Fire On The Mountains

Before leaving town I visit fellow veteran Henry Bennett. He is a broad man that carrys the hunt in his shoulders, in his powerful hands. Into my right hand he places one at a time, a mound of bullets he has loaded for the gravest extreme. Grizz. Henry is a story waiting on a listener. I listen through fields and through hunts as Henry gifts a long knife into my left hand that he made from a file, then polished into a mirror. Henry smiles as he moves his pointing finger near the hilt. "What I like most about this knife is that it doesn't read CHINA across the blade," Henry grins at me like a young soldier, like an old friend I had forgotten the memory of. We are standing in and out of his front yard, and then we're thrown into Montana's back country dressing elk with no other voices for a hundred miles, at once I am alone looking back, looking forward, looking inside for a compass with magnetic pull. Nothing speaks. Here I have been adopted. Here I have been given many faces pleading concern up and out through their eyes, watching me prepare to leave, porch and curb, from experience and innocence fingers are folded and unfolded, shuffled like cards nobody can turn over except the digital movement of time. They want to save me from the road, from myself. They want to see me fulfill a dream far from just started, and yet I see them stare with a mouthful of words they can't say or swallow and I understand. I can't swollow either. I will listen more in Cody.
The newspapers all talk about the fire coming down from the mountains, across the high deserts and open plains into the course I've plotted. Homes are abandoned with little hope and some given to fire. This of course means the bears that sought food and seclusion in the woods now flee hungry and scared into a path I have yet to break through. Parades are over. The Gift of the Water celebration in which the Shoshone act out the giving of the mineral springs in Thermoplis to all mankind to use free of charge for all time has passed. The tepees have been dropped, and all the golden eagle feathers have walked away. Fattened pigs have been auctioned. Schools begin to pull boys up out of the fields, and girls from their saddles. Somewhere geese prepare to move into the sky and I feel it.