Great Plains Quarterly

We haven’t even brought snacks for our drive to the prairie northwest of Billings. We’ve been out a lot longer than we thought we’d be, and we’re hungry, Bernie and Luke the Dog and I. It is 8:30 p.m., and after rain and clouds all day, the sun has finally slipped below the valence of dark cumulus that bedeviled the afternoon. It primps up the wheatfields, alfalfa rows, last year’s crop stubble, and the remaining tracts of shortgrass prairie with a light so wise and cleansing we might have passed into an El Greco canvas or an Ovidian myth. Long-billed curlews rise, glimmer, and shimmy like kites—white against purple clouds scuttling off to the east. They lure their beloveds and charm us.

It’s hard to comprehend that somewhere there are pavement and crowds and world affairs—and sumptuous dinners. It’s June 11, 2018. It’s also June 12 in Singapore where President Donald J. Trump is dining on beef confit with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Fittingly, confit involves the slow cooking of muscle in its own fat, leaving the flesh tender and moist. The process usually happens to some sort of tough creature, like duck. But Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump are above the consumption of birds. Castrated cattle for those two. A dish for autocrats and despots.

Not that we don’t have our own sort of despots here. The owl, for example. A short-eared owl, to be specific, on a ragged fencepost. We pull over and stop. He stares back at us with an innocent ferocity it’s hard to endure. In the golden light, he shines like a natural zircon. He’s glorious. Despite how close we are, he doesn’t move, shake his head, raise his feathers. Pale and compact, he must be a male. I take in the whole of him: round, feathers blowing, head swiveled at a sharp angle to consider his world, ourselves included.

I linger over every bit of his beauty. He has two short “ears”—tiny, dark, pointed tufts of feather right on the top of his head. His facial disk is round as a crater and more clearly marked than a great horned owl’s. His beak is a black line bisecting that disk. His eyes seem highlighted by Egyptian kohl. The owl’s feathers are white and tawny, a spangle of gold-nugget freckles across his breast and flanks. His legs and taloned feet are covered to the ankles in what look like golden fur tights. Splayed, his feet squeeze the fencepost he perches on as if he might crush it.

But I keep coming back to his eyes. Two round black pupils cut through circular yellow fields. Yellow? As in sulfur, egg yolk, sunflower, lemon, neon sign, emergency vehicle? [End Page 345] No. Nothing I can think of compares to owl yellow—its own color, simile, and metaphor. The yellow that death looks like. Or love. Or the will to exist. A yellow that says, “I know you. Not who you are, to be sure, but what you are.” We’ve driven and walked, bird-scanning and alert, and finally we’ve found and entered his flat-out stare. Usually, large birds flee when approached too closely on foot or in a car. This one doesn’t.

However impressive, though, our owl is just a single dab of energy on the prairie. He’s a random bit of birdlife in the continental scheme of things. The tiniest smear of earnestness on the face of the wide, round earth. No more than a particle in the solar system. So infinitesimally small in the galactic wilds that he might as well not even exist.

“Say the same for yourselves,” the owl’s eyes retort. Say the same for a president or a supreme leader worshipped as a god in his realm. The owl stares at me without engaging. “Fool,” he might say, if he cared enough to call me anything.