by Colleen Madonna Flood Williams*

It was quite apparent that she was an old cow when we first laid eyes upon her. Her hide was scarred, and she moved with the assurance of the aged. She knew where she was, and where she was going. It was time for her to calve and she was going to do it in our backyard. Right behind our fire pit!

We were the newcomers, not her. Having just moved into our home, we were unprepared for this unexpected guest. She, on the other hand, was prepared to do what she had traveled to our yard to do, give birth. She also did not seem to care one bit that we might believe that she was in our yard. This was her birthing area, and we were the trespassers, in her eyes.

For the next five years, my son and I were blessed with the opportunity of watching this older mother show up every year to do it all over again. In the nearby woods, a disgruntled yearling always seemed to be watching her give birth, too. The yearling never appeared to be as excited about the whole process as my son and I were.

She almost always produced a precocious pair of gangly chestnut red twins, and invariably lost one of those twins over the course of the long Kenai winter. I ached over the loss of each of her calves, although she never knew it. I missed her and worried when she disappeared from the area for months at a time. She was my friend, although she didn't even know me.

I wondered, as I underwent ten months of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for breast cancer at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, if she knew I was ill. I wondered if she missed me peering out of my back windows to watch her.

I hoped that she was all right and that she would still be around if and when, I made it back home. I asked my husband to keep an eye out for her. My husband, Paul, did look for her on the few occasions that he flew to Soldotna to check on our house, after completing his monthly "two weeks on" the North Slope. Paul's time was split between Buffalo and the North Slope most months, though, and he didn't see her much that winter.

She was nowhere to be found when I arrived home. I wept privately. Something in me knew that she was gone. Perhaps, old age, a motorist, a disease, or a predator brought her down. I didn't know what had happened to her. I only knew that she was gone.

I wept for the gangly calves that I had so looked forward to seeing in my back yard this year. I wept for myself, as her death reminded me of the fragile state of my own health. I wept because she was a mother, too. I wept because I missed my friend.

I realized about a month after I had arrived home, that there was another younger cow nosing about the brushy areas of my backyard. I told myself that this was one of my friend's daughters, come home to give birth in the same place that she had been born. I spied an anxious yearling observing her from the neighboring trees. I smiled and touched my son's hair with my hand. Another mother moose had come to visit our yard, and soon, I was sure that she would become our mother moose. We would watch her and worry about her and love her, just as we had her predecessor.

I closed my eyes and pictured the grandchildren that my son might someday give me. I hope to be around to meet them. If not, however, I hope that he brings his wife to the Kenai Peninsula when she is ready to give birth. I hope that it is still the wild, beautiful place where I once gave birth to my son. And I hope that they are able to look out their back window, and watch a mother moose of their own, nudging her gangly chestnut red calves onto their feet for the very first time.
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* Colleen Madonna Flood Williams is recovering from stage 2b breast cancer. Her son, Dillon, and husband, Paul, support her as she struggles to overcome this disease. She spends many of her days writing, and watching out her back windows for moose.