Shepherd’s Work

My harvest was not bountiful this year. I sat on a shelf of shale rock, knees up, fingers laced together, spine exposed as the creek below stippled cold air upward. The river stream was stubborn, writing around a fallen log like a dog gnawing something clean. A brown scarf wrapped around my loosely braided hair, horse-mane thick. The woods, bare-limbed and candled with white late-winter light, had stopped barking at itself. For a long time the only sound was water rushing over gravel and the crisp punctuation of my own sorry teeth chattering. I hadn’t felt like a proper man in months, or a whole one anyway, but even the weary sameness of small rituals like a tight jaw felt necessary, bracing, almost good. Shepherd’s work.

I’d never seen myself the way I did until that early November afternoon, when the year was already thinning out. In that spidery image of a mountain and a stick figure shaped like me. Sometimes you see a thing so seamless it splits your idea of beauty. Sometimes it’s the way frost feathers up the window, sometimes it’s the scar that runs from wrist to elbow, and sometimes it’s just a branch struck heavy in winter, holding onto the vow to never lose my way twice the same season. I tried to spare my tears, if that’s what you’re waiting on. I’d halfway convinced myself that’s what being a man was: getting by on less, not asking for anything you couldn’t carry out with your own hands. Asked for forgiveness and I threaded through the elk-blown field, guided by a September angel that I trusted to know better. I saw it like a splinter, and everybody spends their life clawing to get it out. I didn’t. I also found a bit of a bend in my inherited nose, crooked to the right side. A son of a family of survivors lacing lore like staves in a basket, told like prayers: the crane who called down the scissoring daylight or the white wolf fighting famine, and if you listened with ears perked, I swear I could have heard it passionately mourning.

I let my sight gaze up the river through bare winter brush. Brittle ferns and hardened bramble gave way under my boots; twigs snapped like familiarity. Smoke blew from my mouth and curled around the pines and in the blue hush I started shedding burdens. But I knew, as the hunter knows the tundra’s veins even under fourteen feet of white, that these burdens weren’t the bane of my existence. Every shed antler, every ripple in the glass was a God-quiet message, and sometimes a bitter warning. And I attained it by reading the signs of something sly or sharp, having a taste of me as if I was stuck in a bear trap. Wholeness comes that way, by a slow, faithful piercing recognition. When I was a boy, I’d snapped every branch with ease. I’m nearly twenty-four, I still see that long-haired boy every morning, flinching under my voice. Sometimes he looks at me as if I’m a shield he’s unfit to carry but must, because that’s what the story needs. Today the years graze along my face, but memory runs underneath, crashing, like a broken faucet. For him - tender armed, willow shouldered, wild and wincing at the world - I’ll fail a thousand times, will chase his approval like a knight in a storybook, blind and shining under chainmail.

Now, sitting in the hungry fringe of woods behind my house, betting five on a friesian and drinking coffee black with a whit of whiskey, I realise I was less a skeleton and more a collection of twigs, lashed together, but holding back. Even at the periphery of this wild, indifferent wood, I feel the slow, stubborn thaw of holding back sideways in me. I had come to the forest in search of some high-minded silence, the kind I had read about in books and heard praised by men with salt thick beards and honest twitches at the corner of their eyes. It pried a confession from me just the same, drew me open like a surgeon’s touch. God does not always speak in answers; sometimes He leaves signs that require living with. At this point, the notebook in my lap looked incongruously white, like a bride’s kiss. But last Tuesday, when I noticed a buck caught up in barbed wire, I’d jumped the fence, bled my knuckles, lifted the trembling animal from its trap without asking who it belonged to or what it would cost me. I placed it gently in a clearance, and it looked at me with an understanding beyond gratitude. More of a mutual, stitched admission. I should walk off some anger sometimes.

I tried to see some narrative out of the last year. Taught myself how to spot hair caught on a snag, a streak of fur that clings to a burr like a pennant and spot a squirrel’s nest in March’s haze. But what surprised me that decisive morning was a downy woodpecker stuttering along a downed birch, splitting the quiet into pieces. I watched it for a while, its little violence so innocence-pure. It went at bark with headlong faith, not doubting a single strike. When the bird took off it left behind a mess of a dozen shallow wounds. I tried to decide if the tree looked more or less alive now, if it had finally received what it needed. And as heaven’s light struck the trunks, clear shadows spilled long and sudden, scraping along the drifts of this place. I thought about how, even with its bare branches, the trees made something beautiful just by being there, by being vulnerable and seen without complaints. By giving through sacrifice. I exhaled, watched the fog of it shiver out and vanish.

By February, in the brittle woods, the best I could muster was to sit still and let the wind knife into my body, the way I thought a man might if he were determined to let the world cut him into the shape it required. A man moves through his life like someone overhearing himself half-asleep. But somehow it was okay to hurt, out here where the wound showed itself right back. I’m a cursive pen mark scratched along the periphery. I came back here on a Thursday - because of course it would be a Thursday, because if you want your sacrifice to be atoned for you need an ordinary day. It’s good to check up on it. These things accumulate like split wood.

Above, the sky was draining itself of morning. I closed my eyes, letting the sore winds pass through me. Cyclical wounds and recoveries. Sacrifice isn’t pretty, but it’s good. I’m not complaining. That’s how it has to work. So I herd my sheep, keep my issues close enough to count. Thank God for this year now hard-spent and here’s an apology to what I know can’t surrender back. I remind myself that this year, my harvest was bountiful.