They shot the last wolf in the valley in 1926 and called it mercy.
The elk, ungoverned, ate the willow down to a memory of willow,
and the beaver, who needs the willow, left, and took the ponds with him,
and the songbirds who needed the ponds went quiet, and the banks,
with no root to hold them, began to walk into the river and dissolve.
The valley did not die. Worse. It kept living, wrongly, a body
running every organ off a script with the keystone verb deleted,
a sentence still grammatical with its subject torn out, meaning anything,
meaning nothing, a green and functioning nonsense. Then, seventy years on,
fourteen wolves off a truck in 1995, and the willow remembered itself,
and the beaver came back to build the water back, and the birds,
and the banks stopped walking, and the river, they swear, changed course
to match a channel it had forgotten it once carved. The teeth
put the whole valley back inside its own sentence. Nothing here
loved anything. The wolf did not return to heal the river.
It returned to eat, and the eating was the healing, and the healing
was just the shape hunger makes when you let it back into the room.