stripping bare

Peeling off the purple coat, I walked uphill after the goat, which had disappeared over the crest. It was unusually hot for October at this elevation, and I was winded and perspiring from the climb.

I dropped the coat on the vertical trail; it luckily hooked on a scrawny branch instead of tumbling down and over the cliff into the lake.

I leaned forward onto my hands again, not cooler without the coat but thankful to be rid of its weight. The steepness required me to use all fours, to pull on the roots of the bushes above me, to grab handfulls of long, well-rooted grass to keep myself from falling backwards. I found rock and root footholds for my feet. I crept up the mountain like a slow and trembling monkey.

I could smell the mountain goat. Hair and straw. Some hormone, too, that was like protein in my nose. Umami. I was salivating. Just before I summitted the peak, my shoes got tangled beneath a warped tree and fell. I could hear them tumbling for a moment, but I did not turn to watch. I was too close; they had met their fate.

I crawled on my belly over the ledge and onto a broad, flat rock that marked the highest point of the mountain. My cheeks and stomach were scratched and bleeding. My arms shook with exhaustion.

I could not see the goat, and I could see everything. In all directions I could see like an eagle. The burrowing red ant on a mountain in the next range. The dying yellow needle on a tall pine in the ravine. The wind stirring the feathers on the wing of a waiting owl.

The ground beneath my feet shook and split. My legs disappeared into the mountain. I was a woman's head with a mountain body. I gave life to forests of trees. I pumped veins of water. Iwitnessed millennia. My hair dissolved into spongy, fruiting moss. My neck opened into a granite fissure. My eyes dropped as smooth pebbles, bouncing and tumbling down the mountain. My teeth grew into a fuzzy caterpillar, scrunching its way hastily across the bare rock.

My ears grew into orchids, and I listened.