I was in the mood to believe. The family had made me receptive to new possibilities—yes, they’d done their work. It was getting lost in Pisgah, it was Dice’s spell, it was everyone telling me, over and over, that I had to be open, and that they could tell if I wasn’t. I lost track of myself; I felt I was becoming the heron. What a relief it was to move from looking to being. So this is what it’s like to be a bird, gravity so light on my hollow bones, my long curled neck readying for a strike.

The heron startled and took off, a rigid white kite. I could hear someone rushing through the woods behind me, a girl’s voice cursing, then a shuddering crack, and the heron jerked in the air and followed its own neck to the ground. Queen emerged from the woods, carrying a rifle. She walked through the stream and approached the heron, which beat its wings helplessly against the stream bank. “Hey, Harmony,” she said, and laughed at my aghast face. “I’ve got dinner.”

“You can’t eat a heron,” I said.

“Yeah, you can,” she said. “They taste like frogs’ legs.” Some dark blood trickled into the stream, which pulled it quickly away, toward Tennessee. She slung the immense corpse into her arms. One wing spilled whitely to the ground. “We eat otters, beavers, raccoons.” I searched her face for remorse and found none. “You’re all right. Go on,” she said. “Go on and bring the sheep back.”

* * *

That night, the compost bucket under the sink was filled with blue feathers. Queen had dredged the bird’s long breast in flour and fried it with mushrooms. I ate the heron, dead blue angel, because I was here to understand how it all worked—the processes of stars, trees, and animals, the way to wring out a living from dirt. I’d eaten deer; this was the same. I had this idea that if I found everything agreeable and easy and comprehensible, then my redemption wouldn’t be real. It had to be hard, to hurt, like my hand. So I would be okay with not leaving. I would be okay with no modern medicine. I would be okay with no couples. In the fake world, people competed to live with perfect ease and that was why the Earth was dying.

And I could look in any direction and see goodness. The following morning, I woke to find every needle of pine jacketed by a low frozen cloud, sparkling with rime. The extended laugh of the yellow-shafted flickers echoed upward, with their endless tapping. I reached the kitchen before anyone else, and while I made pancakes for the five of us who were left behind, the clouds drew back raggedly from the lavender-blue sky, and all the mountains shone.

It was not restful, but it was ascetic, which could be mistaken for restfulness.