Page 129 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Fleshing the Hide

Nora L. Jamieson

Home now. Or was that home? And what did I carry home from New Hampshire beside the dried and

unworked hide now tacked to the board, the yearling doe hide, who was flesh, who was a fawn, who

was a wet and gangly newborn, who was carried and loved, who was the meeting of an egg and a

sperm, who was a longing, who was a possibility. No more.

Who was sighted, shot, skinned, quartered, or bled out to age the meat, whose skin under my hands

was fleshed and grained and soaked and smoked and will be stretched again and again over the

coming winter, my hands raw and bleeding. Whose lovely head might be one of many in a large vat of

heads that will feed Chickadee and vulture and coyote.

I enter after the kill, after the hunter’s early rising, the coffee and eggs, the toast at the local diner

before filling up the thermos, heading out to the woods, before climbing up into the tree stand. Before

the waiting, before the sighting, before the shot. I arrive after the soft crumple, the violent spasm, the

instant death, the slow one.

I arrive after the tents have been pitched, the food delivered to the kitchen, the smoke house fires lit,

the selection of the hide carefully saved out for me. After the morning prayers and coffee and smokes,

I arrive into the temporary village, too gentle a term for all that has happened before me. Children run

about. Dogs prance showing off the prized legs of deer or wait hopefully for bits of fat to fall to the

ground.

Like a paper doll inserted into a scene, I arrived to that small village of men and women hunched over

fleshing beams, the dull crescent-­‐moon blades working the hides in deep concentration so as not to

tear the thin places, perhaps knowing the debt owed to the hide that might just as much have yearned

to return to earth.

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