Wild Life (28 page)

Rain overnight, which I am nearly hardened to, but then heavy wind, which seemed to fill the night with devils—shrieking and whining in the limbs of the trees—the wild forest animate. The decrepit trees began to groan and fall all around, which quite drove me to desperation—I crept through the wet dark to their denning place, a mere shallow hole in a dirt embankment, which they had lined with dead grass and leaves for insulation—their smell very strong and bestial, but I was more afraid of the wild night—and insinuated myself among their heavy bodies as any poor orphaned cub. They must normally shun human contact, but they only shifted their weight and moaned faintly or sighed, while otherwise seeming to take no notice; and as I lay in that feral dampness and stink, believing I must not sleep but lie awake all night in a rigor of fear, I took slowly into my very bones the heat of their massive bodies and quite let go of the world—oh so cold for so long, day and night—slept deep and dreamless until the dawn.

They now thoroughly tolerate my presence, as indifferent to me as the rhinoceros is indifferent to the oxpecker roosting along his spine. I have learned to pass among them with some degree of casualness and confidence, though I am cautious of abrupt movement, as
one must be with untamed beasts, and conduct myself submissively, which is behavior familiar to any housebroken woman.

The wind has died away. It is very much warmer and a haze covers the sky.

 

When much in the Woods as a little Girl, I was told that the Snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or Goblins kidnap me, but I went along and met no one but Angels, who were far shyer of me, than I could be of them, so I hav'nt that confidence in fraud which many exercise.

E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
,
FROM HER LETTERS

I have given each of them names, which is only for the convenience of my mind and this notebook.

The adult female I have named Cleo, and the infant twins (whom I cannot tell apart) are Pit and Pat. The female cub, who I now guess to be almost Oscar's age (though in size she already stands nearly equal to me), I have called Dolly. On a naked humanish anatomy they have a thick growth of hair two or three inches long, moderately coarse to the touch, and varying in color from near black to near red, leaving bare only the face, feet, and hands, as well as knees and elbows, and also the female breast and the male genitalia of the twins, which are small and carried close to the body. Their necks are short and faces broad, noses somewhat flattened below a beetled brow, and mouths wide and lipless; nevertheless they possess a startlingly human range of facial expressions; and their bodies, as well, can be expressive of emotion in the same way a dog's tail or his hanging head will tell you his feeling.

Overall, though, the emotions of these beasts are not so near to the surface as a dog's—they have a calm demeanor as befits creatures large enough and strong enough to brook no enemies. The screams of lions at night do not turn their hair; today and yesterday we have crossed the heavily used trails of bears, which they ignored as beneath interest, and equally so a bear of mammoth proportions, which gazed on us from a rockfall ridge and which would have stopped my heart if I had not been in the company of giants. Yet they are shy, and in certain ways much alike to any small animal—as if prey to every bloody-toothed beast of the forest. They continually turn to look behind them and to all sides, as if fearful of being followed; and their dens are made in the deepest brush, among thorns and tangled vines. They never fail to bury their dung—not in the fastidious manner of cats, but with the furtiveness of thieves, as if seeking to conceal evidence. Of course, it must be this shy behavior which has kept them unknown to Science, glimpsed only by the occasional Indian and the rare woodsman, and it may show a justifiable and intelligent fear of discovery by humans—quite as if they've gained secret knowledge or occult warning from the American bison, the passenger pigeon, the sandhill crane!

As to language, the beasts' whistles and chirrups are a rudimentary form of communication which I am beginning to severalize. At home I have made a study of Buster's various vocalizations—have been able to distinguish seven individual barks of quite different meaning, even to the point of whether the person coming up the path to the front of the house is Known to the dog or Unknown. In similar fashion I've made out simple meanings in the calls of the beasts—incitements to play, for instance, and a particular whistle which seems to express surprise and puzzlement, as well as alarms such as any animal uses to alert his fellows to the presence of unexplained sounds or events. And there are, as well, two distinct calls the mother uses to locate her children, one a sort of routine inquiry and the other more urgent, a kind of alarmed imperative which infallibly brings the twins and Dolly racing in from wherever they are. In addition, they communicate by dumb show—gestures of a primitive sort but plain to understand—finger pointing, for instance, and a raised hand which I take to mean, “Stand and be still!”

In most scientific circles it is forbidden to say that animals love. (Human beings alone believe they know what love is, and esteem it
highly.) On the subject of their society, I should say only that there is a bond (or the appearance of it) between the members of this family of beasts. Cleo puts up with her children's rough play to a remarkable degree; her patience when bitten, knocked about, pushed, and pulled I should call saintly in a woman. (Hair pulling is a favorite torment, which she tolerates as I never would from my own children.) She further demonstrates great attachment to her children, becoming anxious-eyed—looking searchingly around—when one or another of the young twins is briefly missing, and when the baby hoves into view his mother bounds to him, overjoyed, and anoints the top of his head with her long gray tongue.

In addition, they touch one another far more than is usual among the Scandinavians or even the Italians and Spaniards of my experience—gentle strokes and petting of a seemingly affectionate sort, as well as grooming of the hair. I should like to know—shall have to investigate when I am returned to civilization—by what measure Science differentiates the love of a human family from the evident affections of a family of beasts, when the chief observable difference lies in less argument and rancor among the beasts.

 

In his latest article (Feb. 1892) Prof. Garner says that the chatter of monkeys is not meaningless, but that they are conveying ideas to one another. This seems to me hazardous. The monkeys might with equal justice conclude that in our magazine articles, or literary and artistic criticisms, we are not chattering idly but are conveying ideas to one another.

S
AMUEL
B
UTLER

We have come out upon a floor of grassland with a steep rockfall along its flank. Though snow remains over the high trails, upon this gigantic rock garden spring is in full cry: white fawn lilies and mission bells, red-maids and chickweed, buttercup, wild larkspur, starflower, red columbines, bittercress—I name the few I know, though I cannot name nor even count some hundreds more.

We climbed down onto the cliff garden and have spent the whole day happily digging thistle and avalanche-lily roots and peeling their young stalks, nibbling the leaves and flowers of buckbean and wild parsley, as well as tiny yellow monkeyflowers marked upon their lower lip by reddish brown freckles—too exquisitely lovely to eat, though I ate them all and hunted for more! In the afternoon we drank deeply from the cold lacework of water falling along the edge of the rocks, and afterward the others waded in and played as dogs will do, with a great deal of tussling and romping and screeching, and I was so desperate for a bath I did strip off my clothes and splash in and out—the water so very cold, straight off the glacier—and now we are sunning ourselves amid the continual coming and going of bees and butterflies. As long as the sun shines, I shall not have to put on my filthy duds, which is a wonderful relief. As I lie here writing, the twin cubs tumble and play in the stones, while Cleo and her daughter are sprawled and dozing upon the meadow-grass, and I wonder: What is happiness? Perhaps not a State, as we seem to think, but a Moment—perhaps the moment when one stands from one's browsing and straightens into the sunlight, into the heady warmth of the scented air, and one's gaze rises—oh!—across the dazzling field of flowers to the white dome of a far-off mountain perfectly drawn above the dark mountain trees, luminously bright against the violet-blue of the sky. And I wonder: In such a moment, could even Eve in her garden have been more content?

 

The female Dzo'noq!wa carries away children in her arms to her house inland, or she puts them into a basket, which she carries on her back. When young girls walk about in the woods, they are enticed away by her or carried away in her arms. (When enticing away a child from a house, she assumes the voice of their grandmothers.) Little children are frightened into obedience by being told that the Dzo'noq!wa will come and carry them away. (When she has stolen a child, she keeps it as her daughter and picks salmon berries for her.)

F
RANZ
B
OAS
,
Kwakiutl Texts

I woke thinking: Is it possible that, after all, I am to go on living with the wild beasts while in the greater world others are hunting out the peaks of the Himalayas, the dark heart of Arabia, and the secrets of the Poles—while in the civilized world electricity is spread to every corner, and the flying machine is invented—while in the laboratories and academies and astronomical observatories, by telescope and spectroscope and microscope, others are to discover the minute secrets of Life and of the Universe—all this while I am living ignorant as a savage in the wilderness?

We have left the high meadow and the rock garden, after burying scores of lily bulbs in several holes lined with cedar boughs. No attempt was made to conspicuously mark these winter caches as I would have thought—with cairns of small rocks, for instance, or other indicators. I hope they may find their bulbs again when this field is transfigured by the changing of season; what, after all, will be recognizable when leaves have fallen and snow is on the ground? I suppose there can be no particular intelligence in recovering stored food, only a sort of rote memory, for which even squirrels and certain birds have shown an uncanny knack; and it may be that the beasts will keep in mind particular large and constant landmarks such as coniferous trees
or sizable rocks. Or they may be intelligent enough to think of returning to this ground once or twice more—as leaves fall, as snow arrives—to strengthen their memories.

We have been following the grown-over marks of an old trail that I believe has never seen the footprint of a man, a meandering route taking in every thick brush patch and pond-lily puddle and all the soft muskegs which lie in low swales—food to be found in each, and though I am never filled I am not starving. We are seeming overall to take a northerly route. I wonder where we are bound—afraid it must be farther and farther away from the company of other human beings. (I am now struck by this thought: I should expect to be either dead or rescued before they return finally to that high meadow and uncover their lilies.)

This afternoon, met a stream boiling down over boulders which could be crossed only with caution, leaping from rock to rock with the care of a cat. (Proved I am catty.) Then a slow and tiresome climb through an old burn, where the second growth and the trees fallen in tangles made an impenetrable thicket, which of course we must penetrate. Camped tonight under cover of ancient trees, the sky only glimpsed in rags and tatters, which is usual.

I am reminded how rarely I have seen the sky since leaving behind Home and Family and the lower Columbia. Last night, while lying upon the high flower field, I may have had my only unencumbered view of the moon, pale and thin, a merest shaving of the flesh of an apple, yet even that dim light was like a wondrous gift, and filled me with gratitude. I felt I was seeing the night sky, the dense field of stars, for the first time—really
seeing
it—and its beauty. Of course, I should have preferred different company for sky watching—should have asked for a female astronomer with a sense of the aesthetic! But while it may be true dumb animals neither see nor reflect upon the vault of heaven, I did not feel this loss particularly last night, lying with them under that vast canopy of stars—was consoled by their warmth—found it easy to imagine, in their silence, a kind of awestruck meditation.

According to Science, animals are without culture, having neither poetry nor music. Yet I think of the wolves which used to skulk about the hills of my childhood, and their moon singing, which even then struck me as a kind of polyphonic fugue—intricate and exact as
any human concert. (How long since I have thought of wolves in the Skamokawa Hills, or seen them? Not for twenty years or more. They would shy away at once if Mother came out to the field with her rifle, but would stand and look with curiosity if we were unarmed, which must demonstrate an animal's instinctive understanding of human intent. Old Lars Larsson claimed to trap the last one, starving, infested with parasites, the year my mother died.)

I believe the beasts have minds, though what they think and feel is another and more difficult question. What goes on in the animal brain? When they lie in the dark with the flower-scented wind in their nostrils, as they look out at the moon and stars or the streaming clouds, what are they thinking about? They make their living in these remote and inaccessible parts of the forest without benefit of metallurgy or agricultural lore, and are curiously compounded of human and animal traits: Cleo commonly carries one or both of her twins upon her hip, washes and grooms them, and if she feels there is a threat to their safety, rushes over and snatches them up. On the other hand, she seems to delight in feeding them the living fish before it is dead, as well as garter snakes, which is a beastly thing to watch; and she examines and explores her own genitals (the cubs looking curiously on) whenever and wherever she receives the impulse. I am not prudish, but this is the shameless indifference of dogs or monkeys.