The Wild Marsh Read Online Free PDF

alien as some language never before heard.
    Reading, or rather, looking at, the riverine etchings, one easily imagines that the elegant, unknown formulas are pursued vigorously by mathematicians and physicists in universities far away, that these men and women pursue the formulas like hounds; but it's easy to believe too that they will never gain on or capture the river's crackings, that always, like some animal that's able not only to stay ahead of their pursuit but to cover its tracks each night, the knowledge, or the formula, will always evade them, and instead there will remain only each morning's new glory.
    Looking at the inscrutable elegance of the ice patterns' strange geometry, one is reminded of the children's story in which the spider spins in her web the words "Some Pig."
    Punctuating too the river's flat crust of snow are the stippled tracks of deer, their hoofs sometimes as small as coins, hundreds of coins spilled the evening before. Knowing deer as we do, it's no problem at all to recognize an interpretation for the snowy sentences of their passages.
Here
is where they crossed the river to get to the browse of the hawthorn bush.
Here
is where they came down off Hensley Mountain in search of morning sunlight.
Here
is where a doe with two fawns wandered along shore's edge, nibbling the dried stubble of last autumn's wild roses.
    Horrific, sometimes, will be dark ovals, shadowy lozenge shapes in the snow about the size of a deer's body, where the stippled tracks vanish. One imagines that though the deer for the most part are equipped with vast reservoirs of instinct, refined and accumulated across the millennia, so too is there chance and error, mistake and uncertainty in the formulas of their own passages; and it seems that over the course of a winter—the river thawing and freezing, opening and closing, thawing and freezing again—the river must become as filled with the bones and bodies of deer as were the fields of the pilgrims said to be filled with the fertilizer of fish, as taught to them by the natives of Plymouth Rock. One imagines the frozen river as possessing a hundred or more hungry mouths, secret and yawing, anxious for the taste of a deer; or that the river beneath the ice is thirsty and must drink of the deer, whose pale bones come in time to decorate its stony bottom like jewelry, the jewelry of chance or carelessness.
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    By mid-January, the deer are already beginning to look tired. They are not yet thin or gaunt, but to a close observer, and one familiar with their daily appearances, the weariness is clearly evident; and though it must have been building, it seems to me that their fatigue has appeared from almost out of nowhere, in the same manner that sometimes, early in the fall, after a hard south wind and heavy overnight rain, the ground is pasted and littered with the red and yellow leaves of the season and the trees' branches bare, whereas only the previous day the trees had retained their brilliant, burning colors and the ground its somber brown. You know intuitively that whatever has arrived on that overnight wind has been a long time in coming, but what it looks like to our sleepy eyes is that all was one day a certain way and then different the next. As if a hundred small things make no difference to the world, really, and are unobservable, but that one hundred and one small things do, and are.
    Sometime in January, that one extra inch of snow arrives, or that one extra unit of
something,
and though I do not believe it breaks the wild spirit of the deer, things are different that next day, and a certain burning light is gone from their dark, wet eyes. There is a new slowness to their movements, and a pause, a studied gathering of energy before they commit to any one movement. It's particularly noticeable in an animal in which such gathering or hesitancy had not been previously witnessed.
    This is the only thing, the only one, that tempers the rich feeling of bounty, of joy