Digging in

 

Sometimes for no apparent reason Foxy, under the bed or with me on the bed, will wake up or lift her head and bark quickly, then growl. She can smell or hear the deer moving through the clearing. I lift my head to look out the small window, but at night there’s just blackness and in daylight the hoarfrost covers the window anyway.

Later, outside in the light and the snow freshly fallen there are deer tracks even fresher, moving from one birdfeeder to the other. The deer are never far away.

Due east of the cabin, through the old firs, 100 feet out, is a stand of thick young balsam on a slope going down, away. There we find the deer beds, impressions in the snow made by the bodies of the deer. If the deer lays on the snow, its body heat will melt a layer of snow and create an ice basin; if it is snowing while the deer beds the deer allows itself to be covered by the snow. This is common for animals. Common for bear and wolves and fox and partridge and ptarmigan.

These deer bed under the overhead protection of the young balsams. The prevailing wind, from the west or north, brings the scent of any danger. If, for example, I let the dogs out, the deer can sense it, being downwind.

These are the SOPs of hunkering down for deer. Always put your back to the wind. Face down wind. Bed on the southern slope on a sunny day to catch the warmth.

From the bedding area in the balsams the bedding deer have the advantage of a vantage down the slope and over the creek basin, which they watch for danger, meaning predators, meaning die Mannschaften und der Wolf und Der Panzer…

My great uncle George fought for foxholes in the Ardennes Forest, in the Battle of the Bulge, in December and January, ‘44 and ‘45.

In the first afternoons of the German attack the ground hadn’t frozen yet. It was wet and the snow was coming and in the foxholes the digging and scattering of the dirt discolored the snow, so that it appeared just as a mortar crater, but the mortar hadn’t yet landed there. In those first days the Germans had their wind and their legs, and every inch dug for a foxhole was necessary every night.

Then it continued to snow, and the temperature dropped. The Germans held their breath against the cold. And the ground was frozen so you could not at first dig the foxhole. The only luck you had was that now the German offensive stalled from the cold and snow so that you had, not one afternoon for a new foxhole, but days and weeks to chip and chop down into the frozen ground for the one foxhole for the rest of your days.

And there lived the G.I. Christmas 1944. Eating, urinating, defecating there. New Year’s 1945.

At night in the frozen stillness – and this is my great-uncle’s favorite part of the story – the German line across the snow so close that in the dark we could hear them speaking in German.

If he were lucky, he would share the foxhole. Either way, alone or with a buddy, he held his ground and waited by retelling the story of his young life.

“My mother’s name is Francis and my dad is Jimmy. They sell shoes at a shoe store on the main street in a small town.” Long pause for housekeeping and distractions in the foxhole. “Once you’re on Pine Lake you just can’t see the far end. You’re at the east end and looking over west the lake is so long. If the wind isn’t bad, you can paddle all day and reach the small point that juts out from the north side of the lake and there’s this island just off the tip of the point. There’s no point in trying to camp on the island, even though it really is the best spot on the lake, because all the firewood on the island has been gathered up and burned since 1920.”

It has become accepted wisdom that there are no atheists in a foxhole.

I have never been in a foxhole.

But it seems to me that if any place is deserving of an atheist, it is a foxhole. What man could believe that his loving and omnipotent God would leave him there? A foxhole is an atheist’s home, where comes a soldier who has been forsaken. If he’s lucky he shares it with another, who has also been ultimately forsaken. Shares it not with the gentle Jesus meek and mild that Karl Malden (as Father Barry) so beautifully preached in “On the Waterfront.” It’s a foxhole, and it’s January, and it’s night, and the boy atheist is there because he deserves to be there. Because he’s an atheist. And his buddy didn’t know he himself was an atheist until that foxhole.