In the High Grass

There was a gazelle living in the tall grass of the fields where she was born. The plain was windy and the grass blew back and forth like pendulums. The gazelle was shot there, right where she lived. A boy fired his gun, because he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to kill anything. As it turns out, he wasn’t. His bullet grazed the gazelle’s neck, wounding it.

When the boy saw blood drip from her body, he ran. He ran home to his mother’s house and he wept. He threw the gun on the grave of his father and cursed him for proclaiming that his son would be a hunter.

The gazelle wept from pain. She had only cried more when she got lost as a young fawn. Back then she descended into the high grass petrified, not knowing where her mother had gone. Now she descended again, this time from the pain of a wound too intense to withhold instead of from a broken heart. She wept in the grass just like when she was lost.

The fox heard commotion where he stayed and tried to avoid it. He was usually able to avoid hunters. He often climbed to hide. Quickly and quietly he could scurry up so anything on the ground became insignificant. To the fox, out of sight was out of mind. That was how he survived. He poked his head out from the branches, trying to get a look at his hunters. This made him fall clumsily. There were cracks and thuds through the bushes until he hit the ground, panicked, and scurried away. He escaped to the plains, toward the high grass, not realizing he wasn’t being chased.

While the gazelle was sure she would die, she didn’t know how to spend the last moments of her life. She always hoped she would get to a river to be washed away in her final moments. In the grass, however, the end did not feel right. In spite of the pain in her neck she willed herself upward. Her legs wobbled and buckled. Once she gained some balance she was knocked over again by the speeding fox. It hurled through the grass and into her side.

The disoriented fox stood after his collision, only to find the damaged gazelle sprawled in front of him. Her blood was on him. He licked some off of his nose.

The gazelle prepared now for a fate worse than before. Her eyes closed.

The fox had eaten other animals before. He ate a mouse that approached him in the night and a rabbit that trusted him not to. He ate a bird when it flew too close to him and even tried to find where its eggs might be. He was a predator, ate to live, enjoyed the taste of meat. He gave no other consideration to those who he ate. It was never in his nature. They couldn’t ask him not to; just stare with fear in their eyes. The gazelle’s fear was no anomaly from those who’d been devoured by the fox in the past. She slowly accepted the harsh reality that there would be no water in her death, no washing away or freeing sensation. There would only be the ripping and tearing of a creature of prey.

In the high grass, the fox licked the gazelle’s wound. He licked in such a way that if he were something else, some other animal, it could have been mistaken for that of nurturing care. The gazelle prayed that the fox could be so kind. Strangely, he didn’t bite. Not yet.

The fox recognized the good he was doing. The same had been done for him when he was young and suffered a slit back paw. But despite his kindness, the fox was hungry. He hoped a hunter would come along and chase him away, before he could no longer resist his urge. It was strange to not want to prey on the helpless, but overwhelmed him in this new awakening.

Both animals assumed the end of their encounter would abide by the laws of nature, of predator and prey. But in the tall grass that day, the fox went hungry. The boy who’d shot the Gazelle returned. When he found her, the Fox had already scurried off. He might have heard the boy approaching, through the field.

The boy covered the gazelle’s wounds with a cloth he took from his mother’s kitchen, but was surprised by how little blood had seemed to come from the wound. It seemed cleaner than it should have been.

The boy returned home, the fox to his hiding spots. The gazelle made it to the river. Rather than wash away, she was cleaned in it, healed in it. Water flowed across her body, the remaining blood left where the fox had soothed her pain.

Photo by Daniel Cisek