The Elk

Stepping out the back door of my house. It's dark and we have a fire raging in the pit so I can't see very far out into the woods beyond. I am aware of the vegetable garden to my right side and of the herb garden in front of me well past the fire pit. As my eyes adjust to the light beyond where the fire blares its warm orange hue I see that all is bathed in the grey glow of a full moon. My roommate and a neighbor or two are already at the fire pit socializing. We do this frequently enough and this is much like other nights. We discuss the topics not covered in decent society, the "taboo topics" one is trained to never talk about. We cover religion and off-shoots of it mostly. There's also debate about the best place in town to get coffee, all in all a pretty normal visit with friends.

People started trailing off one by one, two by two. Some walked home, some had driven and they drove off back toward town. eventually, it got down to just my roommate and me. We each cracked a fresh beer and discussed even more random things. We were figuring it might be a good night to bring out the telescope and the roommate got up to go and get it. Right at that moment, I heard something out in the woods, the roommate heard it too, we both just stood there listening, where we lived it could have been about anything between a horse and a mountain lion. Our house was situated on about 8 acres of land. The house had a small front yard and was situated close to the road along with an outbuilding. The back yard went straight down to the river. There was a section of beach on that river that was on our property but often people hiked through so we set up logs to sit on and another fire pit. We knew no one was down there though.

Since I was closest to the sound I started walking out to get a closer look. I was so close to the fire that it made it difficult to see out into the darkness but once I walked out past the light of the fire pit I could see clearly as my eyes adjusted from firelight to moonlight. I saw nothing and everything. The forests of the Pacific Northwest are beautiful. Our woods, all the way down to the river hosted a variety of trees, some were darkened in the moonlight by shadow while other reflected the moonlight back on light colored bark. The over-all color was grey glowing white. Still, once my eyes adjusted, I saw nothing, just the woods, the beautiful woods.

Sure when we were all up in the circle of light cast by the fire pit everything beyond it just sort of went black. Now I was peering out in the moonlight toward the river. I saw the herb garden I was standing next to and the trees swaying gently. I could hear the river in the distance and took it all in for a moment before turning to walk back to the fire when I heard a twig snap. Now the scene had quieted down considerably, it had been just my roommate and I talking quietly for over an hour. Not to mention how quiet it had gotten when we both had initially heard something and stood up.

When I had stepped further in the direction of the woods I had done so quietly, for some reason I hadn't wanted to make any sound. The twig snapping was exactly like in the movies. It was ridiculously loud, far louder than a normal twig snap should sound. It broke the silence and in that instant something came up the slight incline between the river and the part of our backyard where I was standing. All in one moment I realized that I had been the one who stepped on the twig and I was looking directly into a herd of elk running at top speed right at me. I stood dead still looking at my roommate. He wasn't in the line of the heard, they were passing our house at sort of an angle going toward the lot next to us. The lot next to us was empty. The guy who owned it had started to clear it as he was planning on building a house there, but back then, it was just more woods. The elk had been coming further and further in each year.

I think of myself as "average" height. I stand 5 feet 4 inches tall and believe me, I was standing very straight at that moment. The elk were passing me by. The top of my head was about to their shoulder, they don't look that big on the Discovery Channel but they are really big, and beautiful and graceful. I thought about their grace at that moment, I was counting on it. One never sees an elk run directly into a tree after all, so I would become like a tree and hopefully not get trampled to a bruised and bloody death. I closed my eyes and even in the chaos of pounding hooves and pure force coming right at me I was able to still my mind somewhat. I imagined roots connecting me through my feet to the earth, I imagined myself as strong as a tree. The elk darted past me, I could feel them, hear them, smell them. The next time I opened my eyes there was no fear, I just watched and everything seemed to slow down momentarily and this is where it got weird.

As everything took on a sort of timeless quality and things slowed down I could make out the details, right down to individual pieces of hair in the fur of elk as they ran past me. I saw their eyes, I saw myself reflected in them. Then one of the elk decided to jump right over me. This was the oddest part of all. My roommate remembers it thusly; one of the elk "veered or something, it all happened really fast," He said that I stood there staring at him through it all and eventually all the elk had run by and I came back to sit by the fire. That is what he remembers.

I remember it sort of like that, at least the part of the memory that we shared. I remember maintaining eye contact with him but I also remember that when everything seemed to slow down, the eye contact with him was off-putting. It was as though he was looking through me rather than at me. It was as though perhaps the time difference was slightly out of sync for us or we were both in similar but slightly different places or times. Like him, I remember coming back to the fire pit and sitting down but there was more to it than that for me.

I remember that as the one elk jumped over me I felt a sharp pain right at the top of my head. I remember that my head was sort of thrown back from it. I remember being all logical about it. The elk must have clipped the top of my head as it jumped over me, I was ok and should just keep being a tree until they have all passed by. I remember that when my head was thrown back I broke eye contact with my roommate. I made to stand like a tree again as the elk were still coming but as I stood looking all I saw in the periphery was dissipating. It was as though I was getting tunnel vision like I was stepping into the tunnel far enough to be out of range of the light from either side. Everything went black and I felt myself falling backward. I felt my body hitting the ground and still heard the elk, they weren't jumping over me anymore.

Suddenly I could see again, not sure why, perhaps the pain. I cannot describe the feeling of being trampled by a herd of elk, I really can't. I imagine it's different for everyone. Some people have a high pain threshold, it depends on where the hooves hit you. I suppose no two people would experience it exactly the same. I can say with certainty that if one of those heavy cloven hooves makes contact with your throat, it will kill you. It killed me. I knew I was dead but it was as though to leave my body and have to go through the rest of the elk as they trampled my body would be impolite. I could sit tight and then float on up and out. I could still see everything and then I blinked and there were no more elk. No one had come to get my body and I seemed to be attached to it somehow and time was doing funny stuff because I was in a fairly advanced stage of decomposition.

I was sinking to be accurate, sinking into the earth itself. Whole seasons passed and I was sinking and as I decomposed I became compost. I broke apart and here, rather than everything slowing down it sped up, it was like a really good effect ala Francis Ford Coppola in The Secret Garden that showed the passage of time through shadows moving very fast, vegetation dying, snow covering everything in a blanket of white and everything slowly blooming back to life in spring, wash, rinse, repeat. Seeds grew in the dirt made up of my own body into plants that fed animals that spread those seeds further connecting me to everything. I felt all that and listened to the voices in the wind, it was totally surreal, time meant nothing here, there was even music and that was when I realized that what was happening wasn't real.

It only took knowing it to find myself in my backyard again, everything slow, my own speed catching up to the speed of everything else. I catch my roommates eyes again and this time we are looking right at each other. It's only a few seconds later that all the elk have run past and I am making my way back to my camping chair. In the cup holder on the right arm of the chair is a fairly cold bottle of Mirror Pond Ale, I love that stuff and I am thirsty. We both sit back down to stare at the fire a moment catching our breath then he says, "That was weird, for a second it looked like that one that veered was gonna hit you, you ok?" I didn't answer, I was still sorting it out and waiting for the universe to explain the rest. We both just sat down and he poked at the fire a bit, the telescope all but forgotten. I was left with one reminder, the bump on the top of my head.

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