Jeff Slim, Coyote On The I-10 East //Ma'ii Bí Só
Thoughts on Raising Girls Freshly Feral
They are children of the wood. They belong to the pack, the band, the herd, the flock. They know how to stand on four legs, a shoulder’s width apart on a mountainside, and bellow, bearlike. Some leap mad as squirrels, loud and wild. Some stalk silent through sticks and bark, arm hair raised like fox hackles. Yet more bound after deer through yellow grass, faster on four legs than adult men are on two. Others grip tree limbs in horn-toughened toes and cackle-scream, jump so surely you will swear they are flying. They are a tangle, a tumble, of grass-painted skeletons, wearing crowns of leaves in their hair in a kingdom of branches
Your job is to bring the girls home, teach them. When you arrive in their forest, booted feet covered in mud, baseball cap on head, hair sticking to the back of your neck and flies too, the girls scream and flap skinny arms. Or they snarl and crouch on hands and knees, hunkered necks low. Or they rear on two legs and paw the air and blow through the nose, slap the ground with open palms. The men who led you here are dirty, experienced, unafraid. They look at their quarry and smile, clap each other on the back and say, We’re losing the light. Be easier to round ‘em up in the morning.
They build a fire and you sit near it, so close that your cheeks and calves start to burn. The forest is full of their night noises: howling, snuffling, shaking tree branches. You scoot closer to the fire, even though the embers spark on your knees. The men sleep. You don’t. You never close your eyes, not ever, in the dark around strange men. In one boot, you have stuck a can of mace. In the other, a pocket knife. Still, you stick close to the light. Your red nails are black from the dirt. Your cell phone doesn’t work out here. You want to check your voicemail for a new message from your doctor, anxious to be unreachable but glad, too.
In the morning, the sleeping men will help you bring the children—girls, all—to the city. To capture them, the men will have to get close to them, even though they stamp and stomp and scream and snarl. The men will come close and the men will touch them though they do not want
to be touched and the men will put them in nets and cages and you will take them home, where you’ve been hired by an adoption company to teach them people things. You usually teach addition, subtraction, picture books like A House for Hermit Crab. But you need the money, you rationalize, remembering the voicemail you hope isn’t there. These girls do not need math. They need you to teach them many things about being girls instead of bears squirrels stallions ravens beasts. You need the practice raising unwanted children.
Start by teaching them how to be afraid of the dark. They are not yet, not like you have learned to be, after years of using the bathroom in a group, never leaving your drink unattended at a party, locking your car doors in a late-night drive-thru. Not them. They were raised by, and have become, creatures of the dark woods, hunters at home in the night, equipped with claws, a sense of their own capability, teeth that they do not use for smiling. Like you, they have had their survival depend on their awareness, scuttling through the trees, and, unlike you, they are alert, but not afraid. Unless you teach them to be, like you were taught.
No one knows for sure how they got here, in this tall national park a few hours from the state line. But you think you know. You can imagine the panic of new mothers holding daughters for the first time, thinking about everything this baby must un/learn to be a woman. How tempting it would be to never teach them, to instead leave them in leaves where they will never be touched except to sleep nose to tail with a fox, to lose oneself in the thick mat of bear fur, to pick insects from feathered backs. They will know the feel of soft moss under fingertips and what it is like to walk through the night and not be frightened of men. This way they are more rocks and branches and sharp edges than girls. A mother might wonder if it is necessary to teach them to shrink, to shy, to shake. Surely not these girls, they of the forest caves and cliffs and cold rivers and prickly brush. Perhaps as you wait you may start to wonder if you, too, should leave them—join them, even—right where they are.