The End of Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

moments to bury them. But even in the bitter cold the scent of death travels, and every time night fell, the predators—coyotes, field rats, whatever—would come and feed. In the mornings, the scavengers—vultures and crows—would battle each other to take the predators’ place.
    He never said anything about it, at least not out loud—that’s the way my father was—but I could see in his eyes that he felt responsible for the suffering these animals endured. The night the last calf died, my father walked from the barn into the house and came back a few minutes later, carrying his .22. It was loaded. He handed it to me and dragged the calf outside. My father was never big on asking me to do anything—he’d either issue a direct order or simply make it clear that he expected something—but this time, he did ask. “Do me a favor? Keep an eye on her tonight. And if anything comes after her, shoot it?”
    We buried that calf and what remained of the others the next morning. Though my father kept up farming for another six years after that, his heart was no longer in it.
    The truth was, my heart was never in farming, and every chance I got I’d vanish, disappearing into the deep woods that plunged from the top of our hill into a rugged gully below. I’d meet up there with my best friend, Ralph. He’d bring the cigarettes, always a crushed pack of Marlboros that he stuffed down the front of his pants so hisfather wouldn’t catch him during morning chores. He knew every corner of Ellsworth Hill and the hollows around it and all of the hidden things they contained. He knew where the old tumbled stone bridge was, and he had a knack for finding fresh tracks left by coyotes or bobcats beneath the undergrowth. Sometimes we’d make our way up along the ridge that ran from the highest part of my family’s land for miles in either direction, to hunt for arrowheads on a plateau where, local lore had it, there had been a battle between the remnants of the Iroquois Confederacy and a band of Continental soldiers. We never found any arrowheads, just some misshapen fossils of sea creatures—strange distorted shells with scalloped edges, distended coral-like discs bent like reflections in a funhouse mirror and frozen in stone, stones with eye-shaped holes that ran clear through them, the interior surfaces marked by what looked like scales—that had somehow been deposited here, 150 miles from the nearest ocean.
    Once, as Ralph and I picked our way down into a small valley bisected by White Creek, we caught sight of a pure white deer. It sniffed the air as we tumbled out of the woods, trembled, then bounded into the undergrowth. To this day, I’ve never seen another like it in the wild.
    There were a few secret places that Ralph talked about but never actually showed me. He told me that he had seen places where every so often he’d stumble across a spring that for no reason at all might bubble, as if something deep inside it was breathing. There were other places, he said, where the rocks would sometimes give off a peculiar fume, and if you breathed it deeply enough, it was kind of like getting high. I begged him to take me to those places, and once or twice we went looking for them, but we never found them. And after a while, I stopped believing that such things actually existed, convinced that Ralph was making it all up.
    I had mentioned it to my father once, skipping the part about the narcotic nature of the stuff. He told me he had heard the same thing and that the source of the mysterious fumes was natural gas. In fact, Ralph’s grandfather, old Leon Williams, had told my father that from time to time when he was out “witchin’ for water”—dowsing with a stripped willow switch, a practice he continued out of a sense of tradition long after he knew the location of every gurgling spring within miles—he would sometimes come across a small fracture in theground where natural gas seeped up. It was never much, just a few