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In Dulce we lived high in the mountains and we had our dog Boots with
us. In the summer before school, my brothers and I ran in the tall
grass chasing dragonflies, holding them tenderly in the cup of our
palms, in jars to study their colors briefly before setting them free
back over pools of reflecting water. They were another magic like the
fireflies I watched ignite in green lights in Mississippi. As they
flew off into the sun, I could feel their bleating wings in my heart,
in that utter joy over the beauty of the flowers.
 One morning I stepped outside calling for Boots and saw a mountain
lion on a rock that was taller than the trailer we lived in, just
right in front of me. We stared into each others eyes. I watched him
flick his tail, watching me, deciding, our breath right there in the
same air, so close it mingled. I backed away, and away until I made it
back to my trailer and ran inside. When I looked out, he was gone like
a vision. He filled my mother with fear for what was outside, but I'd
watched him watching me. I'd watched him let me go. And Boots came
home with porcupine quills in his face our father had to remove with
pliers. And Boots refrained from biting over the pain.
While Boots lay by the door healing, I ran over the dirt of the
driveway of the trailer park to the landlord's house, playing tag
football with the Indian children of our landlord. We were all so
tough and fast, made of muscles and hardly cracking when we pounded
into one another. I could trip and stay on my feet, jumping through
that air.
And then I didn't know where the cage came from but there was a cage
beside the landlord's house, the toughest most unbreakable cage and it
in was a sad cub. We children watched him and wondered, looking behind
us higher into the mountains, if his mother would come tearing down
for him, if she would try to break the cage. At night I heard him
wailing for her and I hoped she could, she'd come and save him, she'd
weave her way so rapidly down the mountain, past the rocks and the
trees, and break that cage apart and take him home. The moon was round
and bright and glowed over his cage. I hoped so much she wasn't dead.
And then the cub was gone and no one talked about it.
Longing for him to be home, I walked with my brothers over boards
covering a crevice and there on the other side was a rattlesnake
coiling and rattling at us. I ran and looked back from where I'd fled
to see my baby brother with those blond curls staring down in
curiosity, fearlessly reaching for the interesting being. I ran back
and swooped him in my arms and then the men came and chopped the snake
in half and talked about a den under there and how they needed to
protect the children. They talked about blindness and finding ones way
by scent and feel.
I thought about Dulce. I thought the earth must be sweet, the grass
that grew from it, those flowers, all those animals of every size that
had never hurt us. Once Boots was even bitten by a rattlesnake and his
face swelled but he didn't die. The world was ethereal. I'd learned to
not be so surprised by hatred, be not so woebegone now that we were
away from hunger in Mississippi. In that beauty I could feel in my
breath, in my blood, I didn't care. My body was lithe now, not
yearning for food, but yearning to run and be outside in that
murmuring world where all the dangers were worth it.
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