Free The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Page B

earth’s biomass. It said their burrows are “marvels of engineering.”
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    When my sons were younger, we used to take a walk to this place we called the Pit. It was a huge hole in the ground, in the woods, at the edge of town where the pine barrens started. How it got there, I don’t know, but it looked like a meteor crater. It was the choice spot in the winter for sleigh riding—everybody launching off the sides and streaking down toward the center. There were plenty of collisions. Once I saw this woman from town, who eventually committed suicide, get struck by a kid on a speeding sleigh. Man, she flew up in the air just like in The Little Rascals episode where Spanky and Alfalfa and Darla and Buckwheat go sliding across a golf course on a door or something, hitting golfers. Before that I’d thought the way the golfers flew into the air was funny, overblown comedy, but when I saw it happen to this poor woman that old memory of humor returned mixed with nausea. Anyway, the Pit, yeah, it was remote. Lynn and I went for a walk there with the dog and we found a place where someone had built a fire, and in the charred remains were animal bones. I picked one up and Lynn looked at it and said it was probably the leg bone of a goat (she’d taken a lot of anatomy classes in school). “A fuckin’ goat?” I said, all the time thinking, “Weird, suburban religious cult, practicing black magic.” Another time I found a stone arrowhead there.
    There was a spot at the rim of the Pit that jutted out over the downward slope. The kids and I would go there, and they would jump off the overhanging ledge of dirt and strike poses in the air before falling onto the slope, after which they’d roll down to the bottom. My job was to sit somewhere nearby, where I had a good view, and judge their jumps. It was nice work if you could get it, because when they were younger any chance to sit was a good thing. All I had to do was make sure that no matter what else happened, their scores added up to be exactly even at the end. The bonus was that all the running they did up to the top of the Pit for the next jump tired them out and they’d fall asleep pretty quickly on those evenings.
    So one day, I was sitting there judging, and I looked down at the ground and saw a beautiful, completely clear stone, like a big round pebble made of water. I picked it up and inspected it. It was a perfect piece of quartz crystal—no apparent flaws. From then on, instead of going to the Pit to do the jumping game, we’d go treasure prospecting. In the following months, we found a lot of really nice specimens of clear quartz stones. I used to like to look at the sun through them. Then, on a hot summer afternoon, we were there, poking around in these mounds at the rim where the tree line started, and I noticed these really big ants crawling in and out of holes that had been burrowed in the hill. They were regular big black ants, but get this: on their back section, each had a patch of bright red—I mean like fire-truck red—hair. The color was striking, and when I got down right near them, I could make out the little individual strands of hair, and the patches looked like red crew cuts on their asses. I was amazed. I showed the kids. We went home and I tried to look it up on the Internet: “redihaired ants,” “hairy ants,” “hairy ass ants.” No luck. I looked through my ant book. Nothing. I asked a guy at work who was a biology professor about them. He’d never heard of them. After a while, I just gave upand when I went back to the Pit I never saw them again. The Pit was filled in earlier this year. I really miss that hole in the ground.
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    For Christmas one year, when we were kids, my sister, Mary, got an ant farm. The box it came in had the coolest illustration on the cover, of ants in tunnels wearing miner’s helmets and wielding pickaxes and shovels. One ant was