Then come years sallow and goldenrod, years whose mustard skies went hardly stirred by unhearty gales as i knelt down in dusky grass and let one afternoon then next and next wash over me, a stream, a yellow stream, coursing the color of the fat sheared straight from woolen hides as wild creatures gasped their lasts. At first father hunted too, cocked his pistol, grunted, grimaced, swigged and shot. But soon those afternoons were mine and only mine. In long grass i spoke secret prayers, became hidden, strange, slept and woke to stirring blades. Alive, i dragged the beasts away so he could drunken skin and cut them down while they swelled gazes to me, squealed, stumbled, kicked and bled hollow, drained and empty, died.
