Janina senses “a feverish vibration under the grass … as if vast, underground nerves, swollen with effort, were just about to burst.” After the poacher’s death, a local hunter is found dead, his body surrounded by hoofprints. At Big Foot’s house, the death that she registers as a crime isn’t his but the animal’s: “One creature had devoured another, in the silence and the stillness of the Night.”Ī deadly spring comes to the plateau. She spots the head of a deer in Big Foot’s kitchen-severed, the rest of its body butchered and eaten. Instead, “he treated the forest like his own personal farm.” Only when she notices evidence of another death does she become truly upset. “The forest nurtured this little goblin,” she says, but he did not respect it. He was a poacher, a crime that’s truly monstrous in her view. It made me feel sad, horrified.… The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.” She doesn’t bother to eulogize him. “Just a piece of matter,” she notes, “reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. A couple of deer standing in the snow look as if “we had caught them in the middle of performing a ritual whose meaning we couldn’t fathom” catching sight of a patrolling fox is “like seeing an old friend” in the spring, she is attuned to subtle, fresh energies that nobody else can hear, “the rustle of the grasses growing, the ivy climbing the walls, and the mushroom spores expanding underground.”Īnd so it makes sense that, in the dead man’s home, she is straightforward enough about his body. But when she describes the natural world, her voice goes tender. She is matter-of-fact about things, and about people, whom she describes simply, brusquely, summing them up in a moment as one of those women with too fake a tan, one of those men who think they know everything.
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