Most of the party respected their hate; anyone could have hunted the bird. The March wind harbors an inappropriate violence. He nodded to the water as he flew, knowing all of the stones and trusting the river’s glacial clarity. The reproduction of silence sounds like gravel when it plays on the police station’s stereo. Russet color on his talons suggests a suicide, the coroner rules. Birds wouldn’t do that, the police are firm, it must have been a murder. The gravel recording starts up again. The coroner turns slowly. He forbodes the pistol disposed in the riverbank, illuminated by sunken, snow-heavy stars. A solution: ether, icy metamorphosis. The vulture had made a serrated-winged pilgrimage to the Northland to pronounce the cold land’s name in his cloudless language. One wing was bound with fire to his rights, the other disappeared in moss. The answers to his overwhelming questions bloomed silently in the unclosing eyes of the fish. His legend smolders all around his imprint in the ice. The law goes home to meat and wine.