Jackals

The prairie was darkening. He could feel the change of season in the air, his skin prickling with goosebumps like tiny mountains erupting all over the plains of his forearms. His hairs stood on end and the orange sun blazed over him like a molten wave, drenching him in it's soft, inviting light. He squinted through it's marvel and focused on the eclipsing horizon. This would be the last sunset he ever saw round these parts. He stared straight into the sun, daring it to burn him alive, to turn him into ashes so he could join his beloved prairie and dance in the tornadoes of the land he cherished.
     Every one of his exhales had the strength and emotion of a repressed sigh. It was if his respiratory system couldn't quite hold the weight of his heavy heart. His soft brown eyes and rough black hair caught the glow of the sun, making them shine in crescent forms. His hair, a sickle atop a meadow - his eyes, segments of a dying moon. His face was dark from constant exposure to the midday heat and the aggressive sun. He tipped his hat further down his worn face, harnessing shadow to shield his pensive eyes from the unforgiving flare. He was a rider, he herded the cattle across to safety and that's all he'd ever known. That and the relentless howls of wolves and coyote all out for a lick of his rich blood. He watched them circle at the edges of the horizon where the dusk lived. They were inexplicably terrifying, and hauntingly beautiful - bounding and falling in playful taunt.
      He kicked off his boots to feel the hot dust and dying soil of the dehydrated pasture beneath his callus toes. He swept his eyes across the land, taking in every grain of sand, every shadow pressed against the blazing sun - dancing and leaping forms of deer and hefty patient cattle roaming freely with no thoughts beyond the grass in their mouths or the milk in their udders. He held his gaze over the feeble glow of stars beginning to emerge through the dulling expanse above him, fighting through the stubborn last day of his world. The battle of the future and the past, commencing silently just above his head.
     He thought of the girls who'd walked beside him down these parts, and the men who'd rode in front. He thought of Evangeline and her soft lips. He thought of how they laughed as he beat the dust from her bonnet after their desperate tumble under the cover of night in the summer heat. He thought of the fiddle's playful tune soothing him to sleep in those cold merciless winters. And then he thought of the concrete, of the trains and the automobiles, of the fast approaching rape of his virgin prairie. The death of it's innocence. The destruction of all that it, and therefore he, was.
      The sun had really set now. The darkness consumed him like a hug at a funeral, cold and shrouded in black. The stars above him cried, dripping tears of phosphorescent beauty to replenish the gasping ground. The chorus of crickets was his lullaby and his eyes began to droop. He wished to stay for eternity, to trap the  miracle of this moment in the back of his mind - to revisit whenever he dared to dream.
      In the end the jackals edged first, snaking towards him in silence, bounding lightly around the cattle. He held his gun close, ready for the pounce. But all he wished for was to jump, to skip toward the jackals as they morphed out of the darkness and began to stalk their victims. He watched them move, their doe-like legs bounding and jumping, bushy tails waving playfully in the air. Every movement enchanting, captivating - deadly. He longed to be chased, caught, and ripped apart by their beautiful mouths to dwell in their strong anatomy until expelled out onto the tundra where he'd melt into the grassland forever. But his terror was too much. He feared death more than he feared change. He could no longer pretend the world wasn't moving too fast for him and in the morning the contractors would come, and they'd pave roads across his ethereal barren home.
   The strays reached the cows but it didn't matter anymore - they were no longer needed, not in this new world. He heard the jackals scream as he turned his back on all he'd ever known - and he wondered how they knew, exactly what he was thinking.