Perfection of the Morning (16 page)

From my journal written not long after the
something
happened:

I was in the field to the north lying in the grass, trying to center myself again. I shut off my conscious brain activity—if only I could sustain that longer—and this time the sounds around me—I became aware of them, which I hadn’t been before: insects, birds, chiefly the wind. But this time I had a sense of my “awareness” going out of me and not of these things
entering
me, but of me going
out
to mingle with them. Of being part of the sounds (which are Nature). Then I thought, this must be how the Aboriginal hunters did it, by mingling with Nature in this way and thus knowing where the animals are and what they are doing.

This is a difficult experience to describe; after a few days had passed, I had to concentrate hard when thinking about it, to bring back its immediacy. I had recently read an article on such experiences by Pamela Colorado, an Oneida who had done her doctoral work at Harvard, who said that she was “just learning this myself,” that is, “to have the ability to project yourself out,” “to see what it’s not possible to see.” She goes on to say that “it is an ability that our people have known for thousands of years, and still practise.” My experience suggested that this was true—both that some Native people could and can do it, and that one could learn to do it. Thinking about her remarks, I went out and tried to achieve it again.

And I succeeded, but for only a second, although it was long enough to convince me that it could be done. Some days later I tried again—some days I’m tired or upset or am not alone or conditions just don’t feel right—and this time I thought I’d learned something new. I noted in my journal:

I didn’t get a new sense—I shut off the ones I usually use and “clicked” into another kind, which I am sure is there all the time, but the others are omnipresent and obscure it. It isn’t developing that sense that is necessary, it’s learning to “click” that’s required.

I have begun to think of this as “throwing” one’s consciousness, though I don’t feel at all confident that I have the necessary discipline to ever be able to do it beyond what I’ve already described. My speculation is that I don’t
need
to do it, in the way that a hunter who depends on his skill for his food supply has a powerful need to do it, and that is why it is so hard for me. Or perhaps if I had learned it as a child, it would be easier.

And yet, it doesn’t seem a useless skill to me; it seems a wonderful thing to be close enough to Nature to know Nature as Aboriginal hunters do. Who knows what the new, possibly even urban practitioners of such an art might learn about the world and how they might then change in their attitude toward Nature? More, in their attitude to life?

You have to be still and quiet for these things to happen; you have to release your expectations; you have to stop thinking you already know things, or know how to categorize them, or that the world has already been explained and you know those explanations. You know nothing. You understand nothing. You have only what your own body tells you and only your own experience from which
to make judgments. You may have misunderstood; you may be wrong. Teach me, is what you should say, and, I am listening. Approach the world as a child seeing it for the first time. Remember wonder. In a word: humility. Then things come to you as they did not when you thought you knew.

I don’t claim to have had a unique experience among non-Aboriginal people. I think of all the people I know who have lived on the land all their lives and those, fewer it’s true, who have lived in such a way that they always had the desire and the time to simply sit and enjoy being in Nature. I think of Peter, to find an example close to home.

I think how, in the early days of our marriage when I was younger and before my knees gave out, we used to spend whole days on horseback checking cattle. Often on a hot summer afternoon we would sit on the grass high on a hillside, while our horses grazed beside us, drowsing in the sun while we waited for the cattle to water before we moved them home or to the next field. It was a new experience for me, and I always found something magical in it; it seemed so extraordinary that one might spend a life full of moments of such peace, purity and serenity.

Indeed Peter had spent his life like this, day after day on horseback, herding cattle or checking them, in all kinds of weather. Knowing this about him, how at ease he is on the prairie, completely at home, how familiar he is with the habits of the cattle, horses and wild animals of the plains, with the grasses and the wind, I thought that just possibly he might have experienced this throwing of the consciousness as I had, almost involuntarily. Because it wasn’t in his vocabulary, and there was nobody around to tell anyway, and quite possibly if it did happen, it wouldn’t seem strange to someone of his experiences, he’d hardly noticed it and had never mentioned it. I
asked him, and he said, deeply embarrassed (we had company at the time), with characteristic taciturnity, that he didn’t know. What he meant was, I think, this is not something to talk about.

I leave him his secrets. But who knows what the old farmer who never married and never modernized, who spent his life out in a weatherbeaten shack in the midst of a sea of grassy hills, or the devoted gardener, or even the occasional birdwatcher or ecologist might have experienced much to his/her surprise, when there was nobody around? And if someone like me says it out loud, will more people admit to having had it happen to them? And then more people try it, thereby changing themselves and, ultimately, the world?

If I had left behind a lot—a career, family, friends, an established round of life—and gone into what seemed a void, where I had begun, I thought irrevocably, to sink into its black depths, slowly a whole new light was dawning, and I was beginning to feel as Christopher Columbus must have when he first saw the shores of the New World: tremendous excitement, joy and relief. And this must also have included, for Columbus as it did for me, a measure of chagrin to discover it was already populated by people who took for granted and understood what for us was a world of immeasurable treasure and wonder.

One autumn not long ago, visiting at the northern cabin owned by one of my sisters and her husband, I was stunned by the blaze of gold, orange and red with which the bush glowed as if it were imbued with its own light, making it appear fragile and buoyant. I had not remembered this. All my childhood memories were of gloom and menace, the heavily scented darkness of the earth, the terrible, soul-stirring cries of the wolves, the bears lurking everywhere. I grew up with a fear of wild animals that was of a very deep and primeval kind, kin to that of cave dwellers defenseless against marauding animals.

My earliest memories as a child are of bears: early one morning, my father standing on the step in his pajamas, clapping his hands loudly over his head so that two bears who are snuffling through our clearing, pause, look up and quickly shamble off into the woods; our mother, alone in the night with us small children, putting the lit kerosene lamp on the window ledge instead of the table, explaining that she does this so that any approaching bears will not see their reflections in the glass and try to get into the house. In the north, bears—interesting, charming—whatever else they might be, are always first to be feared.

I remember also from that time sitting at dusk on a swing in the schoolyard in a tiny village set against the bush. Timber wolves begin to howl not far away in the forest, and I move so that I’m sitting with my back to them, while shivers run up and down my spine.

When I came here to live, a particular pleasure was the constant presence and sightings of wild animals, most often of small herds of antelope, especially if they crossed the prairie in front of the truck and I got a close look at their power and their amazing bursts of speed. It seemed wonderful to get up in the early morning and look out the window to see a pheasant strolling across the grass, a brace of grouse pecking in the garden, a pair of deer feeding under the window or seven coyotes strolling across the field on the other side of the yard. It was like living in your own private zoo.

Since I thought I’d found a landscape where there were no animals one needed to be afraid of, when I saw antelope, deer, coyotes, they weren’t much more to me than interesting and beautiful card-board cutouts. Peter’s horses and cattle were presences more real, but at the same time, I thought riding a horse would be like driving a car, and that the cattle would offer no resistance to a rancher’s plans for them. The nature of animals was only one more aspect of rural life about which I had a lot to learn. That it is an aspect at the absolute core of it, I also had to learn.

Although as children we kept housecats for pets, and I remembered how our mother’s father talked lovingly to his team of big workhorses as if they were people, I had no experience of animals that felt personal to me, and no very great feeling for them.

When Peter and I were first married he had a herd of three dozen American Saddler horses, including a stallion. I watched him, often working with his friends, breaking horses, trimming their feet, doctoring them, even castrating them. They did not hurt
animals. They did what they had to do and, for the most part, enjoyed their work. As I watched I began gradually to see their deep respect for animals, their admiration of them, their nearness to the ones they knew well and yet, despite their calm acceptance of them, the eternal distance that remained between them.

A favorite entertainment when there were visitors was to chase the herd in. What fun that was, hanging on for dear life in the back of the half-ton as it bounced wildly over the prairie, and how thrilling to watch the herd streaming across the fields and up the alley to the big corral. Then Peter would put part of the herd into a smaller corral, cut out a few to bridle and saddle or, when we still had colts, cut the new colts out so that the visitors could pat them and talk to them to gentle them. Then Peter would begin to teach them to lead.

But of course on a working ranch when it was time to change saddle horses in order to give those in the corral a rest and to keep those in the fields in riding condition, Peter would chase the herd in on horseback. Then he would cut out the horses he wanted to ride, turn out the ones he had in, and eventually let the herd go back out into the fields. Usually he kept them in for a few hours, though, so they would remember they weren’t wild horses, and feed them a little and let them find the electric stock waterer so they’d know where to get water during times when the sloughs and dugouts were frozen or had dried up.

For the first while I was very afraid of the herd racing around in the corral. I stayed on the other side of the fence while Peter walked among them, choosing the ones he wanted, one at a time, raising his arms, stepping in front of them as they ran, calling to them, then murmuring softly to the one he had managed to stop as he put a halter on it. I saw how they went around him, no matter how fast they
were running, how they seemed to be carefully trying not to hurt him, although they might easily have run him down and killed him.

Obviously it wouldn’t do for a rancher’s wife to be afraid of horses. But it is one thing to be helped up onto a saddle horse in a corral where there is only one other horse, also saddled, and to stand in the middle of the churning dust as several dozen horses, many of them never broken, race around within inches of you.

On one of these occasions when Peter had chased the horses in and left them to stand in the corral, I went out with him to open the gate to let them go back to the fields. We were alone, our visitors having long since left. It was evening and the sun would soon be setting. Peter went into the corral while I lingered on the other side. “Aren’t you coming with me?” he asked. The horses were standing quietly in the evening stillness. A nighthawk whooped softly, huskily, as it swooped low to sit on the fence at the other end of the big corral. A horse switched his tail at a fly. Nothing else moved, even the perpetual prairie wind had died. I allowed myself to be coaxed into the corral.

We walked slowly from the gate into the center and stood looking from horse to horse. Peter talked about them: about selling this one or that, about breaking this one or that one next, about the origin of a scar on a mare’s flank. A kind of peaceful hush had settled over the corral. We stood till we grew tired and then walked a few feet more to sit in a relaxed silence on the edge of an empty feedtrough.

We sat a long time together with the horses. Once or twice one of Peter’s saddle horses strolled over and put his nose down to us. We didn’t move and he wandered quietly away again. As we sat there a kind of enchanted mood descended over us and over the corral, as if the two of us were, for that little time, a part of whatever the horses were, caught in the same spell, till the sun descended below
the horizon and it was almost dark. Then we opened the gate and waited while the horses slowly moved out into the pasture.

After that, I was no longer afraid to go into the corral with the herd, and although I was cautious, eventually I helped him cut out the ones he wanted from the herd of racing animals. This mightily impressed my sisters when they visited, although nobody else around here would be fooled about my courage or know-how.

One day Peter and I were out riding and were waiting for the cattle to go to water before we chased them into the next pasture. We sat on a hillside holding our saddle horses’ reins as they grazed beside us. We waited a long time, more than an hour. Peter even dozed off, while the cattle moved almost imperceptibly toward the waterhole. I was getting bored. Peter awoke and sat up.

He was riding his usual horse, a big bay gelding, a horse nobody else ever rode. Now the horse moved close to Peter, lifted a front hoof and gently brushed Peter’s thigh several times. I froze, caught in a mixture of surprise and fear; Peter laughed. “He wants to go,” he said.

I had never thought that a horse might have an opinion, that it would occur to him that he might be allowed an opinion or a desire as pets are, or that he thought at all. He weighed about twelve hundred pounds, and seemed to me to have no way to communicate, yet he had stroked Peter’s leg gently, aware of his power, but careful not to hurt him. From that moment on my attitude toward semi-domesticated animals like this one began to change. I became less afraid and more curious about them, and also more accepting of them as fellow creatures with innate natures of their own.

As I was beginning to get closer to domesticated and half-wild animals and becoming more enlightened about them, I was also beginning to have encounters with wild animals. These were often
less benign, but they nevertheless served to increase my curiosity about them, not curiosity of a casual kind so much as a growing sense of a deep mystery that needed solving before it would be possible to live easily in this landscape.

One day I stood across the river on a high bank picking chokecherries while on the other, lower side a white-tailed doe, unaware she was being watched, fed at a tree and talked steadily to her fawn. The sound was somewhere between a whinny and a whistle. I had never heard it before and never have since. I find myself anthropomorphizing her, imagining she was teaching the fawn the lore of the prairie, or more likely as a human mother would do, using her voice to keep the fawn content and nearby. But maybe she was vocalizing for the sake of vocalizing, or for all I know, she might have been having a conversation with the tree.

Occasionally when we were out riding, a coyote would follow us for hours, sometimes getting very close to us, pausing every once in a while to call. I was pretty nervous when they came very close, although Peter, for whom this was unremarkable, was entirely unafraid. He assured me that there had never been a case on record of coyotes attacking a human.

On my daily walks I liked to go far enough out to be out of sight of power poles and lines, buildings, fences, any sign of human occupancy. In a place where there were no longer any bears—the Cypress Hills had once been full of grizzlies—or any wolves or swift foxes, I never seriously thought there might be any reason not to. But one day as I was strolling along more than a mile north of the ranch house, the cattle dog I had taken for company suddenly abandoned me and raced toward a hill ahead of us and to the right.

I saw a coyote running the line of the hill on an angle slightly toward us and to the east. I was not afraid, partly because I was
used to them following us when we were on horseback, and also because “coyotes never attack humans.” I called the dog back. When he came to me, I turned, intending to head back closer to the house. Then I caught a glimpse of something moving behind me, also on an angle toward me, but some distance back. I froze and waited. It was a second coyote, and in that instant, in a flash of understanding, I saw that two coyotes were circling me as they would prey.

Terror swept through me. I ran; I ran as fast as a non-athletic forty-year-old could. I was out of breath in what seemed only a moment, and when I stopped to catch my breath, my lungs wheezing painfully, and looked around, the landscape looked exactly the same. It looked to me as if I had been running on the spot. I was mystified. The pain in my lungs signified that I had run a very long way and yet I appeared to have gone barely any distance toward the house, although it’s true that one grassy hill looks a lot like another. In any case, when I thought to clap my hands together over my head as I’d once seen my father do so many years before, the coyote closest to me—I think about fifty feet and still running toward me—paused, I swear cast me a disgusted look, then veered off. I didn’t see where the second one went.

Besides the puzzling perception that I had not run any distance, there was also the circumstance of the weather. Peter and I had just returned from a two-week holiday driving from the northwest corner of British Columbia to the southeast corner. It was late fall, but it had been ninety degrees Fahrenheit for three or four days in a row, and this was so strange at this time of the year that the prairie had taken on an otherworldly aspect; there was a tension in the air; I felt that something was about to happen, something out of the ordinary; I was waiting for it.

Here I was being circled as prey by a pair of hunting coyotes, one of which seemed to stare hard at me, and then rejected me as if finding me not worth the trouble. I was not only terrified, I was chagrined. If it is true that no coyote has ever attacked a human, and I believe it is, then what did they want? I couldn’t help but feel that this might have been the opportunity I’d been waiting for to actually communicate in some direct way with a wild animal, that if I’d not been such a coward and had stood my ground, something enlightening might have happened.

Because I had originally believed I was in a benign landscape, I had forgotten my childhood fears of wild animals until my encounter with the pair of hunting coyotes. I began to see that even if there are no life-threatening animals in this landscape, there are excellent reasons to keep a good distance between yourself and relatively harmless ones. One of my first encounters, with a badger, which backed up against a rock, rose on its hind legs, and in a most threatening manner appeared to swell, extended its claws and hissed ferociously at me, taught me that here was another animal from which I’d be wise to keep my distance. I startled a porcupine once, and it’s putting it mildly to say it startled me. The porcupine, about a foot and a half from my leg, in a move that I liken to the sudden flipping of a venetian blind from closed to open, flashed from fur to a shield of quills and froze that way. I gave an involuntary shriek that sounded like a deep note from an organ and that hurt my chest, while my scalp crinkled. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And then there are snakes, which I’d just as soon not mess with either, even though in this pocket of country they are all harmless.

There was so much about rural life I hadn’t understood. With regard to animals, it seemed more and more amazing to me that every empty field, every hillside, every unplowed road allowance or
stone pile or patch of tall grass contained wild animals. That animals had a kingdom in, around, beside ours where they lived out their lives and went about their animal ways, fitting into Nature—being Nature—in a way humans can’t seem to. I knew that already grizzlies, wolves, swift foxes among others, all native to the area, had been completely eliminated, and that burrowing owls were threatened and now ferruginous hawks too. I had a sense that there were people who wouldn’t care in the least, would perhaps even be glad, if all the wild animals were destroyed. I wondered what would happen to the landscape if that were to occur. Would anything happen? Would it matter? Why would it matter? When occasionally someone made a derogatory comment about animals, I kept silent, but I kept watching and pondering questions like these.