The Dark Night of the Badgers

The forest is restless this morning. While feeding the chickens and checking the incubator, Sarah notices what appear to be fresh claw marks on the chicken coop. A stray fox? So far, none have had any success violating the coop fencing. She dismisses the other option. Not something she wants to deal with when Paul’s away.

After returning to the cabin, she prepares for her husband’s arrival. The inside with its twelve-foot pitched ceiling feels cozy from the reddish glow the sinking sun bounces off the log walls. To the original main room, they’d attached an open two-story addition–kitchen and bathroom underneath a sleeping loft. The kitchen mixes a new large GE fridge next to an antique porcelain-enamel sink.

Whistling, Sarah seasons the simmering venison, washes two potatoes for baking, and shells fresh peas from the garden. She digs into her hope chest next to the couch and retrieves a bottle of fine wine, a wedding present she squirreled away for this occasion. She places the wine, along with a non-alcoholic version for her, into the fridge to cool. Not only is today their first anniversary, but she has wonderful news to share. A smile envelops her face.

She steps outside and picks the three remaining daffodils from a bed along the cabin’s side. Before returning inside, she stops on the porch and surveys their land: a pristine bowl nestled in a range of wooded hills. Their cabin, consisting of logs and planks cut from these same woods, perches atop a small knoll overlooking a four-stall barn, an extended chicken coop with a fenced-in run, and a stone-walled well. The homestead is carved from an aggressive forest that constantly tries to retake what it has lost.

In the distance, she can see the beginning of the dirt runway where this morning she waved to Paul as he headed north for a customer. Along the ridge to the west is a long line of hundred-foot-plus Douglas firs whose shadows advance on their property as the sun sets until it covers the barn and then the chicken coop, darkening the land, inviting predators to an early meal. The same Douglas firs that, when lumbered away to make their road, will finance their freedom and, she smiles, more sunlight for her vegetable garden.

Beautiful as the land is, Sarah hates being imprisoned in the wilderness – for that’s what it feels like without a good road and civilization three bumpy hours away via ATV. But Paul’s uncle Zemo left him the property, and he wanted to see if he could make a go of it. He’d cleared the rough access road and rehabilitated the barn when they met at his cousin’s birthday party on the Santa Barbara beach.

After a six-month courtship squeezed onto his weekly supply trips, she agreed to go along with him, to see if they could make a go of it. Snared in the throes of love, she was anxious to strike out on her own, away from the San Barbara society world of her parents, away from her phony, materialistic friends, and the boring suburban homemaker script written for her by her prim and proper mother. She pats her stomach and promises herself she won’t raise her daughter, their daughter, that way.

Now a year later, she is still madly in love with Paul, even more so if that’s possible, but fed up with the days alone with no one to talk to except too many chickens to even name and a mama and poppa goat yet to breed. She is fed up with non-stop chores and tired of lonely nights while Paul delivers cargo for his clients to remote places in the Cessna Skylane, another gift from the late Uncle Zemo.

A distant rumble draws her attention to the dark blue mountain range in the west. The rim of dark clouds over the ridges seems to be moving sideways away from her. She can hope.

Later, buried under a red-striped Hudson Bay blanket, Sarah reads Jane Eyre for the third time. The blazing fireplace reflects her brooding body in the ebony eyes of a dead elk hanging over the mantle. A tarnished bronze sign dangles from the animal’s jutting antlers – “I Lost My Head Over You.” She would have tossed the tacky placard months ago had it not come from Paul.

A plink-plink from the attic crawlspace announces raindrops striking the bottom of an aluminum saucepan. Tree limbs scrape across the roof. A galvanized pail, blown off its hook on an outside wall, jounces and jangles in a sing-song fashion downhill toward the barn.

Sarah checks the antique brass carriage clock, her mother’s final gift before she and Paul headed north. Six o’clock. Paul should be an hour out. She inhales deeply, rises from her cozy couch, and steps onto the wet and windy porch. She looks to the west. The first of the incoming clouds are attacking the rising moon, tossing their Oregon forest homestead into darkness.

She watches as the weather speeds toward her. From somewhere comes a low-pitched grumbling noise. Could be distant thunder on the march or a plane circling–but in her bones, she fears it’s something else. Have they returned? Even if so, she prays Paul won’t try to land on their dirt runway in rainy weather, that he’ll divert to the Sunriver airport with its instrument approach as promised.

~

Days before, they argued about the trip.

“Don’t give me that glum face. We have no choice,” he said moments after announcing he had accepted a charter to Columbia Gorge.

She twisted his napkin into the fancy rose her mother used for dinner parties. “You won’t be home until after sunset,” she said and placed the other napkin flat on her side of the table. She knew what followed was a dialogue dance couples often engage in.

“Worried I can’t land in the dark?” A faux question. He knew she knew the answer. The question was his attempt to allow her to admit she was scared to stay alone.

“They say there’s bad weather coming.” Redundant information. She’d seen the radar printout of the storm on his desk. Her way of voicing her concern about his flying in bad weather.

“If I don’t beat the front back, I’ll land at Sunriver.”

She made him promise.

~

At the time, she was pleased by his caution. Now that caution meant he wouldn't arrive home in time. She wonders if the badgers knew she was there alone.

Under normal circumstances, she looked forward to occasional nights alone with the floods and detectors on guard. She’d brew a pot of tea, extinguish the house lights, and sit on the veranda under a canvas of twinkling stars. Her grandfather taught her the constellations’ names and their mythical tales revealed in the night heavens he called "God's palette." It was at times like those she felt totally connected to the sky and the land, their land.

Outside, she hears the neighbor’s terrier yipping from over the hill. He yips all the time, likely a squirrel. Mrs. Carlson will swat him with a rolled-up newspaper as she saw her do once before, and he’ll quiet down.

But then, nervous cackles come from outside, below the cabin. She turns on the outside lights and activates the barn area motion detector. If there are unwanted visitors, the siren will scare them off.

Sarah returns to her reading. The wind picks up, enough to activate the cabin’s creaks and squeals. Hail rains a tattoo on the roof. Ice pellets crackle down the chimney causing little explosions to spit an occasional ember onto the wide-planked wood floor. She marks her place in the book, puts it down, and moves the fire screen into place.

Outside, she can see the glow of the barn lights on the trees. The siren activates the motion detector’s high-pitched grating voice a moment before an explosion pierces the night. The cabin goes dark save the fireplace embers and the jasmine-scented candles on the mantle.

Sarah goes to the large armoire that separates the living area from the kitchen and retrieves more candles–three new, white, long, and tapered–and a large brass hurricane lamp, a wedding present from Aunt Bee. She recalls how she laughed at the choice and now here she is relying on it.

The hens' nervous cackling mixes with the hail forming a percussion chorus. Outside it is pitch black except for sporadic lightning flashes. She half believes she can see pairs of red eyes flashing yellow in synch with the lightning, eyes exiting from the forest protection.

She remembers the little girl who hid under her bed when thunder and lightning began and had to have a nightlight until she went away to college and a roommate shamed that behavior away.

She’s scared but allows another thought to enter her mind. This dilemma presents the perfect opportunity to get free. Let the sinking ship sink. Return to arguing parents and Santa Barbara with her tail between her legs. They can live with her folks until Paul gets a job, and they find a place they can afford. A few months, tops.

A loud thunderclap returns her to the problem at hand. A pop-up thunderstorm has knocked out the power. Her concern isn't a fear of the badgers though she did once hear them attack a fox and the air exploded with hisses, growls, and the yelps of the wounded animal as it fled. She keeps reminding herself a badger has never attacked her; they don’t have the pack mentality of wolves.

But nights like this bring an uneasiness. Now, with a cloud-shrouded moon, the barnyard will be pitch-black, a black that empowers the imagination. It isn't the badgers alone. It’s the conspiracy of the black unknown magnifying feral growls.

Rain hammers on the roof as the storm proper arrives. After the last hint of light bleeds away, she again imagines badgers, a clan of badgers, wet furry hulks lumbering towards the coop with its fresh eggs and week-old chicks in the incubator boxes she covered earlier with heavy quilts. Fangs ripping the quilts into flying feathers and jaws dripping smelly saliva onto the meal before them. She saw a predator’s damage to a neighbor’s pigeon coop when she was six and had nightmares for weeks afterward.

In between the increasing intensity of the rain on the corrugated metal roof, she catches another sound. The chickens panicked squawking. She knew that sound. Unwanted visitors. If they lose this batch of hatchlings, they’ll have to quit their home. She caresses her stomach where her own chick nests. She senses the baby watching her mother.

Metal crashes on concrete. Something has knocked over the galvanized bin between the barn and the coop. She knows what Paul would do in this situation. She lifts the Remington off its hooks below the elk head. She checks the shotgun is loaded, safety off. While she whisks through a dozen other questions in her mind, she empties a box of shells into her yellow slicker’s pocket.

She thinks of Paul, of the two of them. She is proud of what they built. Imagines it overgrown in a year–ivy invading the barn, the coop torn apart through many holes. Two more flights and they’ll have the money to bulldoze a true dirt road five miles in from the county road. Then, at least she could get to town when it isn’t the rainy season. The road will let them log first stand Douglas firs along the way. Pave the road, clear the stumps, and they’d have the makings of a true ranch. Something to tell the baby growing inside her.

Save the chickens or forego the dream and return to civilization? Avoid the dark and the badgers? Kill Paul’s dream, their dream?

She looks back at the three pictures on the fireplace mantle: the crew-cut Air Force pilot now turned longer-haired frontier farmer, the Queen’s Court deb at a Santa Barbara Ball with the carefully coifed hair now frazzled from months of sun and wind and forced into a makeshift ponytail, and the handsome wedding couple. If she lets nature’s drama unfold tonight, he’ll never know, never blame her. But the wedding picture reminds her, it’s no longer she but we.

A violent gust barrels up the hill, knocks her aside, slams the front door against the inside wall, and blows out the candles holding the dark at bay. The circular mirror on the backside of the door slips and shatters. A second later, more smashing of glass announces the demise of the pretentious wedding stemware, now fragments on the cabin floor evoking a bizarre image of her family home torn apart, ruined.

Sarah steps onto the porch. She looks down at an imagined little girl at her side in a matching ponytail and a gingham dress. A clash of close clouds drumrolls through the forest. Lightning flashes reflect true yellow eyes in front of the low barn. The image lasts seconds before winking out, long enough for the hairs on her arms to stand up.

Caught up in her fears, she pauses and then thinks what kind of role model is a quitter? The chickens are panic-stricken. She pumps the Remington and squares her shoulders. The next lightning bolt strikes even closer. Over the fireplace, the elk’s eyes reflect a bouncing ponytail and a swinging lantern disappearing below the ground horizon.

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