Michael Andrews Arts
Watching The Buck
Holcomb Lake, 1959
On the north side of the lake is a meadow with a rock fall spilling five hundred feet down the face of a granite cliff.
The rock fall is all loose scree and medium sized boulders, tumbling in slow motion for thousands of years into the meadow below.
Pop and Patriquin took me and Rick and Dennis and Lance scrambling up the rocks.
We slide and tumble and dodge one another's landslides.
It took us blood and sweat and tears and two hours of heart pounding, leg crushing, spine breaking climbing to make it to the top
where could look out across the sea of other peaks cresting across the range, and down to the lake waiting blue below us.
The next day we all sat in the quiet of the afternoon on the big boulder that sits in solitary grandeur in the middle of the meadow.
We are watching the clouds sail over the green joy of the meadow, across the ice blue sky, and pass out of sight beyond the granite wall.
We make less noise than the afternoon breeze blowing off the lake.
Suddenly, without a sound, a lone buck with a huge wrack wanders into the meadow, looking for tender grass and a cool drink,
and we hold our breath, scarcely able to contain the sheer thrill of being this close to so
wild a thing, hoping he doesn't see us, doesn't run,
and he crops the cheerful grass until finally, one of us moves, and the buck jerks his head,
startled the first moment he realizes that his meadow is populated with mortally dangerous predators.
He bounds across the grass in less than a heartbeat and begins leaping and bounding up the rock fall, boulder to boulder, without a single slip,
without a single rock slide, and before we remember to take a second breath, his bobbing white rump
leaps over the top, and he disappears from our lives in less than two minutes flat.
Only hawks have loved these mountains more.