The Count

At the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

 

by Brett Rutherford

From a cloud as thick as cotton
the egg-shaped face emerged.
It was not smooth, not white
but brown and when it spoke,
the wrinkles of millennia spread out
around its watchful, sparkling eyes.

Not once before did such a one
appear to me. The way was open.
No spirit guide preceded me,
and other than the riddle of my life
no puzzle was put before me,
and no monsters blocked the way.

“Poet,” he said, “do you know me?”
“I think I do. We have not met
but the word ‘ancestor’ comes to mind,
and through my father’s mother’s
mother we are of one blood.”

The egg-head nodded. “That will do.
I had a name, but I myself
     have forgotten it. I am glad
you are not afraid of me,
for those who bow and scrape
and mistake me for a god
are of no use to me — fools!”

“I do not mistake entities,
old and distinguished, for gods,”
I assured him. There was no fear.
A stone seat came up behind me.
I sat. Something like elbows
leaned forward from out the fog.
Soon we were eye-to-eye.

A bony hand, its fingers knobbed
with uncounted age, emerged
and held forth a giant femur bone,
remnant of some mastodon.
From end to end it was carved
with notches, some lines, some lines
with hooked curved above them.

“This is the count,” he told me.
"Notches on bone, and then behind me,
marks on stone, tens to hundreds,
hundreds to thousands,
one record passed along
and across this continent.

"We came from world’s roof,
from the fertile valleys,
the bamboo forests.
Nothing was ever enough.
Always, we moved onward.
Always, the beasts were chasing us.

“We slept in dank caves,
skin-covered huts, houses
of bark and wood.
Some places offered plenty,
other dank contagion
we learned to avoid.

"Evil there was:
the bite, the sting
of snake and scorpion;
the sudden storm,
the whirlwind, the quake
that leveled houses.

“We guessed that here no king
dared raise a palace,
how mounds and pyramids
alone endured
when the floods came
and sinkholes swallowed.
It was an angry place
that did not want us
to walk upon it, it seemed.
 

“Wild beasts consumed us;
some we consumed in turn.
The dog, the goat, the lamb
we held to us; the wolf,
the bear, the lion we drove
from us with spear and fire.

“To whom did this land belong?
the sly thief
     with the mask around his eyes?
the chattering squirrel?
the migrant birds in the open sky?

“Thousands of lakes,
     and hundreds of rivers
          with their tributaries
waited to welcome us.
No one was there. We saw
no other people until,
some ages later, our own
lost cousins came round
to find us again.”

“Ancestor,” I answered.
“We have guessed as much
from bones and shards
and bits of pottery. The woe
is that you left no poetry.”

He sighed. He waved
the giant bone again.
“The count,” he said.
“This is all I have to tell you.”

“But I cannot read this.”
His hand took mine and made
it trace the notches, one by one.
“The count,” he repeated.
“The count of what?”
“How many times the winter has come,
and the summer after it,
and the winter again,
since our first foot fell
on this vast and unpeopled land.
Our count, our claim,
our history.”

“But I cannot read this!” Against
my will my fingers ran
from end to end of the long fossil,
turning and touching another row,
another, and another.”

“The count!” he shouted at me,
his eyes imploring now. Faster
my fingers traced the carven lines,
faster and faster still, until —

It is a summer dawn. Upright I sit
in my modern bed. The birds
are about their business, the first
morning bus is at the corner,
announcing its destination.

I speak aloud the count of years
since the first man came
from far-off Asia
to make this empty land his own:

Forty-two thousand
seven hundred
and ten times
have winters given way
to summers since
the days of the Ancestors.