They sat in a ground blind looking out over a timbered edge of burned prairie waking back to life. In the steel-sheen glow of darkness before the rising colors of dawn, green sprigs shone spiking from the black mounds of charred earth. As light rose, the faint green of spring buds shone in adornment to timber’s canopied boughs, and the first blossoms of the season snowed down to earth in petals of white and faint pinks.
The timber floor woke in the green of weeds and timber grasses. Violets and bluebells bloomed in the lighted understory of old timber before summer growth cast it, once again, in shadow.
It was a yearly ritual, Ryan and his father, a day in the woods; calling to turkeys beginning to sound in their roosted sentries—airy yelps and echoing gobbles booming in reply—before the disturbance of beating wings and crashing bodies as the flock descended from their high posts down to the timber floor and set to wandering their world.
They were not good hunters, and they would never claim to be. Ryan’s father came because it was something they shared when Ryan was but a boy, and though life progressed and changed, the ritual of this spring day was something they held to and shared.
As a boy, Ryan loved the woods, the hunt and chase. As a young man, Ryan pursued and hunted different quarry. Ever after, his avarice for chase and kill waned. Ryan still enjoyed the quiet, the naturalness of the world, but kept a reticence for pulling triggers on living creatures simply seeking to exist.
The sound and ceremony of the dawn began with scurrying of squirrels up and down the spines of the trees stretching tall, their paws scratching and digging in the understory; the movement of coyotes searching the burnt span of prairie for quarry foolish enough to remain exposed as light rose near to its precipice with dawn. The first hens in roost began to sound, and with them, Ryan and his father began their own lonesome calls.
Dawn appeared in its ritual of rise. Sun shone, and the sky woke from the colors of dreams into the blue of day, and in its midst of transformation, the crashing of the flock descending from roost sounded—the first descents as distinct acts, and the collective sound of the mass when following suit.
Ryan thought of something his father shared to him weeks before. It was a reply to a song Ryan shared—something he shared to very few, but of which he was proud because it spoke, and came, from his heart.
After listening, his father wrote, “I love what you are doing because it sounds good and it makes you happy.”
Ryan thought on his father’s words and what it was of the song that made him happy. Ryan stared at the sprigs of prairie rising from the scorched aftermath of flame—life rising from perceived death that, in truth, saved and made better that which appeared destroyed.
In his thoughts, he asked his father, “Dad, you said you loved what I was doing because it made me happy. Would you still love it if it ruined, or changed in an irreparable way, something else we love?”
His father was slow to answer. He spoke slow and quiet as the world around stirred. “I wouldn’t know until it happened. What are you talking about?”
“I was just asking. Maybe we ask when we seek affirmation for an act already decided.”
“What is it?”
“I want to write those songs and stories. I don’t want to hide them away, or change them to make them fit as others think they should. I want to tell them as they are in me, how they come, and from where they show.”
“I love that you do, and I think you should. They’re yours. I don’t know where they come from, but I love what they do for you…I see you’re changed.”
In the young light of new day, the green of the sprigs shone stronger, starker in contrast to the charred black of old.
There is no comfort in fire.
There is no peace when flame consumes, but the prairie lived. From the ashes of old, new growth rose from the roots that held, kept, and sustained. In the bare spread of ruin, new life would take and flourish in the sun and fecundity of after-flame.
The prairie did not die, nor would he—if he let the fire take.