First Nation Encounters
Wheat and Moon Cass Lynch
You hear her approaching, the whump whump whump of feet on wheat. The rhythmic roll of paired appendages lifting and spearing among stiff straw stalks on undulating agricultural boodja. Over the night horizon she appears, a low pale moon that lifts off the ground as if to ascend skyward, only to hover and sprout limbs — two, four, six, eight. Limbs that branch from behind cephalothorax, multiple glowing eyes a constellation on her face. The legs are lengths of millet, the coarse head is hay, the round body a tapestry of cereal grains. The giant spider made of wheat walks with horse-rhythm across beige fields burdened with kernels. Soon combine harvesters will make straight tracks across colour-leached land, guided by satellites, plucking seed top from crop. The great spider is looking for somewhere to rest. There is remnant scrub at the edge of a paddock, the lumped granite there hostile to machinery, with a she-oak looming shadow-like in the moon’s rays. Spider feet grope forward, brushing over rock and lichen, and she senses something acidic: not mammal urine, not rotting citric fruit. It’s nitroglycerin. This granite outcrop has been dynamited in the past, partially, unsuccessfully, an attempt to make more pasture, more bleached sameness. She traces the stone with curiosity, her stalky chaff claws admiring the rock that runs too deep to crack.
15
