Arborescent. Marc Herman Lynch

      As Jeb Buckles’s eyesight deteriorated, he staked guidewires across his land. Jeb often walked down the valley to the river, two kilometres out, pinky hooked under wire, to stand in windswept snow. The expletives he delivered intensified with the wind: he told both the alpacas in their shelter and the yellow-beaked pilgrims under the trailer to “fuck off.” The wind tortured him until he threw down. But, rather than resembling a proper pugilist, he looked, Marchella said, more like a lady with a June bug down her dress.

      His cataracts worsened, but no doctor was gonna fudge with his eyes. “Better to have an eye,” Jeb would say when the goose sausage came out like the offal from a freshly field-dressed deer.

      His blindness worsened in the winter, when the light off the snow was biting, and there were only eight hours of sunlight. But the intricate lattice of guidewire did more than compensate for his disorientation. It amplified his touch, such that his reach stretched across the valley. He could feel the nose of a deer nudging the line on the opposite side of the estate, the light touch of a gopher’s tail, the sway of a copse, the roots wending through the matted earth.

      Stepping outside his back door, Jeb reached for the hip-high stake hammered into the ground, the thread practically invisible against the hard-packed snow. He curled his pinky around the wire.

      The trebuchet creaked with windmill-like sluggishness. The cantilevered counterweight was a hefty load the size of a small yacht. Jeb hoisted his own weight onto the tie, momentarily leaving the ground to allow the pawl to catch on the ratchet’s next tooth; the machine strained with tension. Foot-tall dead sunflowers stood in the snow along the edge of the escarpment, their stalks bent and discs covered in icicles.

      With mitted hands, Jeb yanked the thick, braided rope. With a clank and wobble, the contraption shuddered and the counterweight dropped, followed by a rush of air. And here the rush of siege, the mounting pressure toppling bodies that jostled over bloody fields. For Jeb, history was nothing more than men swinging from gibbets and skulls spiked on ramparts. This was progress as largesse, violence shorn down to evolutionary impulse. For him, an eight-pound trigger pull, the drop of the plunger, the whine of a drone—these were the products of men being men, a call of the wild as distinctive as a roar.

      His oohs and aahs died in the wind as the bathtub twisted, an awkward porcelain projectile turning from blackish blur to whitish speck, until it disappeared from his sight entirely; he listened intently, then heard the muffled explosion as the tub bounded to a halt among the other snowy lumps on the valley floor.

      “That sure is something,”