It's impossible to tally how many times I've walked on this berm. Thousands of times. Some days, the light reflecting from the pond creates a perfect mirror surface. Other days, the sun gives it an eerie silver facade that looks thick, like you could walk on it but would muck up your boots. Upon the berm animal tracks, mainly deer tracks from hooves sunken deep into the rich soil, make it look like there is a constant party going on when we aren't looking. Once there was a six-foot long black snake stretched out across the entire width of the berm soaking up sun. They are not likely to strike and not poisonous, but it’s wise to give them a wide birth and go down the slope to get around them, just in case. This should all be recounted in past tense because these are now only memories. Maybe they'll come back one day, the animals. It's eternally too quiet without the birds calling and the squirrels rustling in the fallen leaves and squawking at each other from the trees. Motion detecting cameras are stationed in various locations around the pond. If anything is still out there, it'll be looking for water. So, I check the memory cards once a week, but only the hourly field scan photos appear. Stillness. Thin trees and decaying pine needles. No motion detected at all. Never. Nothing.
It used to be that the cameras would catch foxes, wild turkeys, black bears, “coywolves”, herds of deer, song birds of all kinds, raccoons, opossums, minks, even an occasional owl that happened to land in view in the midst of a hunt. Sometimes wood ducks and Great Blue Herons would make appearances. It was nerdy excitement for me, viewing those images. It seems like eons ago now. The only thing that keeps me checking the memory cards is a combination of habit and vague hope. But my husband reminds me, daily, that there is no reason for hope. He thinks I have some Noah's ark image in my head, that I'm hoping to see a dove carrying an olive branch so I'll know everything will be all right again. Maybe he's right, and I'm that pathetic. He's been right about almost every detail about the way things played out. Almost. Not all details. It's been stranger even than he expected. Less violent, but more sudden and, paradoxically, excruciatingly slow––as if we are being made to watch the silence and to feel even lonelier than we felt when there were too many people.
For a long time we kept track of the years, but we’ve stopped. Maybe my husband keeps track; he's meticulous that way. But we don't talk about it. We talk about what we read. We have a lot more time to read now, and we stocked up long ago on books. It was easy to get them when all of the new and used book stores closed up in the '20s. We cleaned them out. Now, it's our only entertainment aside from the acoustic music we make and stories we write for ourselves. Most everything else is work.
Lost in thought as I trudge around collecting memory cards from the trail cameras, I nearly miss it: movement in the periphery. I freeze, and the hairs stand up on my neck. At my nine o'clock standing on the ground appears to be a red-tailed hawk. Correction: there is a red-tailed hawk, not an apparition. That is a hawk. Its back is to me, but its head is turned ninety degrees so it can watch me. I don't know how long I stand here unblinking, afraid that any movement or sound will cause this gorgeous creature to fly away or de-materialize (because it may be a hallucination). The hawk hops, more so than flies, up onto a branch only a little farther away from me, never taking its eye off of me. It makes no sound, so I still think I'm hallucinating. It looks fat, like it hasn't missed a meal.
The feathers look healthy. The eye looks clear. This makes no sense. How is it surviving? There aren't even any corpses of what would have been prey anywhere around here to scavenge. The hawk seems annoyed by my presence and makes a whimpering sound before flying farther away, yet still visible in a dead cedar. Maybe Rusty (as I’ve just named it) is equally as surprised to see me. A hawk. Not a dove. No olive branch. And healthy. So healthy. "Please don't leave, Rusty," I plead aloud but through my teeth. "Please stay!" Rusty stays. But I can't stand here forever. It'll be dark soon and there may not be enough battery power without the sunlight to go through all of the memory cards. I hate waiting for the sun to come up so I can look through the images only to see nothing. A hawk. My husband won't believe me. A freaking red-tailed hawk! I finish collecting the memory cards and confirm that Rusty’s still in the cedar before heading home.
"Honey, you are not going to believe this," I blurt out. Honey looks at me distractedly.
"What's that, Babe?"
"I just saw,” I let the words float from me one by one like bubbles, “a red-tailed hawk."
"A—what?!"
"Yep. I’m serious. A red-tailed hawk. Name’s Rusty." A big, stupid smile on my face.
Honey is really looking at me now, his brow furrowed. I can tell he thinks I'm losing my mind. He's thought so for quite some time because I go through my rituals like clockwork as if someone is going to show up and tell me I need to get back to the office, back on the treadmill, everything back to normal.
"Um. I'd ask you if you're sure, but I can see that you are. What was Rusty doing?"
"Just standing there on the berm, then sort of hop-flew into a tree. Kept its eye on me the whole time. Flew into a dead cedar to the south of the pond. I was so stunned and just stood there. It looks healthy, like it's been eating all along no problem!" My voice is a little shrill. I inhale slowly through my nose; exhale slowly through my mouth.
"Well, that's something,” his voice tentative like he’s maybe willing to accept this as fact. “I mean, wherever Rusty came from, the hunting must be better than here. Where could it have flown from, though? There is nothing for miles. We've looked all over. No signs of anything."
"God, I hope nobody kills it! Damn, stupid neighbor is going to see it and kill it. Shit!" How quickly I revert to the kind of catastrophizing I always did before when people were around. But despite my worry, I'm pleased to note how quickly he has accepted that the hawk is named Rusty.
"Maybe, but Rusty’s made it this long. May be smart enough to remain hidden. Take me to where you saw it tomorrow?" He sounds like he believes me, believes that I believe it anyway. I nod and smile back.
Flipping as quickly as I can through the images on the memory cards, there is nothing to see on the first several. Now the battery is running too low to keep going. We sit in the flickering light from the wood stove and a few candles. It always grows dark so early, like the earth is permanently standing still at aphelion. It's been this way since everyone disappeared. It doesn't make sense, and there is no one here to explain why this is happening. So we've adapted. We don't risk our eyes to read in candlelight. Too precious. We eat in silence, each of us thinking about the hawk: I relive the experience while he wonders whether it's true. It's a bird of prey! That means there is prey! Right? Later we work on our music, sing a little tune about a red-tailed hawk.
Sleep doesn't come easily, but I eventually drift off and dream of animals parading through the forest. They surround me, and I feel like a post-cataclysmic Snow White for a second until I realize the animals are starting to attack me—first the butterflies at my eyes; next the grasshoppers at my shins. Wrens begin pulling my hairs out. I am knocked to the ground by a black bear and her cubs. I see Rusty watching from the dead cedar. My intestines trail behind a crow flying away with one end.
I'm awake before the sun, but not before Honey. He's already boiled coffee over the fire and left it steaming on the wood stove for me. Soon, I think, coffee will be more precious. We've been rationing it for countless months now. We did a great job of stocking up and storing it, along with many other foodstuffs. It seemed surprising when no one came for us or for what we'd stockpiled. Everyone we knew before assumed we had a storehouse, but no one came. Except for the one neighbor (a mile away) who had stockpiled for himself and his family of three, we found no one at all. We all expected people to show up. They didn't. It's was if they all disintegrated. Radio silence. All signals dead. Nearby stores left abandoned. We broke in, took everything, and divided it between our two houses. And that was it. We started biking around and found only emptiness. No phone service, no ham radio signals, nothing. Of course there had been signs before everyone disappeared, like when the petroleum ran out completely. Some people packed up and said they were going west. But then came the floods, seven in succession. Our house on pontoons and our floating gardens didn't look so crazy anymore. Each time the dark waters receded, fewer and fewer animals seemed to return, until there were none we could see. But for our solar panels and wood furnace we would have had no electricity. The grid was out because there was no one was there to run it. No air traffic. No road noise. Nothing.
Those neighbors say it was “The Rapture.” As non-believers, we don't opine aloud on that point on the rare occasions when we interact with them. There is no point in confronting them about it. It wouldn't do to alienate them at this point. But if they really believe that, it means they think that almost everyone they knew, even the ones they considered to be “bad” people, went to some golden heaven except them and us. They must feel terrible being “left below.” Maybe that kind of thinking is simply a stage people go through after the world changes drastically. It's like an end, but we’re still here. A few of us. Maybe, like the Mayan calendar interpretations failed to consider, the "end" was not the “end of the world” but the end of an era, the end of a phase.
"I saw the hawk. I saw Rusty," Honey blurts as he rushes in from the cool morning sunlight. "I saw it flying over the pond. It's the darnedest thing. You're right about looking healthy, too. Damn." He has a faraway look in his eyes, but he's also looking directly into my eyes. I love his ability to look so innocent sometimes. It's like a gift. And, like that terrible four-letter word "hope," it's hard to shake. We sit, sip coffee, chew on granola.
A flying bird is like the innocence in his eyes. Sometimes the impossibility of it is difficult to endure, especially after such a long time becoming accustomed to the quiet sameness of expectancy. Expecting what, we never know. We only know that something must happen. Rusty happened. Rusty is proof that animals still exist somewhere else and, now, one has moved into the neighborhood. A raptor! A bird of prey means so much about an ecosystem's viability.
Shaking my head to hold back the flood of joy at what Rusty means, I remember how much I complained about nearly every person I encountered before. People were insensitive, selfish, boorish, anti-intellectual, cruel, nosy. I used to crave solitude because there were so many people everywhere grabbing everything they thought they needed and stating their opinions as if every damn thought that crossed their mind was something the world needed to hear. I never once dreamed that I could possibly miss these people. But maybe I do. After so much time to ourselves, maybe the contrast and conflict is necessary.
My partner and I have nothing to complain about except the silence and the constant work. Silence can be terrifying. This chrysalis of time we’ve been living in may soon open wide. The hawk's lone screech—a tocsin. I don't know if I'm ready, but I know about inevitability. We are reeds in a tempest. Time is relentless, as relentless as the mind's creativity. The hawk is here to foretell, and we can only await what unfolds. I hold Honey's hand in mine. He is as nervous as I am. His eyes have never looked clearer to me.