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Universal
Appetite
Years ago, rural landowners burned dense tracts of forest as a cheap means
of clearing pasture for sheep farming. Occasionally, the fires raged out of
control for weeks, but that wasn’t a problem because wool was huge back then
and you couldn’t get it off the mutton and onto textile spools fast enough.
The trade was so lucrative that nearly every inland family in hardscrabble
New England abandoned traditional means of working the land, launching
headlong into shepherding, stripping the glades. To dirt farmers, the
cloying smother of smoke smelled like money.
At the zenith of the sheep craze, one intentional summer fireburst spread so
swiftly and with such savagery that its intensity consumed the surrounding
hills, vaporized two small lakes, charred a lowland marsh to exposed,
sterile rock and raged through
an entire old-growth valley.
Searing topsoil to ash across three counties, roots of smoldering mountain
hardwoods sparked orange versus black horizon every single night. By day
dense, surreal haze obscured dim, hidden sun.
The fire slowed somewhat but burned determinedly into fall. Scores of entire
families were wiped out, but most of the livestock managed to get
successfully herded to safety.
Without tree cover to buffer the blasts, caustic autumn gusts fueled the
timber conflagrations into winter, ravaging the valley.
Five months after its start, sleet and freezing rain finally quelled the
epic blaze. Brutal ice storms then crippled what was left of the entangled
blowdown, burying it beneath layers of pure, pristine snow.
The catastrophe subsided soon enough and the remaining shepherds were able
to get back to the task of raking in profits.
Privately, the talk was that the fire was a godsend in the long run because
the woodlands would have had to be leveled eventually anyway.
A record spring crop was expected and the wool merchants coveted the
foreseen abundance of free land, now so superfluous that their flocks could
expand exponentially, unlimited and unconstrained over time.
In March, the first thaw came and the ewes bore the initial fruits of the
anticipated cash crop. Optimism spread like virulence.
It took a few more weeks for all the snow to melt away. When the final
blanket of frozen cover disappeared, it became alarmingly obvious that the
demolished landscape was not what people expected.
Instead of open, rolling pasture, all that remained was an impenetrable maze
of entanglement: Brittle, blackened sticks and bare earth singed to ancient
glacial scars.
Incredulously, the shepherds came to realize that nothing would ever be able
to breed, graze or grow in the crusted carbon of the fissured floor, that no
living thing could ever flourish in what was left of thousands of square
miles of jagged, serrated undergrowth.
That final incorrect assumption, above all others, proved to be the most
catastrophic.
Nestling in the expansive scorched fortress of intricate thicket, one native
species did indeed thrive in this exact gift of a perfect lair, perpetuating
and nurturing undisturbed amongst the sooty, spiked maze.
The ripe farm flocks were thinned rapidly, with cunning discern.
At first it appeared as if nature was randomly reclaiming individual sheep.
Over time, the process became understood as carefully orchestrated
retaliation.
Wolves.
—T.D. Thornton
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