Trauma Farm Read Free Page A

shadow across an X-ray landscape—shaded thus because the human eye’s receptors can’t receive all the wavelengths of light from the moon at that low level. This makes me wonder if we perceive moonlight the way the honeybee sees flowers. Its colour perception is weighted toward the blue end of the spectrum.
    Olive, blacker than the night, pants alongside me, her oily fur glowing. This makes me remember the varieties of darkness I’ve seen. Prairie dark, near-Arctic darkness, darkness in the high mountain country, the total blackness of jungles, and the luminosity of nights at sea. Most of all, there’s the darkness of my homeland, the raincoast. When there is no moon the Gulf Islands have a darkness you can almost breathe. It’s a cloud forest, and we can live for weeks inside clouds. Sometimes, you’d swear the rain erupts from the ground. Rain showers strike when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. That’s when they say the devil is kissing his wife. Standing at our window I’ll watch clouds appear miles away on Swanson Channel and drift inland, and the rain will hit our house on the upswing. It can also be drizzly for months, yet warm, a temperate climate at the end of the Japanese Current. I am so born into our weather, my forgetfulness, and the usual neighbourhood visits, I often spend weeks trying to figure out where I left my jacket.
    Night walking has its disadvantages. A few summers after we moved to the farm I was awakened by the dogs. The chicken coop again. I jumped into my boots and rushed outside. When I reached the coop it was locked tight and quiet, the hens muttering softly. The night was island dark and the dogs were running strange—this wasn’t a coon chase. Their hackles were up, and there was a nervousness in their circling. I moved around to the back of the coop, curious. Then I heard a branch break under the big rock maple. Something was moving between me and the field.
    A deer? Since hunting season was approaching, I decided to investigate, despite the bad light. There were stinging nettles between me and the intruder, who was drifting stealthily away. Stinging nettles are no fun for the bare-assed. Yet I couldn’t resist the opportunity to follow, albeit cautiously. This is the lot of the hunter. I instinctively went into mode, almost inhaling the hunt, while circling the maple. Intelligence-challenged Olive, meanwhile, had finally caught on that I was following prey. She circled onto the back road, trapping it between us. I moved faster in the darkness, still unable to see what I was pursuing. Another branch snapped, and then our prey started to run, swiftly. It had to be a large buck, the way its feet struck the ground.
    That’s when it hit the page-wire fence concealed by another clump of nettles. A bloodcurdling scream erupted, and I realized I’d done a very bad thing. It was a cougar, and it was pissed—and I was right behind it, wearing nothing but my gumboots. I froze. Brave Olive ran for the house, while I needlessly yelled for both dogs to get back, the border collie cravenly glued to my ankle as I retreated.
    We all know how, in a moment of fright, the hackles on our neck can stand up. Well, I was so scared I could feel my chest hairs straighten out.
    “The pigs!” I thought. The cougar wasn’t interested in the chickens; it was going for the young feeder pigs I had in a pen beside the lower field. Having backed up close enough to the house, I ran inside and began fiddling with the locks and double locks on the gun cabinet that the laws of our time dictate. I was looking for a howitzer, but I settled on a shotgun and lead slugs. A better tool for close encounters in the dark. By the time I returned, armed, dressed, waving the powerful hand lantern, the forest was quiet again. I flashed the pig yard, where they were calmly browsing amid the stumps. They looked at me with an intelligent curiosity that made me recall an old farmer who remarked, when I was dallying on some job,