Here with laborious stealth
On heavy snow-shoed feet through
Years piled in windswept blizzards
Men stalked with skill and prayer
The wary deer.
Glimpsed through gray leafless thickets
Heads high, long mule ears
Tuned to the whisper of leather
In snow, they would hear and spring
Too soon away, out of range,
Spear and arrow no match for their
Bounding flight. The men weary
Watch still all the shivering
Way home, wait yet near the trail,
Peer through snowlit dusk.
Snowplows scrape the highway clear,
Pushing drifts aside,
Spread the salt that draws
Deer, who pause, only listening still
For stealthy step, wolf, lion,
So they die fearless on crumpled chrome
Feared, cursed by we
Who eat slow, earthbound meat,
Pass too fast to see the blood
Smeared on the salted
Street, bare now. The plows
Pass again on the shoulder,
Piling snow sheared
Off into walls of ice
That melt and settle.
Here and there I notice
A slim leg protrudes,
Or dark eyes sightless peer
From the banked snow,
Feasts for the magpies and eagles.
And I wonder if I listened
In the thickets would I hear,
When the snowlit dusk draws down,
The spirits of the hunters greet
The spirits of the deer.
--Ellen Walker
