Told him how, in the old days, the men didn’t abide clearings at all. Berry pickers watched as the men went off with arrows or rifles, depending on the epoch, from a village or town, depending on the same. The men went. Goodbye. They walked by below the ledge where she crouched. She looked down on them with their noisy gear when all she had was the silent basket. Any man was hunting if young and strong enough, if bearded yet, if anywhere near still able-bodied, if an elk had been spotted in the next valley over or tracks seen in the recent snow. The berry picker ate berries as she watched them, fistfuls. Her lips turned blue, horses and chariots, depending, rickshaws pulled by naked slaves, trucks and mules, bicycles. All berry pickers are the same. She watched them watch for elk. An elk turned a circle far up in a stand of trees, an unreachable perch except on foot. She could follow, therefore, and they could not. This was the price of the adventure. The elk hurried. The elk found the herd, milled among the females, counting. He strutted among calves and yearlings. He herded his herd uphill to the safety of impossible cliffs where they harbored in the sky with their old mothers who were young still, whose tits were heavy with milk again, and the yearlings trying of course to get to their tits. A mother snorted and kicked, causing great confusion among the yearlings. She was still their mother and no longer their mother. She had a new calf now. A yearling watched from a distance the newborns circling under the mother, shy, slipping in close under her chin, circling again on wobbly legs, nuzzling close on a second pass, sucking her. The yearling pushed on. There was plenty to eat. The world was big, everything green, as the men stomped by seeing nothing of them, one fat man on a dun, a king on his sorrel, a fool on his chestnut, the queen on her fine paint, the priest on his bay. The berry picker brushed her frock. She’d killed bugs without thought. The men never saw her. They were deep in their men-thoughts, the women and children, the old men to feed back in town, they prayed on bent knee when the elk finally stopped in range for the projectile spinning toward his rib cage, the pumping organ, to roast, digest, and so live. This stranger in the tent was like an old man, outside the hunt. He counted seeds or dogs too old to follow, or napped under rib-roofed lean-tos, to keep the sun back, to dream of hunts of the past, of the women returning from berry picking, to lie down with them if possible, the woman setting the baby in the cradle or a soft patch of sand, kissing his forehead after letting him mount and fulfill his quick needs, lifting the baby after, returning to roots and berries, to braids, to stripping sinew from hides with spade-shaped knives, or any other things the women did.