The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • Ekphrastic Book Shelf
    • Contributors' Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • Workshops
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Stem Cell Hunting Season, by Gail Tyson

1/20/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Fishing Lure Tapestry, photography by Gail Tyson (USA). 2018.

​Stem Cell Hunting Season

 
Ben’s hounds paw their chain-link pen, quit baying at his command. Inside his cabin he droops into an armchair—shaky, but not as weak as he was two months ago, his plaid flannel wrinkled as ever, cheeks sandpaper stubble. Above us hang four stag heads and an antler-wreath chandelier; over the door, a handsaw painted with a woodland scene.

The first time I sat on his couch, I asked who mounted his bucks. “Taxidermist costs too much,” he declared. “Got ‘em at the Flea Mall.” Ben has hunted deer, bear, and wild boar since boyhood. Before Davy Crockett roamed these parts, settlers tracked wild creatures with bow and arrow, black powder, and firearms for food as much as sport. They still do. I’m city-born, but I respect the self-sufficiency bred in East Tennessee’s mountains.

Around our cabins rove 640,000 acres of Cherokee National Forest. For twelve years Ben’s headlights have raked my window at 3:30 a.m., pickup crunching gravel on his way out with Bo, Blue, Big Boy, or just his fishing rod. It’s good to see him up and about since complications from diabetes and congestive heart failure pinned him to his bed.

“I was goin’ down,” he confides. “Pain 24/7. Doctor talked hospice. I said hell, no. Got thirty million stem cells injected, from umbilical cord. After two weeks I felt better. The stem cells go wherever damage is—some to my heart, some to my knees. Even my cataract healed.”

Conversation rambles to his bear hunt two weeks ago with B.J., the preacher up the road. They took along a young guy, a big talker. He put Blue—howling at prey—in peril by refusing to clamber through a gnarled thicket. Ben’s voice dripped scorn. It can take a man two days to crawl through a laurel hell. My friend has some years on him now, but he used to lunge down ravines, ford icy streams, creep across hells, trudge steep slopes.

Ben backtracks. “The treatment is good for ninety days. I’m comin’ up on that. Cost me $7,000, not covered by insurance.” He pauses. “Need to decide whether to do it again.”

I look up. On the log wall a rainbow of 200 fishing lures glints in morning’s sunstream. I’m like a walleye in Lake Tellico, beguiled by spinnerbait. In the dazzling tapestry, I spy a small, determined figure: Ben working his way uphill through stands of oak, hickory, walnut, elm, poplar, pine. Crossing glades wild with ginseng and rhododendron, the grape-scent of mountain laurel. Tracking higher into radiant birch, flaming maples, lacy hemlock. Cresting onto grassy balds. He is rising through his history, from childhood on to an engineering career, past a family feud, pausing now and then near dogs he’s buried, countless potlucks he has graced with smoked bear, stewed venison, fresh walleye, up to panoramas of ash-blue peaks.

He casts his eye at the distant lake. Casts his rod across dark water, quiet and sure. Aims for what old-time hymns call Home.

Gail Tyson

Recent prose by Gail Tyson has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Lowestoft Chronicle.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The Ekphrastic Review
    Picture
    Current Prompt
    COOKIES/PRIVACY
    This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you.
    Join us on Facebook:
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture



    ​
    ​Archives
    ​

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    Lorette C. Luzajic theekphrasticreview@gmail.com 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • Ekphrastic Book Shelf
    • Contributors' Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • Workshops
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead