The Animals: A Novel by Christian Kiefer

Author:Christian Kiefer [Kiefer, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2015-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

YOU CALL her Ginny, after a girlfriend of Bill’s you had a crush on when you were ten or eleven, and you pour yourself into that animal. Perhaps that was your uncle’s plan all along, his way of keeping you on the straight and narrow. When other animals come in you do the same. The year pulls to a close and then another. There are three and a half years of that, days and nights of working and building up the enclosures, and figuring out ways to entice people to pay to see what they had gathered. A few fund-raisers in town. A family discount week. Ginny grows into a beautiful doe and when you release her a year after her rescue, when you watch her disappear into the forest, you cannot deny your tears. She returns briefly for a few seasons and then disappears forever among the others of her kind. You and your uncle rescue a one-winged bald eagle from near the highway where the Long Bridge crosses out of Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, and the following year you bring that giant raptor to the local elementary school and the children treat you as if you are a god, the eagle perched beside you on the great wooden T you have erected for that purpose. The eyes of the children are wide and filled with wonder, and you can see your own childhood self reflected in their gaze.

And then your uncle is gone. The event is not unlike your brother’s death a full decade earlier. One day he is there and the next the sheriff is telling you the news, that David has suffered a massive heart attack in Bonners Ferry while visiting his girlfriend and that he is dead. You can think of nothing to say so you say nothing.

You cannot fathom running the rescue without your uncle and you do not even know if that is indeed what you are supposed to do. Part of you simply wants to release them all, to open the doors of the enclosures and step back and watch them flee into the forest. In such fantasies their mangled bodies are made whole again, their minds clean and pure and made up of wilderness. Or wildness. They dream of fields of golden grass and meadows filled with elk and moose and stands of dark pines and white birch and cool clear rivers flowing from melting snow. And perhaps such an idea is true. Perhaps even now. But you know that were you to open the cages, the animals would simply stumble to their deaths. One-winged birds. Three-legged animals. A bear who would walk up to the nearest human, seeking a marshmallow, only to find fear and death.

There is no funeral, no service of any kind, and when it is revealed that there is a will, you learn that your uncle owned the property outright and that it has been—all fifty acres—willed to you and you alone. Your uncle’s girlfriend receives nothing at all.

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