An Easy Meal

Abstract

An Easy Meal Heidi Bell (bio) “The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes, and gazelles are in cages in our zoos.” —Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers In the beginning—and still—Fox dances in his black stockings, tracing a perfect arc in Bear’s periphery. His nostrils sip the air, his only waking impulse the mouth-watering curiosity pulling him forward to the hindquarters of a deer sunk in a bed of pine needles or to the ripe, delicate layers of rotting fish buried in the bank of red sand. Bear’s secrets give way so sumptuously beneath Fox’s paws. He is exquisitely attuned to Bear, feels the air quiver when Bear turns again toward one of his caches, and Fox slinks off, just out of reach. When the berries dry up and the snow sifts down through the trees, Bear disappears, and it’s a matter of principle for Fox to follow the thread of a scent on the cold air, to steal into Bear’s den. The redness of him, his intricate musk trickles into Bear’s dreams, and Bear moans as nimble black lips grasp and sharp white incisors drag a rabbit carcass from a cocoon of dried grass out into the snow. Fox and Bear dream through the long winter nights, while the Storyteller describes them in stories made while watching from the patient underbrush, while praying for god to appear as a fat buck. Stories of Fox pilfering Bear’s honey, Bear’s fish; Fox tricking Bear into ice fishing with his tail, formerly bushy; Bear insisting, in tale after tale, that might is superior to wile—and proven wrong again and again. II Spring is when it rains and rains, and—like the stream that thaws and swells and overflows, moving everything in its grasp onward through space and time—the Storyteller, alienated now from the forces that made him, reaches in and makes a mess of things. Fox reaches for an easy fish but is caught in the roiling water and buffeted by the churning debris of Nature and Civilization—gravel, shards of clay pots, broken branches, the twisted frame of a loom, clots of winter leaves, a cracked coat of arms, a sodden map of the British Empire. The Storyteller deposits Fox, weak and battered, far downstream. The unfamiliar [End Page 163] forest reeks of Bear. The smell is coming from a heap of rocks, a castle, toward which Fox creeps until the door bangs open, and three male Bears emerge on hind legs, dressed in cloak, in tunic, in doublet and pantaloons. As they step onto the path, the Bears’ front paws dangle idiotically. Fox is pulled after them as if attached by a string, unsteady and disoriented, for he, too, is walking on hind legs, his nose exceedingly far from the ground, his luxurious tail wagging with unease. The Bears notice him there and approach, and Fox cowers inside the sensory overload of them, three boars together. He bows low, drawing his foot back along the ground in keeping with a custom that has nothing to do with him but has somehow taken over his body, and the Bears grunt with laughter and call him “Scrapefoot” before going on their way. Where has it gone—Fox’s supple ability to evade capture? In this unholy place, any of the Bears could have torn him to pieces while he bowed and scraped. For the first time, he wants to be free of Bear, and he wrests himself out of the invisible grip of the Storyteller, who has decided all animals must walk upright. Fox hunches now on all fours and feels more himself. And as the scent of the Bears fades, he is compelled to fumble with the door latch and slip inside the castle, for where Bear is, there is an easy meal. He ransacks the place, searching for the caches, but the Storyteller—unfathomably—has stashed nothing in the cushions lining the three thrones of rock, nothing in the wardrobe but costumes for dancing—red wool jackets...