountain where he watched them during the winter they were gone, the shore of the lake was untouched. His father wanted to turn back, saying his son had offended the Ghosts and they gave him the dream of the ones with white skins during the winter, it was only a dream, this was his suffering for some grave offense he committed against his Ancestors’ memory. But he himself could see the shore of the lake was not as it should be. Many of the tall trees were cut. About two bodylengths up, the bare trunks poking steep, they were chopped harshly in the middle of their growth and the rest of the tree’s body was gone. Flesh from the trees’ bodies had become winter shelters such as never before had been built in the mountains. He knew this was the work of those with the White skin. He knew the trees were cut at the snowline where the Whites had camped during winter. He walked in front of his father as they approached the cut trees in silence. The wind blew straight out in front of them across the lake. He squatted beneath one of the bare trunks. “Those are not the bones of Animals,” his father’s words came over his shoulder with the blowing wind. “We must go. We have come too far already.” He could feel the hand on his shoulder, but it weighted him down like a stone, he could not move, the bones beneath the trunk held his eyes. He could not leave the bones and soon his father was gone. He watched until the Sky grew black. He spent the night by the cut tree. There were no stars and he could not see the bones so he did not sleep. In the morning the bones were there as they had been the day before, and the days before that back into the winter, the rock-hard white surfaces charred black and split sharp down the long middles where the bone marrow had been dug out. “They have eaten all there is to eat,” he spoke his words out to the cut trunk. “If they had teeth of stone not even the bones would be left to rot in the ground. They would eat all.” He moved from the cut tree and away from the bones, but he found others, burnt, split, like the flesh of warrior Ghosts that had been rained on the Earth in silence. He read the bones for the sign they were. He knew they were left to grow. Soon their bodies would return in many numbers. He could feel their presence as he moved through the cut trees. The bones scattered on the shore of the lake was the eye keeping watch on him, the eye of the Fox, the eye of the Fox that sinks like a cave in front of his questions. As he walked he moved further into the darkness, having only the cut trees and burnt bones as his guide, he was alone, he was alone with them. Would he walk forever in the eye of the Fox, would all the trees be cut, the forests slashed at their waists, would only bones mark his path, would they feed on all flesh. He wondered this deep within him as he watched the wind erase almost all trace of the Fox he had etched in the dust.