Rekdal - Animal Eye

Now the black-and-yellow slicker encasing the man leans like a ballet dancer across the animal, matching its length and stretch, the strangely stiffened legs and slack head, the man's knife already deep inside the body. He slits fat down to membrane as muscle is exposed to air, the blue cells brightening, gleaming under plastic tendons the man massages then peels carefully away. There is no face. But children appear in the following frame, and now there is more red, the man and boys taking apart the thickened blood that foams, one enormous jelly pooling the snow so that rubber boots get wetted up to the calf and what they touch coats them utterly: there is no skin left, only hands becoming intimate with the work, cutting away horns and heart, tongue, lungs, kidney, liver, scooping out intestines filled with grass and placing them to the side, moving in to the custard-colored musk nodes bunched at the tail base, then further, looking for whatever is left of use: what beats and swells and stinks and pushes Now it's white across which ant-like bodies of pregnant caribou scatter in migration, photo shot from the belly of a Cessna. In the distance, mountain ranges and the unseen sea to which they travel, where the text below it announces oil rigs dip their certain needles and the Inuit women's breast milk has been declared hazardous waste. It is so beautiful here.

Here is a wall-sized field of green with patches of corn silk. Here is a miraculous range seamed with what I have to be told is coal, the enormous, glassy sea chattering its blue to the sky, the glacier clasped between them quietly disappearing. Here is a view too big to stand or even read the life inside: the slide clicks to an obscuring shore of gray beside which water churns with miniature baleens in knuckles of white. Changes again. Abstracted fields of snow and snow, and ice. In the last, the man has left a flap of caribou skin to dry.

It lies in a shrunken patch of snow, small as a child's pink mitten beside him; a valentine.