Wild Life (29 page)

I wonder what they think of me—if they imagine my corduroy coat, my paraffined trousers, are a furred covering—if they believe I am a singularly ill-trained orphan whose frail size must be due to unknown hardships and abuses! But Cleo is solicitous, sometimes to the point of sending one or another of her children back to locate me if I lag too far to the rear of the column. Like any orphan, I am grateful to be adopted, even if this kindness is driven by animal instinct.

 

They are called monkeys (Simia) in the Latin language because people notice a great
similitude
to human reason in them. Wise in the lore of the elements, these creatures grow merry at the time of the new moon. At half and full moon they are depressed. Such is the nature of an ape that, when she gives birth to twins, she esteems one of them highly but scorns the other. Hence, if it ever happens that she gets chased by a sportsman she clasps the one she likes in her arms in front of her, and carries the one she detests with its arms round her neck, pickaback. But for this very reason, when she is exhausted by running on her hind legs, she has to throw away the one she loves, and carry the one she hates, willy-nilly.

FROM A LATIN BESTIARY OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

 

C. B. D. (1906)
F
ROM
“T
HE
F
ORKS
”
IN
A D
ESOLATION
,
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

 

The woman, who had been alone but now was in the company of a small band of wild people, came out of the burnt trees into open meadows and from the grass flushed the first spring birds—juncos, sparrows, robins. There would be woodpeckers and yellow warblers in the lower valleys by now, but she and the others had climbed and climbed high up, where spring had barely sprung. In the wet places skunk cabbages were blooming, which the woman had learned a taste for, but other animals, beavers or raccoons, had been ahead of them, digging in the mud for the tender roots.

They went up to a low, open ridge and below it was a very pretty lake, small and round, hardly more than a pond. Though there were patches of ice on the lake, the snow was entirely gone from the grassy meadows, and the trails of bear and of deer going down to the lakeshore were well used. There were fresh beaver cuttings everywhere, and as the beaver had mowed down all the brush, there was good going around the edge of the lake, with grassy swales and narrow marshes spaced among low ridges, and knolls crowned with dwarfish noble firs and bare-limbed larches.

The wild people fished the lake bare-handed. Along the undercut banks they placed their big hands in the water and reached slowly along the bottom until they had touched a fish, then worked fingers gently along the fish's belly to the gills, where they grasped suddenly, lifting from the water with the swift motion of a long arm, which action the woman studied and attempted to imitate without accomplishing it. She knew that she might come in for a share of fish the others had caught, but in recent days and weeks she had learned also a rigorous self-dependence. After three or four failed experiments she managed to make a line from twisted strands of her own hair, which she fastened to a thorn and baited with grubs. This was very light tackle, but the lake water was so very clear even a human hair must appear a heavy cable to the eye of a vigilant fish. She caught the stupid small ones, which satisfied her.

She understood that the wild people with whom she traveled had once been human, or had once been animals, and now abided in shadows. She was ignorant of their language, however, and the wild people, in return, believed the woman to be mute and a lackwit. She held to the belief that her inventive fishing contrivance must astound them—that it must represent to them an ingenious technology. In fact, their surprise had to do with her caught fishes, which seemed to them unexpected proof of her native intelligence.

At a shallow place along the upper end of the lake, wet gravel and stones showed where a bear had been feeding upon the grass meadows and then had watered in the lake, twice crossing the round gray cobbles of the gravel bar. A long narrow point of spruce timber divided the upper and lower meadows, and when the woman and the others were crossing through the long spring grasses of the upper meadows, a shadow moved out from the thick edge of the timber and became that bear. He quartered toward them steadily, but stopped suddenly and stood looking straight at the woman and perhaps also at the wild people who were with her. He was large and brown, his pelt ragged, and in his flank and shoulder were several holes, open sores, the result of fighting. Years before, his left ear had been torn loose and now dangled in a comic way, attached by a narrow strap of cartilage.

The bear had been returning to a bloody winterkill which he had taken possession of from coyotes and ravens, and which the
woman now smelled and then saw lying upon the grass—a shape which may have been a deer, though by this time much disfigured and dismembered. The wild people saw or smelled this carrion also and crossed toward it as if the bear were not standing there, for they intended to take possession of it themselves.

As a child, the woman had once sat in a wagon waiting while a black bear held the center of the road, a sow standing erect and fixing the wagonload of people with her stare while twin cubs safely crossed behind her from one brushy shoulder of the road to the other. At another time, still a girl, she had met a bear coming up a trail right toward her as she went down it. When the bear was near enough to see and smell the person with whom it shared the path, it started and tripped backward over a deadfall before scrambling off into red alder thickets in an embarrassed way that seemed to her quite human. In several places where the woman had lived, bears had been both prevalent and unapparent, staying under cover for the most part and having nothing to do with human beings except for their rubbish heaps or the old apples left behind in their orchards. If the bears of her childhood environs once had been predators, they had long since stopped being so; she considered them agreeable models for wildness. They appealed to a side of herself which was grumpy and solitary—unsociable.

She now lived in another place entirely, and had lately discovered in herself an unconquerable, instinctive dread of being eaten. In dreams, she had seen the shining interior wilderness of her own ribs and spine and viscera, the glistening scrapple of her brain, lying unfolded upon the somber green of sword ferns and mosses, and carried in the beaks of ravens and the sharp mouths of bears. She had become less afraid since coming into the company of the wild people, who were giants and untroubled by bears or lions. But while she went on crossing the high meadow in front of the big bear—crossing with the others, who were unconcerned—her heart began to trot, in the same swift way a coyote trots, its blurred feet scarcely touching the ground.

The bear's vision was poor but he was gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell. He blew air, chuffing and licking his nose and blinking as he watched the woman cross before him. Then he lowered himself to four feet and continued on across the grass toward the
salmonberry shoots and pea vines which had sprouted in the sunlight along the lower edges of an outbreak of rock. It was his belief that the woman was, if not inhuman, at least wild, the dark tocsin of her human scent having been by this time muffled, ameliorated. The woman herself, eating of the old, spoiled, and bloated carrion, disciplined herself from casting a look backward. She was at that time still days away from an understanding of her own wildness.

Cleo's character puts me in mind of Edith Eustler: a cheerful disposition and capable hands. We frequently browse near each other, and she has taken up the habit of “talking” to me in a low, lighthearted warbling which I find not only musical but companionable. I occasionally whistle or chirrup in reply, though my tuneful rendering of “Thou Art So Like a Flower” seems merely to puzzle and amuse her.

At times it seems possible to learn and translate their language. Their whistles and clicks and chirrups can be very like the human voice, with risings, fallings, inflections, clots, and stops such as we use. At certain odd hours of the gray morning I have amused myself by imagining their shapeless noise made over into coherent Roman letters, and thence into English. And along another line, I have wondered: by not speaking aloud for days, for weeks, what is the consequence to one's voice? If I opened my mouth and spoke now, what would emerge? Perhaps furred sounds, unpalatized, or a fluent unshapen pouring. (I think of Teddy.) My prolonged muteness has begun to seem the natural state; I am driven back upon my undeveloped senses, where the important thing is not to name the flower but to look at it—
look
at it—until the yellowness and the minute grains of pollen at the tips of the pistils completely enter one's consciousness and
become
its naming; and afterward, one may wish to christen the flower with a two-note whistle.

Today we have been keeping near a little creek which runs down
through a valley of Western red cedar—in my childhood people called them canoe-cedars—such as I am sure Bill Boyce and his fellows would love to get their hands on, the majestic and vigorous trees rising each from its own great hillock of discarded needles and cones. I should guess these ancient trees to be a good five centuries old and moss-covered on their northerly sides, but nevertheless still healthy, having live branches low enough for Pat (or Pit) riding high upon my shoulders to reach playfully with his hands.

I suppose such giant trees as we have in this part of the country owe their immensity to a kind of botanical good fortune: mild climate as compared to the Great Lakes country, or to Maine, where Paul Bunyan's matchstick white pines were but a puny three feet in diameter; and the nourishment of rainfall amounting to a hundred inches or more in a given year (of which I must believe ninety-nine have fallen on my head since going lost in the woods); and I suppose also to individual accidents of location with respect to soil, fire, slope, shade, and so forth: this is Science. The Transcendentalists, of course, would make of such trees a natural church for Man, which I reject out of hand as being steeped in the rhetoric of religion; but I admit that today I was struck by a sense of something grand and beautiful in the accident of Nature. The trees did not intrude upon one another but stood forth alone, vast and mysterious and still. It is a different adventure to walk upright through a primeval forest, among the great buttressed and fluted trunks with their aromatic, pendulous limbs, than to creep through woods which were logged over or burnt years before and now are overgrown with a thick tangle of brush and weedy trees and must be threaded only as the bears and deer do, down on all fours.

A warmish spring day: wildflowers growing upon every bit of ground where the canopy admits a glimpse of sunlight; the young limbs of the trees lifting joyously upward, the old ones downspread with the utmost grandeur; the bright green of spring's growth making a great show at the ends of the branches. As any gentlewoman on a gentle ramble through the countryside, I took in the scenery and meditated upon it. I wondered who could look on the lacy foliage of the canoe-cedar, those flat sprays forked and forked again along their axis—drooping from their parting like the mane of a horse—without seeing a small gesture of grace. I wondered why there was such pleasure in the sound of one's feet crunching the diminutive cedar cones underfoot. I wondered if the soft purl and sibilance of the downhill creek must be what Thomas Fuller had in mind when he said that music was nothing but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. When Cleo placed her huge feet with deliberate care so as not to trample the tender white shoots of Indian pipe thrusting up from the forest duff—well, this is the sort of thing that supports a poetic invention: I wondered if the beasts of the forest have a sublime, unspoken appreciation for the delicate beauties of Nature.

I don't let such thoughts out on the air—have a lingering fear of my human voice startling the others—have become accustomed to my own silence and theirs—but this book is my dear companion, a good listener to the workings of my mind.

 

Though the lower animals have no language in the full sense as we understand it, they have a system of sounds, signs, touches, tastes, and smells that answer the purpose of language, and I merely translate this, when necessary, into English.

E
RNEST
T
HOMPSON
S
ETON
,
Lobo, Rags, and Vixen
(1899)

Today we followed a creek upstream through dense spruce and hemlock until it came tumbling white out of a canyon; we crossed on a foot log, lingered there for a brief rest before tackling the steep, switchbacking climb to the break of the falls. On top, the creek appeared resting for its wild shoot down the canyon—there was a sloughlike stretch of dead water which we followed back through brush to a logjam one hundred feet wide and solid as a dam—the creek impounded behind it in a narrow lake half a mile long. Not the
work of beaver but snowslides, I think, for the steep slopes all around were banded with bare vertical stripes where in years of deep snow, avalanches had swept great swaths of timber down the slopes and into the creek.

We fished the slough and the narrow lake, and in the afternoon were eating quantities of dockweed and salmonberry shoots when Cleo suddenly reared her head in alarm—I felt this before seeing it—a bright startle that went right through to my bones. I ran to the twins and Dolly, whether to protect or to be protected, not clear in my mind, but the twins climbed into my lap and Dolly and I huddled together. Then Cleo gave a new cry, a sort of hooting call which I heard as bright and animated; she broke for the near trees in that sloping gait which is so distinctive to her species, and here came from the brush two beasts standing upright and crossing swiftly over the rocky ground with the same long, loose walk—a jolting realization—others of her kind, two males of monstrous proportions.