View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DigitalCommons@USU Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2005 Hear Him Roar Andrew Wingfield Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the Environmental Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Wingfield, A. (2005). Hear him oar:r A novel. Logan: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. (EAR(IM2OAR !.OVEL !NDREW7INGFIELD HEAR HIM ROAR HEAR HIM ROAR A Novel ANDREW WINGFIELD Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2005 Andrew Wingfield All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 www.usu.edu/usupress Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free, recycled paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wingfield, Andrew, 1966– Hear Him Roar : a novel / Andrew Wingfield p. cm. ISBN 0-87421-615-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wildlife management—fiction. 2. Midlife crisis—fiction. 3. Biologists—fiction. 4. Puma—fiction. 5. California—fiction. I. Title. PS3623.I6625 H43 2003 813/.6—dc22 2005013371 To Tania, for seeing Running with the deer. This is what she called it, because her dark hour was their hour also. They spent their days bedded down along the river. They would come up into the neighborhood after midnight to feed on lawns, shrubs, unfenced gardens. Each night they traveled great distances, eating every green, tender thing they could find. Before dawn they would turn toward the river again, gliding through the neighborhood like a host of spir- its, dissolving back into the brush. She was the only one on the block who didn’t mind their ravenous eating. She understood that they were in trouble, multiplying as fast as the tracts and malls that were devouring their habitat and funneling them into the narrow greenbelt along the river. She understood that they were a public menace, not just for the yards they pillaged but also for the cars they wrecked, the arms and legs and skulls that cracked when people plowed into them on the roads. Every day at the insurance company she processed the claims, she heard her bosses moan about the deer, the money they were costing. She was a good employee, reliable, efficient, smart—too smart to challenge her bosses on the matter of the deer. Anyway her understanding with the deer was secret, never acknowledged openly to anyone but her boyfriend. She knew them. They knew her. She told him they ran with her, not away from her, and he believed it. She told him it wasn’t discipline that got her up and out an hour before dawn each day. She told him it was greed. For quiet. For unrestricted movement. For the sliver of each day that didn’t belong to anyone. Having that sliver helped her share the rest—with her kids, her bosses, him. The reporters asked if it had made him uncomfortable, her going off into the dark like that, alone. When he said of course, vii they thought he meant Of course, I feared for her safety. Because her safety is what they were asking about. But maybe he meant something else, or something more. Maybe he was talking about the way she would remove herself from his heavy, sleepy grasp and slip away into the darkness, going off to seek something she didn’t find with him, leaving the bed as eagerly as she’d entered it five hours before. He was glad she told him about the deer. Somehow this made it easier to have her leave his bed. He didn’t tell the reporters that, but he did tell them he took her seriously the two days before it happened, when she said something was different out there, some- thing she couldn’t put her finger on, a feeling down by the river, an uneasiness she sensed in the deer, in herself. If she had been super- stitious, she’d told him, she would have thought it was a ghost. That had to be what she thought at the moment of the attack. What else could she have thought? Did she think it was a person? No, people make noise. She would have heard a human attacker coming. She was well into her run by then, a good three miles upriver from her home, and deep into the runner’s trance. The muscles and the tendons all loose and warm. Heart pump- ing strong and steady, lungs feeling free. Eyes adjusted to the darkness, which was barely beginning to thin. By now she was getting what she came here for, the thing that always lured her back, the opening of pores, of glands, of emotions, the honing of senses that was also a kind of opening, a dissolving of boundaries, a blending with the darkness no one owns. Running with the deer, sharing this shadowy element that their presence defined for her. So of course she sensed it, as the deer did, or because they did. Something different, a presence faint but definite, like a word on the tip of the tongue, a sound on the very edge of human hearing, vague, so subtle as to be almost nothing, and for all this exciting, stimulating, and never more elusive than in the instant before it struck. It came from her right side, from far enough behind that she never saw it. The blow was so fierce that she didn’t touch ground viii again until she hit a spot twenty feet down the sloped embank- ment to the left of the trail. The force carried her another twelve feet down the slope, and her too-zealous attacker ended up seven feet beyond her. The hard landing broke her left arm. When the attack resumed she raised both hands and both knees and began to fight. For her children, not herself. Because she knew she was dead. Almost immediately, long before she quit fighting, she accepted that. She had been selected. She had been watched. And now she had been struck by a killer so skilled, so discreet that in the seconds before it hit her she had imagined it was far away. The fighting was awful—vicious, bloody, long. She fought for the children, so they would know she fought. But she didn’t mind dying this death. He would understand this. Maybe that was why she’d let this one move in with her. She had chosen to run with the deer. And now, as the sky brightened beyond the canopy of branches, like a deer she dissolved. ix PART ONE COUGAR COUNTRY If you’re not born in THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY, it takes a few years for you to know the first day of fall when it comes. I’ve lived here for over thirty years, about half my life. By now I’ve learned to read sights like the one that greeted my eyes when I walked out the door that morning—a dozen or so yellow spade-shaped leaves that had dropped from the fruitless mulberry that shades the driveway. We were well into Indian summer at the time. Here that means chilly mornings and warm afternoons, a sky full of tawny light, and very little wind. Those leaves hadn’t blown down. They had let go. The temperature that morning was well above freezing, but still low enough that my old Pontiac Vera needed a little time to get warm. I got her running and left her to idle while I gathered up the fallen leaves and placed them around the base of one of my rosebushes, not thinking that those leaves might have some mes- sage for me about letting go, not thinking any such thing as I got my bike out of the garage and strapped it to the rack on Vera’s back bumper. By then she was ready to go. I live in one of this area’s middle-aged neighborhoods, close to the west bank of the Sacramento River, opposite downtown. Within seconds of the merge into sluggish traffic Vera and I rose to cross the river. The view from the elevated freeway bridge was wide open, but I was galled this morning, as I had been for a long stretch of mornings, by what I couldn’t see. A decade before, when Jean and I had agreed to shack up at her place, I’d started making this commute. Back then I would look left from here, toward downtown Sacramento, and glimpse the white dome of 3 4 / Hear Him Roar the Capitol. That old beauty was blocked now by a group of gar- ish glassy towers bankrolled by the Hackenbills and the Venuttis, two local families who started competing in the seventies to see who could make the most money selling flimsy houses and good weather to water-guzzling, road-choking, air-polluting suckers from everywhere. As a non-native, my only claim is that I showed up here when there was still plenty of room. Back then, on a sunny morning like this, I’d have seen the Sierras bulked up along the rim of the eastern sky. Today the mountains were hidden behind the dingy veil of smog that thickened with each windless day. My commute took me twenty miles east of the city, out where the land begins to wrinkle and tilt, climbing its bumpy way from the flat valley floor to the rolling hills above.