Trauma Farm (3 page)
A deer? Since hunting season was approaching, I decided to investigate, despite the bad light. There were stinging nettles between me and the intruder, who was drifting stealthily away. Stinging nettles are no fun for the bare-assed. Yet I couldn’t resist the opportunity to follow, albeit cautiously. This is the lot of the hunter. I instinctively went into mode, almost inhaling the hunt, while circling the maple. Intelligence-challenged Olive, meanwhile, had finally caught on that I was following prey. She circled onto the back road, trapping it between us. I moved faster in the darkness, still unable to see what I was pursuing. Another branch snapped, and then our prey started to run, swiftly. It had to be a large buck, the way its feet struck the ground.
That’s when it hit the page-wire fence concealed by another clump of nettles. A bloodcurdling scream erupted, and I realized I’d done a very bad thing. It was a cougar, and it was pissed—and I was right behind it, wearing nothing but my gumboots. I froze. Brave Olive ran for the house, while I needlessly yelled for both dogs to get back, the border collie cravenly glued to my ankle as I retreated.
We all know how, in a moment of fright, the hackles on our neck can stand up. Well, I was so scared I could feel my chest hairs straighten out.
“The pigs!” I thought. The cougar wasn’t interested in the chickens; it was going for the young feeder pigs I had in a pen beside the lower field. Having backed up close enough to the house, I ran inside and began fiddling with the locks and double locks on the gun cabinet that the laws of our time dictate. I was looking for a howitzer, but I settled on a shotgun and lead slugs. A better tool for close encounters in the dark. By the time I returned, armed, dressed, waving the powerful hand lantern, the forest was quiet again. I flashed the pig yard, where they were calmly browsing amid the stumps. They looked at me with an intelligent curiosity that made me recall an old farmer who remarked, when I was dallying on some job, “Don’t just stand there like a pig shitting in the moonlight.” The stinging nettles rustled softly in the wind, and the dogs moved cautiously, sniffing at a trail into the forest. The insouciant pigs made me feel guilty for my silliness and bravado and panic. Beauty had slipped by in the night. I was grateful for not stumbling into a confrontation with such a sublime creature as a cougar.
The next morning the only trace I could find was a large, perfect paw print beside a puddle on the back road.
ASIDE FROM THE ODD
thrilling encounter, the truth about darkness is that it’s gentler than daylight, when we, the most dangerous creatures on the planet, set in motion our endless slaughter of animals. But maybe I should not say that anymore—the multinational slaughterhouses now work around the clock.
I feel safer in the saturated darkness of our farm than I do walking into a 7-Eleven store in an urban ghetto in Salt Lake City or Winnipeg and asking for directions while the neighbourhood kids size me up. The dark of the wilderness is a relatively safe country, which is why many animals prefer its embrace. At night, I occasionally shine my flashlight across our field. The green eyes of the sheep and maybe a nervous young buck will focus on me like a pattern of fireflies, accompanied by the nervous sigh of the horse. I love the music of the night. Then I feel guilty for disturbing them.
WE HAVE BECOME LIGHT-LOVING
urbanites, creatures of custom, acclimatized to our war on darkness, which accelerated with the invention of artificial light and our rapidly increasing technological achievements. After the gaslights, after the electric lamp, our fear of the night increased. What’s stranger still is that so many urbanites now sneer at the rural world. It’s Hicksville. Those of us who live outside the urban streets are an anachronism, quaint, irrelevant to the roaring train of civilization and its luminosity spreading like an erratic, feverish infection across the nights of the planet.
A friend used to rent out his cabin. It was very beautiful, wall-to-wall windows overlooking a pond and the cedar forest beyond. Serene and private—a hundred yards down the driveway from his home. A Los Angeles couple rented it on a misty fall evening. They were delighted with the cabin, but later, about ten o’clock, there came a knock at the man’s door. Opening it, he saw the headlights of their car idling in his driveway. The woman was holding the key to the cabin. “I’m sorry. Your place is so lovely, but we come from Los Angeles and we’re not used to such darkness. We feel too insecure, so we’re leaving. We don’t want our money back, of course, but we just can’t stay.” She handed my bemused friend the keys and was gone. Later, he heard they’d stayed at a cheap motel in Ganges—the little town that supplies our island’s basic needs. There was more light there.
DARKNESS CAN ALSO TEACH
us about the way we look at the world. A decade ago a friend erected a full-size canvas teepee at the south corner of our upper pasture; then, being a typical islander, he took a few years to haul it down. So one evening, Sharon and I decided to try it out before he retrieved it. A night in a teepee sounded romantic. We collected a pile of bedding and cushions and a lantern, and hiked down. It was another moony night. All three cats followed us. Since they were domestic cats they didn’t appreciate the change in sleeping arrangements. This was too far from home. They cried out their displeasure, which led to some disciplinary adventures. The cat who had figured out complaining wasn’t going to do him any good slept on a heap of bedding at the other end of the teepee, while his two friends were terminally booted out. With that ruckus settled, we proceeded to cavort in the teepee, discovering that the flashlight made great shadows on the white canvas walls. We had a riot.
It was only after we were settling into sleep that I began to consider that flashlight. I woke Sharon and told her to stand up and turn the light on; then I crawled outside and discovered the first rule of teepee living. Unless they have liners, canvas teepees perform like old-fashioned lantern shows. Everything that had occurred inside during the last two hours was not only clearly visible—it had been magnified. Our house is far back on the pasture, but the teepee was near the public road, and very evident to anyone out for a moonlit walk, a common occurrence on Salt Spring Island. I had to smile. Sharon was not amused.
Later, with the moon down and starshine filling the sky, I crawled out of the teepee to take a leak. Immediately, I became nervous, even before I pushed the flap aside and saw the ram gazing curiously at me, ten feet away. They were all here, the whole flock, circling us, equally spaced apart, staring at the teepee. It was like a vision out of a primitivist painting. Directly in front of the flap, four long legs pointed at the sky, was Stonewall Jackson, the black horse, sound asleep on his back during his self-appointed guard duty. And I returned inside, dodging the cats and the snoring dogs, comforted by the knowledge we were surrounded under the stars, guarded by the curious animals of the farm.
Now, another fevered night comes to a close, and there’s a freshness in the air as a breeze rustles the sword ferns. The dogs begin to make wider circles when I come up from the bottom field’s gate beneath the first lily pond. The grey hour is arriving, and the bird god is about to unleash its opera, a chorus of songs rising from the forests, the ponds, and the fields. The peafowl will soon float out of the maple, 150 feet above the field near the house, gliding to the ground like water bombers. Everyone starts singing, even the peahens with their goofy, honking dawn call. And I am walking naked into the morning.
A
PPROXIMATELY 100 MILLION
years ago a tentative wave of song began rotating around our planet without interruption, following the dawn, travelling at eighteen miles a second across the equator in an oral celebration of approaching sunshine. In the temperate landscape of Trauma Farm the song surf of the birds is spectacular, and the grey hour, now peaking, is my favourite moment of the day. It’s when the earth, bursting with the energy of the dawn chorus, flexes its muscles, the hope and desire for life singing strongest in the shrubs.
Hayom harat
olam,
“Today the world is pregnant,” goes the opening line of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. Birth always inspires us. At first, only a few tentative, pensive notes and insecure rebel yells drift into the air. Then the drab Swainson’s thrush calls out its haunt upon the farm. A ghost in the trees, this bird wears all its colour in its song, possessing the most lingering bittersweet refrain I’ve ever encountered.
Although the thrush is endemic to North America, the Swainson’s defines the raincoast, its distinct song identified with the Gulf Islands—lingering, plaintive, echoing in the evergreens, replaced only by the mighty vocalizations of the raven in winter or the punky yap of the gulls in the saltchuck. Every landscape has its song. One of the crimes of our time is that most of us no longer know the birds of our region—so many ears are stopped with the headphones of personal music devices.
Though evocative, the Swainson’s thrush is no vocal athlete and its song is simple and pure, whereas the hermit thrush is reputed to have twelve thousand songs. Its songs generally last less than two seconds, using forty-five to a hundred notes and fifty pitch changes. The hermit thrush sings with both sides of its syrinx simultaneously, its minute muscles controlling the volume of air and its position in the bird’s throat and beak. That this feat of engineering evolved out of chance mutations is a wonder of the world. As a result of these mechanics, the bird sounds like an angel. The biologist Don Kroodsma describes the hermit thrush song as “Oh, holy holy—ah purity purity—eeh sweetly sweetly.”
The thrush is not the only Olympic athlete of song. Bewick’s wrens learn songs from their fathers and translate them into the songs of the other males whose habitats they pass through, combining and recreating local traditions. Marsh warblers also steal the songs of territories they touch upon during migration.
TRAUMA FARM ENJOYS SEVERAL
waves of sound and many small cacophonies. The most impressive one struck in the first months after we arrived. We came to call it “the wall.” The
krek-eks
of an impressive throng of tree frogs— now endangered in other locales. Here they rule the dark hours in the spring, their roar impressive despite our thick log walls, which dampen outside noise more than stud-wall homes. When we first moved onto the farm Sharon would catch herself whispering to me at night—overwhelmed by their thunder.