Free The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg Page B

insects trying to conceal themselves
     from a burning sun. Here the bison were dry, their sleek, red calves grazing beside them. When they’re this young, buffalo
     calves look like they belong to a different species than their parents, who seem to be all head and spine. The difference
     in appearance causes much confusion. One visitor, watching an early June herd of adults and young, asked a local angler which
     were the buffalo and which were the bison. A truly perplexed tourist praised the Park Service for assigning St. Bernard dogs
     to guard the herds.
    Slowly the bison on the Firehole River drifted out of the hot sun and into the timber. They left behind a carcass of their
     own kind, now many days old and still pungent. A solitary raven did a questioning dance across the river, its ratcheting call
     echoing over the water. In the far distance, an angler walked down to the murky flow of the Firehole. With his rod beneath
     one arm, he lifted his hands together, apparently to pray. He stood that way for a very long time. He was selecting a trout
     fly, as if, under such unpromising conditions, his choice might actually make a difference.

    T he dogs hear it in the distance before I do, and so do the horses, a dry dislocated thump, thunder from far away. One moment
     there’s no wind, the air still and damp. The next moment the wind is turning corners where there aren’t any, lifting and coiling
     the barnyard dust. Wind flails the leaves on the sugar maples, revealing their silver undersides. It scatters spent hickory
     flowers in drifts. The sky blackens, and I can almost hear rain begin. But then the wind drops and the front unravels over
     the western ridge, where the weather comes from. Blue sky intervenes. A clear night threatens once again, Venus hanging peaceful
     in the dusk.
    It’s gone on this way for several days here in the midst of a dry season. Rain promises, and then the cloud cover, which was
     as tight and dense as a peony bud, blows away in loose tatters to the east. There’s no point waiting for thunder to crowd
     in overhead and rain to fall. But a single thump sets everyone listening, ready to count the seconds between the flash and
     the crack of the storm, ready to welcome the hard downpour if it ever comes, though it will cut the garden soil and beat the
     last of the peonies to the grass.
    And yet somehow the need for rain domesticates the very idea of a thunderstorm. Were a storm to blow in now, soaking the earth,
     it wouldn’t be Wagner that ushered the thunder across the treetops and into the clearings, tearing at tree limbs and driving
     the horses into a frenzy. It would be Rameau, and in the beat of the thunder coming overland there would be something folkish
     and formal at once, a country dance welling up through the refined strains of an operatic suite.
    The horses would circle the pasture in a ground-eating trot, and the trees would sway in some sort of unison, a hiss arising
     from the new rain on their leaves. I’d hear the clatter of the downpour on the barn’s metal roof all the way from the covered
     porch. The Shakespearean undergrowth on this small farm—the dame’s rocket and cow vetch and ground ivy—would twitch under
     the heavy drops, and the old question of how bees fly in rain would present itself once again.
    Only then would something come unhinged in the music of the storm, the lightning moving too close, the shade deepening too
     abruptly, one of the dogs fetching his breath up short with anxiety. The cataclysm would gradually slide across the valley,
     and as it did Rameau’s music would be heard again, dying away in the east, the ground sated with rain. If only the storm would
     begin.

    I owa farmers used to call a stalk of corn growing in a soybean field a “volunteer.” I’ve always loved the personification lurking
     in that use of the word, as though a cornstalk among the soybeans were like a zealous schoolgirl sitting in the first row
     of desks,