Big Sky Showdown at the Little Pond
art by Mars Tomasetti
She made her way out the door. She’s got a real, big-time and completely legit career. I wiped wake-up gunk out of disillusioned crevices of my regretful and desperately bleary eyes.
Our home is silent. I rip-a-curse of rage at the universe—“damn, my reprobate style!” My peculiar brand of wayward chutzpah. The beats of my heart felt like the leaves outside, decaying on the ground. Fall always makes us realize how far we have to go to get back up.
The numbers on the clock read: running behind. Change never comes from the maniacal rush, faster never saved any souls. I staggered out the door, frowzy and draggin’ my spirit. Crisp air hit my nostrils, and the trees breathe purity.
That dilapidated truck always takes a few attempts, but ain’t missed a horizon-line, yet—five turns, and benedictions, and the engine rumbled. Stopped at red-light despair, the cadence of an electric-cowboy tune, combined with the putrid scent of pristine death—a squashed cat, all nine lives spent—shoots me to an old scene, like a shotgun to the memory glands.
I’m gettin’ out of an effaced rig of neon green, yanking on my pack-of-a-house, and it’s too heavy for my neophyte back. I’m gone, there’s trail to tromp, the inclines take you out and into the infinite nowhere…the Mon-tucky wilderness, and the exigencies of lower status on the food-chain.
I wanna puke, it’s high elevation and thin oxygen. The view makes the title-worthy grade: Big-Sky country! Every morning was raw with big adventure—hell, you were just happy to zip your skull in the comfort of a sleeping-bag at night, and the body always ached, but it beat the gnaw of predatory jaws.
I almost met my fate in those hallowed woods—damn near shook the maker’s hand, whoopin’ it up, over spectacularly wildlands. We had left two axes behind, misery-whipping logs that blocked the path of the trail.
I was alone, retrieved the tools, and u-turned my steps, going back to camp—two hours till sunset. In the deep miles of the Bitterroot backcountry, I descended steep dirt, and the trail swooped left, skirting a pond, where jagged peaks took bites like teeth out of the sky.
Up to its chest in the pond was a massive moose, and it cooled itself off, dunking in the glacial water. I stopped to marvel at the trifle thing, city-slickers don’t consider.
The quiet hung eerily, the moose splashed carelessly, and I recollected the hunter’s advice, “I ain’t scared of anything, out in dese darn woods—except, of course, for a moose, that is.”
The escape route hooked into a thicket of trees. It was time to make a furtive exit. I glanced back to sear a memory. The moose, twenty feet away, glowered intentions of territorial menace into my soul—it was a big sky showdown at the little pond.
