Free A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor Page B

hours of keen attention, hearing every whisper and trickle, every bird chitter and fish splash, the drip of rain, the hush of twilight, the raccoons washing their paws, the little fox learning to make no sound, and why spoil it with the usual yikyak about the sorrow of growing old? Hunting is sacred: why else would you sit there in the cold and damp? It’s all about that awakening of the visceral senses that get dull in the ordinary dry tedium of indoor paper-pushing and the meetings and the sucking up to big shots, and when you picked up a gun and went down to the tall grass, you got free of all that sucking and blowing. That’s why I went, though I knew I should not, after Jackson died, killed by a car that didn’t bother to stop. I loved that mutt. I thought I was over it but I wasn’t. The moment those birds splashed down, my heart felt torn in two, and I paddled out from shore in blind grief, and I grabbed one duck and reached for the other and it squawked and flapped away, mortally wounded, and I wanted to end its pain and I swung at it with the paddle, broke its neck, and myself plunged overboard and I sank quickly, my heart full of regret for Theresa, and I managed to get one hip boot off but not the other, and I sank to the bottom into the mud down beside some turtles and when I awoke, it was dark and I was surrounded by furry things who were snuggling up next to me. I was in a beaver hut. An extended family of beavers, and they brought me bark and moss and lily pads and they put on ceremonies in which they crowned me with a headdress of small sticks and they sang and turned in circles and dipped and nodded in unison. They appeared to be worshipping me. I slept and slept and when I awoke, it was spring.”
    “What happened then?” said James.
    “I worked in a Denny’s in Fargo for a few weeks, clearing tables, bussing dishes. And nobody spoke to me ever, though I kept asking them why I was there, and that’s how I knew I was dead. Because I didn’t exist. And I wasn’t paid a penny. And one night a woman came and sat in a back booth and asked me to bring her a bowl of rice and beans. I told her I was only a busboy. She wore a blue suit with a gold badge that said A.T.F. and she was frightening to behold but beautiful. She said, ‘Your old life is over and your new life is begun. You will spend a time grieving and treading the paths of your old life and seeing everything with clear eyes,’ she said. And she waved a hand in my direction and I became as you see me, a gray wolf. And so I have lived in the creek bed where we used to camp, observing my people, whom I dearly loved, and who, though they are foolish, wasteful, of limited intelligence, and habitually cruel, I now love even more tenderly.”
    The wolf came over to James and lay his head on James’s leg and said, “Every year during the Christmas moon, I have the power of speech and this is only the second time I’ve used it.”
    “What was the first?”
    “I told Theresa that I loved her. She was horrified and slammed the door in my face.”
    The wolf’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t choose to leave the world and even now, years later, there are times I want to return. And Christmas is one of those times. Christmas and baseball season and the last week of August for the State Fair and the week in April when the blossoms open up.”
    “I never cared for Christmas,” said James.
    “I know all about that. And it can’t be changed.”
    “Why not?”
    “You’ve made up your mind and it can’t be unmade.”
    That came as a slap in the face to Mr. Sparrow who thought of himself as open-minded, reasonable, able to be moved and convinced by evidence, not some irredeemable dope, and he was about to protest—“It’s only an opinion— maybe I need to take another look at the situation—read some books—maybe if I went to work in a soup kitchen for the homeless and got a different perspective”—but the sorrow in Ralph’s eyes