A Small Furry Prayer (17 page)

PART  SEVEN

Because how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

—Annie Dillard

33

It was Friday night and early August and as good a time as any to climb into a cage with a mountain lion. This particular mountain lion got hit by a car while trying to cross a busy freeway in the southern portion of New Mexico about ten months back. The police first got the call, and then the Department of Game and Fish, and Doc not long after that. There was some discussion about whether or not the cat would even make it through the night, let alone survive a complicated surgery, but Doc decided to try. She hitched a trailer to her truck, drove halfway across the state, loaded the cougar into a cage, and drove back across the state, this time to an emergency surgical theater in Albuquerque. Working with another doctor for six hours straight, they managed to put ten titanium screws and who knows how many pins in the lion's leg, and when that leg healed enough for transport, the cat ended up at the Wildlife Center's Large Mammal Facility outside of Española. Which is also where I ended up in that cage, trying to wrestle a 180-pound man-eater to the ground.

I guess there were two real reasons I ended up in that cage. The first was that I had reread Peter Singer, but this may require a little more explaining. As I was rethinking my ethical stance on animals, it wasn't lost on me that a great many of the so-called anomalous behaviors I was seeing—behaviors that weren't supposed to exist in nonhuman animals and behaviors whose absence was used to justify human specialness—I was seeing in dogs. But humans co-evolved to live with dogs. They are the species we know better than all others because they are the species we have been around since their very beginning. It made me wonder about all those other species we don't know as well as dogs. It made me wonder what else we've missed along the way.

The second reason was that dog rescuers are really just a subset of animal rescuers, and while I knew a little bit about the former, I had no real understanding of the latter. One thing I knew already: animal rescuers, especially wildlife rescuers, were a tougher lot than dog rescuers. There's just no way around one central fact: whatever the size of the sacrifice made in dog rescue, we at least get the “cuddle factor”—specifically, we get to cuddle our dogs. This was a hell of a payoff, but rescuers who work with wildlife never cuddle. They interact with the creatures in their care as little as possible. Their goal is to heal wounds and return the animals to their natural habitat. The last thing they want to do along the way is habituate these animals to the presence of humans, since there's a good chance those wounds originated with humans. With absolutely no reciprocity, wildlife rescue is the extreme end of the cross-species altruism spectrum. It's the purest form of altruism on the planet, and I wanted to see what that looked like up close.

As Doc had devoted her life to working with wildlife, I asked her if she minded playing tour guide. She didn't, and a plan was concocted. I was supposed to meet Doc and a New Mexico game and fish warden at the Large Mammal Facility to help them tranquilize that mountain lion so he could be put into a transport cage, loaded into a truck, and then driven back across the state for release back into the wild. That was still the plan, but along the way we'd seriously underestimated the weight of the cat and the amount of ketamine it would take to knock him out.

After we darted the lion, he went into a howling frenzy, running laps around his cage, lunging at anyone who came near the bars. Then the drug started to work and he dropped to the ground, but didn't stop thrashing. Doc was worried he'd rebreak that leg. To prevent this, she decided to jump into the cage to try and pin him down, all ninety-five pounds of her. What was needed was another shot of ketamine, which was the warden's responsibility, but the warden was New Mexico country folk and would not be rushed. Since animal rescuers often operate on the edge of the law, shouting at the warden to pick up the pace wasn't going to help the larger cause. So I did what any other concerned moron would do under the circumstances: I jumped in the cage with her.

“You get the head,” shouted Doc, “I'll hold the legs.”

Sure, hold the head. The fucking thing is bigger than a bowling ball and those jaws work just fine. Absolutely, I'll hold the head. And afterward, so the party won't end, let's drink some hemlock.

Unfortunately, rescuers like Doc are needed because it's already the end of the party. Forty thousand years ago, when humans first crossed the land bridge from Asia,
Puma concolor
ranged freely from the Yukon in Canada to the southern tip of South America. That was the last time things went right for these animals. Despite the relevance wildlife has for most Indian cultures, a great many of them didn't know what to make of these big cats. In
Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of People and Pumas
, Chris Bolgiano mentions a 1955 interview with a Nootka who said the lion was “the one animal the Indians didn't understand.” But the Indian's mistrust of the cat was nothing compared to the antagonism felt by early European arrivals. By the turn of the twentieth century, mountain lions had been hunted to near extinction in the eastern portion of the United States and didn't fare better out west. In California alone, where they were listed as a bountied predator, hunters killed more than 12,000 of them between 1907 and 1963—an average of 215 a year. In 1963 they went from bountied to non-game animals and quotas were lifted so they could be shot year round. Then kills rose even higher.

In 1972, California governor Ronald Reagan suspended this trophy hunt, a halt that later became law. Not that it did much good. In recent years, according to a study done by the Mountain Lion Foundation, the premier cougar conservation organization in the United States, “humans have killed more mountain lions in the American West than at any other time in the past century—greatly exceeding even those years when mountain lions were the target of bounties and government eradication efforts.” From 1997 to 2005 nearly 30,000 mountain lions were slaughtered in eleven states, roughly 3,600 a year. It's an increase of 400 percent since 1970. There may be 5,000 cougars left in California, there may be less. Because of this, the World Conservation Union has reclassified the mountain lion from a “species of least concern” to “near threatened.”

As far as I could tell, apologies were in order.

So yeah, I got in that cage and held that head. It was a nowhere-near-the-top-of-the-food-chain moment. I was stepping back in time courtesy of a creature that evolved specifically to hunt the likes of me. The feeling was electric. Once again I was rubbing against pure wildness, and once again I got that sense of deep time and archetypal connection. I knew immediately that this was why Doc could live without the cuddle factor. This was a bigger payoff.

The feeling lasted until after we got the second syringe into the cat and got him loaded on the truck. It was already dark when we were done. In the early morning we would leave for the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, where this cougar would once again be set free. Until then, I was heading home, stinking of sweat and mountain lion. I'd gotten only one step past my front door when the dogs got a whiff of me, spun on their heels, and ran.

34

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, graduated Yale Forestry School in 1909, and was made supervisor of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico in 1912. A decade later he developed the funny notion that wilderness should actually contain large tracts of undeveloped land. He successfully petitioned for the 1924 establishment of New Mexico's Gila Wilderness—300,000 hectares of protected landscape that became the first official wilderness area in the United States. Afterward, Leopold transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1933, when his book
Game Management
appeared, defining his fundamental techniques for the conservation and restoration of native wildlife populations, he became chair of the country's first game management department. Two years later, with the help of three friends, he founded the Wilderness Society, the quartet saying of their goals: “All we desire to save from invasion is the extremely minor fraction of America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smell.”

Leopold died fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm in April 1948, just a few months shy of the publication of his now legendary
Sand County Almanac
. In the
Almanac,
he laid bare his land ethic: “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” In 1980 Congress set aside another 200,000 hectares of New Mexico directly adjacent to the Gila and named it the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, after the man now considered the “Father of American Wilderness.” It seemed a fitting place to set a mountain lion free.

Driving from Chimayo to the Aldo Leopold Wilderness is a journey into a different world. The dusty interior of the state is a stretch of small towns and ghost towns and general strangeness. Years back, I knew a woman from California whose definition of good fun included taking a couple of tabs of acid and trying to convince tourists to hop in the back of her pickup for what she called the “Redneck Tour of San Francisco.” She also fought forest fires. She'd worked as a smokejumper on and off for the better portion of a decade, mainly in Montana and Idaho, but was once down in New Mexico for a blaze at the Leopold, an experience she recounted as “a whole other breed of weird.” And coming from her, that was saying something.

We found proof of this outside the town of Kingman, snake-twisting our way through the Black Mountains. Tadz had joined me for this excursion. We were caravanning behind Doc, her husband, and the mountain lion. They were supposed to stay right in front of us, but between the altitude gain, the hairpin turns, and our need to stop and piss, we'd lost sight of them. We found them again, doors open, truck empty, in a pullout atop a steep cliff. There was an old Honda parked nearby, piled floorboards to headliner with bric-a-brac, but no driver. Besides one very agitated tabby cat, the Honda too was empty. We were only a few hours from Roswell.

“Alien abduction?” asked Tadz.

“Alien abduction,” I concurred.

We found them—Doc, her husband, and some guy we'd never seen before—on the other side of the guard rail, standing a few feet down that cliff. As best as we could reconstruct, the guy had lost his job and his house and his wife had died, and all that was left was an old Honda, a bum leg, and a pair of tabby cats. He'd pulled off the road to stretch the leg and one of those cats darted out an open window. The first portion of the cliff was a steep downslope ending in a hundred-foot drop. Just above the drop was a small ledge, upon which his cat had decided to perch.

Somehow the guy had managed to work his way down to the ledge, but getting back up with a bum leg and cat in his hand was impossible. He'd started screaming for help. A few miles before this, Doc's truck had lost third gear. She was crossing the mountains in second, going slowly enough that she heard his shout. We arrived about five minutes later, at the tail end of the rescue operation, just in time to catch a bit of this guy's lonely backstory. Somewhere between “these cats mean the world to me” and “I really love animals, especially cats,” Tadz mentioned that Doc too had a cat in her truck.

“He's a little bigger than yours,” he explained.

“I don't know,” said the guy. “Muffin's pretty chubby.”

Doc's truck had tinted windows, so you had to press your face right up to the glass to see inside.

“Go ahead,” she said, “take a peek.”

We had darted the mountain lion the night before, because part of releasing an animal back into the wild is ensuring that the animal goes back into the wild. You need it wide awake and preferably agitated by the time you reach the release site. Since our cat had now been wide awake in a small cage in the back of a truck for five hours of bumpy, winding roads, it was seriously agitated. The amygdala is a tiny almond-shaped structure in the brain governing basic emotions such as fear and rage, as well as the formation of memories shaped by those emotions. Among the oldest portions of the human brain, it's old enough that the reactions to certain dangers have become hardwired instinct. Our get-me-the-hell-out-of-here responses to snakes, spiders, and the bloodcurdling roar of a big cat in a bad mood are fine examples of this process at work. That fine example knocked this guy flat on his ass.

“Yup,” he said, picking himself off the dirt afterward, “definitely bigger than my cat.”

35

In his essay “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger writes: “To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a nineteenth-century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. For example, the domestication of cattle did not begin as a simple prospect of milk and meat. Cattle had magical functions, sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial.”

The transformation from magical creature to domesticated livestock that Berger's describing required a certain separation from nature, a distancing scholars believe emerged with our transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist. Much has been written on the topic, with general conclusions tending toward the idea that we abandoned our mystical reverence because the brutality of farm life required maintaining a serious emotional distance from the wild. Language was where this battle first played out. Once-sacred creatures were relabeled. Plants became weeds or crops. Animals became pests or pets.

James Serpell describes this process more exactingly in his
In the Company of Animals:

Traditional hunters typically view the animals they hunt as their equals. They exercise no power over them, although they hope to persuade the animal to be more easily captured by means of certain magical or religious practices. This essentially egalitarian relationship disappeared with the advent of domestication. The domestic animal is dependent for survival on its human owner. The human becomes the overlord and master, the animals his servants and slaves. By definition, domestic animals are subservient to the will of humanity and, for the majority of species involved, this loss of independence had some fairly devastating long-term consequences.

Among those consequences are the ways we've learned to justify subservience. “If one accepted the Cartesian view that animals were soulless, insensate machines, then one could do what one liked to them without any moral compunctions whatsoever,” says Serpell, later explaining further:

The myth that humans were entitled to lordship over the rest of creation was a useful cultural adaptation that greatly facilitated agricultural and domestic expansion. It allowed domestic animals to be regarded as objects and merchandise, and it encouraged an aggressive, exploitative attitude to the natural world. Wild animals which were deemed to be useless, or which made the mistake of competing with man on his own ground were universally classified as vermin that needed to be exterminated at every possible opportunity. And uncultivated areas, such as forests, moorlands and heaths, were viewed as bleak and hostile wildernesses that harbored blood-thirsty wolves and legendary monsters. It was man's duty to tame such areas; to subjugate them and bring them under the yoke of human domination. In other words, the myth was important, and defended vigorously, because it had immense survival value.

Sometimes this plays out in strange ways. As mentioned, one of the first duties assigned to the “domesticated” wolf was that of babysitter. Mommy and Daddy would go off hunting and gathering, leaving Fido and friends to mind the fort. We can argue that primitive societies held their offspring in lesser regard than we do ours—that is, if we're willing to deny a whole lot of biology along the way. Instead, we argue about wolves being allowed back into Yellowstone. “They're pests,” was a frequently heard rancher's response during those debates, “dangerous pests.” Those pests used to babysit our future generations—so how's that for bizarre?

Also bizarre was our need to drive all the way across New Mexico to liberate a cat that once called the entire supercontinent home. Another difficulty was the game warden. State law requires one to be present at all releases, and ours seemed to believe himself a direct descendent of the Marlboro Man, complete with cigarettes, mustache, and double-barrel shotgun. What the Marlboro Man wanted most was not to be bothered. Mountain lions are solitary by nature and require a lot of space to remain that way. Their home ranges starts at twenty-five miles and can extend up to three hundred. The plan had been to drive as far into the Gila Wilderness as possible, but the Marlboro Man was in charge. He led us three miles from the freeway and called it quits.

We parked atop a low peak, in the middle of an alpine forest. It was dusky afternoon, the light not all that different from the color of the lion's coat. Doc was on the roof of her truck. She had modified the cage so that its gate could be lifted with a hook from the roof, an important safety feature when working with an animal that can sever an artery with the swipe of a claw. The warden took up a position not far away, trousers hitched up, stance wide-legged. He had his shotgun locked, cocked, and blocked.

I once asked Doc if there was an animal that was dangerous to release. “Grizzlies are deadly,” she said, “but I've never seen a bear stick around long. Open the cage and it's boogie, boogie, boogie. I've turned rattlesnakes loose and had them try to bite me. Rattlesnakes hold grudges, it doesn't matter what you do, but I think they're the only grudge species I've met in my life.”

And what about mountain lions?

“Mountain lions are a different thing. They're incredibly efficient killers. If you survive a mountain lion attack, it's because they let you live.”

Doc wasn't taking any chances. Tadz and I were told to stay in our truck until the cat was gone. Then she got the gate open. Nothing happened. The lion stayed inside the cage, inside the truck, just looking at all of us. We looked back. Time passed. More time passed. Eventually he stuck out a paw and slunk to the ground. He glanced right, then left, then strolled to a small clearing about twenty feet away—and stopped. This was not the way things were supposed to go.

The warden had been itching to fire his shotgun all day, and finally got his chance. It should be mentioned that so fond are people in New Mexico of their guns and so stupid in their operations, that the police find it necessary to go on television before every major holiday to remind folks there are laws against firing a gun straight into the air. Specifically, the law of gravity: what goes up must come down. Pets and people being the usual casualties in this tragic scenario. Our warden must have missed that message. He shot straight up into the air.

The shotgun blast was supposed to scare the lion into bolting. He did not bolt. He turned again, that massive head, to look back at us. Then he hissed once and bounded off into the underbrush. No one could find him for a moment, and then we saw him, stalking a wide circle around our position, finally pausing in some trees directly behind us.

“He's fucking with us, right?”

“Yeah,” said Tadz, “he's fucking with us.”

The last we saw of him was when he lifted that head for a final look. Then he was gone, retreating in the underbrush, leaving only the specter of that gaze behind. I had the very serious sense this cat had been trying to tell us something. The look was pretty unmistakable. I asked Tadz about it later, and he'd seen the same thing I did. What was that look? It was disgust.

Not fear. Not hatred. Just disgust.