ART + STORY BY CAMERON BUTTERFLY SMITH Night falls in the old wood and the air stirs with the smells of fire and food and the small sounds of subdued life. A band of men with burly backs crouch around the blaze. Bluster and laughter are squeezed out beside mouthfuls of the day’s hunt and prideful voices. Clinks and scrapes of wood on metal from the cooks play percussion to an ambient pouring of liquids. Excited noise settles into satisfied grumbles once they are taken by the warmth of coated ribs, burnt wood and whiskey. Just past their realm and enveloped in ours as deep rest draws near, then we strike. First, we circle their circle at a distance unseen, taking care to embrace each singular sound we can shake up from the forest floor. Cacophony and confusion replace clinks and comfort as each raucous snap of twig and torrential flurry of leaf, each circular pulse and beat syncopate with their gasps, bated and virginal. Their eyes look at everything and nothing in an effort to make linear the tangled unknown. Speed up, slow down, leave no surrounding spot untouched. Keep trampling, remain unseen, make them afraid. Subtle gasps make way for frantic No. 147 exclamations as dread sets in. An unfettered scream slips out. Then, we cease, leaving them with a silence appearing endless in human breadth but a mere flash to us. Voices chime in with bargain and reason; woebegone whispers of wolves, wendigo, and what could it be? The sharp ones act immediately, briskly under the veil of hush. The sharp ones gather themselves, draw on their sharpness and orient themselves back in the direction they came from, every desperate attempt made to blend in with the silence we allow for them as they make their escape. Soon we need not watch them again, those sharp ones. The dull ones — four of them this time — panic and break the corral, sprinting into the wood, spilling headfirst like a dam of cold water into a mouth, so thirsty and pleased. We hurry in after them and begin our hunt. One is found days later in shock, gnawed on, dragging himself by finger and nail along the forest floor; one is fetal underneath an uprooted tree, chattering uncontrollably, beside himself; one is rocking, cradling his body with eyes rolling far into the back of his head, muttering BEST OF 017
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