55) I am crossing at the highest elevations, along the cold spine of mountains spiking the violet horizon. Life is less plentiful up here. I carry a smaller bail of pretty souls to forget. Peak after peak roll up the earth. It is almost as if I am spinning the world, like a circus elephant atop a ball loosed by painted clowns. What a curious pret-a-porter idea, just batting around my head. I've never even been to the circus! Perhaps the idea assembled itself from the tiny bits of my knowledge of men, and Dr. Creep's designs for me, of course. And no sooner do I think it then I come upon an instructive, unwholesome place. It is a valley, a cup of snow, really, a couple dozen rods of land between two elevations. I espy a group of thick men, heavily armed. I don't know how they got there; by themselves, heft and girth considered, it is unlikely. Horses must be nearby. The men mill about, they tred upon alpine flowers and shuffle among stunted pine. There is a light wind. Voices carry. I hear words in my tongue. A few words are isolated and bounced off to me by the great ear my stony watching place makes: Home. Truck. Shit. Forty-five seventy. A truck climbs, approaches and winds down among them. A large mesh cage sits on its flatbed. Something lolls within it. On some days only a list of things occur to me to recount, things I've destroyed, killed, or have rapidly passed in a blur of the same. But today I have an object, one and only, that I might concentrate on: One thing, one life, one basin of dirty water to watch drain: A cage. No, two. Each containing a some pearl of learning. Much excitement attends their arrival. Two men get out of the truck and move to the cages. The first thing released, or dragged out on a leash, as happened, was a creature I've seen once before: an Ibex, improbable, but here. Massive horns of white and black, a narrow, stripped body, low to the ground. Savannah or the Steppe? I am graced with a memory of its passive self. And as I savor my reflection, but before I understand what I think, lost in phantoms, I hear a shot ring out. The animal falls a few feet from a man who fired, for I see the smoke of his rifle carried off. Adulation. Cheers. High-pitched howling. Done. Attention shifts. It is the turn of the second pearl. I know this animal too. It is so weak it has to be carried. Two men hoist it by the legs to a patch of clean snow. Three men gather around it to argue about who shall take what is a lion. Mane, silver-tipped with age, bury the hands that prop it up against an icey cornice. Revived by a cold it has never known, the lion steps. Another shot. The lion falls. Cheers.
Disturbed, I descend from my place to the bloody show. The men get me, my malevolence, right away and fire. I am hit often, but owing to my nature, it means nothing. Once upon them, they are vanquished in an instant. I kneel beside the lion, its eyes still open. I lay on hands until it is nothing more than tuft and vapor. My aim.