The Ulm Pishkun

On the lips of the Blackfeet the word pishkun means "deep blood kettle," a reference to the jumping buffalo of buffalo-jumping days. It is a concave rock face—and it looks like a face—with two osprey aeries for eyes, wide willow habitations, and the cracked granite mouth split through a seam of shale like an old man shooting his granddaughter a wry, wrinkled countenance. There is an unshaven, sun-shielded stubble chin at the bottom, the yellow meadow grasses growing deep in the penumbras of a coulee. Scouring the high plain I see the day in late April, the medicine woman swooshing her thistle-painted skirt, the huntsmen rallying in a wide u-shaped wavelength, pawing the ground with hundreds of moccasins made from the fraternity of the iniwa, the buffalo's kindred. As the men shake their spears the paramount hunter races in with a torch pine. He lights the tall sawgrass surrounding his quarry; fires rise and vacillate like the arms of octopi, and the bison runs with his shaggy hide and his fat slapping his legs, stumbling and stuttering over the precipice.
     After, the entire party files down and surrounds the kill. The youngest boy leans in, presses his arms into the wooly brown body, and nudges the big black horn with the top of his head. He says, "Brother, brother, we are the dwellers of the backbone of the earth. Iiníí, forgive us, for we have done this thing."

Three Bighorn Rams at Gibson Reservoir

Backpacking. The lake smells of sulfite and honey, not a clover-honey you bottle and lick off fingers but a honey that lingers near bramble and jasper with a sugary redolence that asks of one nothing but to taste, recalls the thin-leafed essence of pinot noir or the musked honeydew scent of newsprint on a daughter's hands at breakfast. Wind-riffled waves come in low, each clambering over the next, a skyscraper built in rapid sections, notebook paper piling over two years at the corner of a credenza. About sixty feet above on a flat outcropping overlooking the canyon, three fever-yellow haunches camouflage against the marigold of winter-dried Indian paintbrushes and mountain cacti—a troop of bighorns! One can scarcely see them as they march up the north limestone face, except for the fat black horns, keratin-spears curled twice around like Byzantine sabers. A gunpowder crack echoes down the Bob Marshall sluices. Each ram rears his two front hooves and scrabbles, almost glides, up the near pass, back legs twisting over rocks and crackle bushes as if memorized, mathematician-rote, worked it through on a chalkboard the night before, prefigured each step on the banana-wood beads of an abacus. I see their black tails flash, strobe-like, like the eyes of Monongahela lizards as they bound over the other side; the wide funnel-antlers christen their heads in the manner of jojoba berry censers, Muhajadeen turbans, or the miters of Inquisition priests chasing a quarry of heretics past Galicia, Extremadura, and La Rioja, pursuing the large wool-bearded men who will give up at last, heat-choking, on the Strait of Gibraltar. Anxious voices rise in pitch, send ululations to the Atlantic. They notch the pepper tree for a hanging post.

- first published in the May 2005 issue of The Quarry

A Dead Animal in the Bob Marshall Wilderness

There is the skin of some animal here, though
what it is is hard to say. It appears
to've been ripped straight off the muscle
and bone, stripped clean as one does
with a Christmas ham. Looking closer, I see

black midges smaller than semicolons
scuttling over the hide. Its hairs
lie slicked down and feel wet to the touch
as I smooth them under my palms. A
shudder goes up from my pelvis, through

my iliac to my lumbar to my brain stem. A death;
the ravages of an animal in the forest. A
beaver, perhaps, or a bobcat. Don't tell me
I shouldn't feel this way. Feelings can't be helped.
A death. The death of something shaggy, soulful, and alive.

Brent McCafferty has had poems published in The Teacher's Selection Anthology of Poetry, The Quarry, and The Indented Pillow. He is a 21-year-old BA English graduate of St. Olaf College, and is currently applying to graduate programs in Creative Writing. For the next year, he will be working at Montana State University in his hometown, Great Falls, Montana.

Email: Brent McCafferty

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