Perfection of the Morning (17 page)

If we find wild animals interesting, it sometimes also works the other way around. Early last spring Peter came up to the house to say there was a coyote hanging around the corrals; why didn’t I come down and have a look? It was only 6:30 in the morning, but I dressed and valiantly went down to see it. In the big corral the yearling cattle were standing crowded together in a semicircle staring in silent wonder at a thick-coated, grayish white coyote who stood quietly in front of them, seemingly paying them no attention.

Peter had the camera, and I stood a few feet back of him as he took pictures, getting as close as six feet from the animal. The dog got as close as he dared, which was closer than Peter or I, sniffing, then moved back to stay with us. The coyote didn’t run away or make any move to threaten us. Sadly, he had mange, a kind which affected only his hind quarters and tail, which hadn’t a hair left on it. Peter snapped a few pictures, we talked about the coyote, his condition, wondering what he wanted, and after a while I went back to the house and Peter went back to feeding cows and the coyote
trotted off, disappearing behind a windbreak. When we thought to look again for him, he was gone.

He was back the next morning. I stood in the living room watching him as he rolled and chewed some bones the dog had abandoned, then went to the row of cars and trucks and circled each of them with an edgy trot, stopping for a quick sniff, then on to the next, circling back, zigzagging, stopping, moving on. He was in the yard every day that week. He and the dog arrived at a standoff, one going down to feed on the fresh carcass of a dead calf down by the barn while the other waited by the house, then trading places. Once the dog went too close to him, and from the window I saw the coyote show his teeth. In an instant he went from a delicately built, harmless-looking creature to a ferocious wild animal—he seemed suddenly all teeth—and back again.

Peter said that in his fifty and more years of ranching he had never seen a coyote behave in such a way. How did he know we wouldn’t hurt him? Was it because in all the years we’ve been here we’ve never hunted anything? Have cheerfully fed skunks and raccoons and magpies, creatures other people shoot, from the food we put out each day for the barn cats and as a snack for the dog? I like to think that’s so, because, after all, in every corral that time of the year, every year, there’s the fresh meat of cattle that didn’t make it through the winter, and always some of the coyotes we spot have mange, but despite this, no coyote had ever come to live in the yard here.

The following week, returning from a walk down a little-used country trail, I found his corpse lying peacefully on the grass by the side of the road. Someone passing by and seeing the coyote’s condition, which would ultimately have killed him, had shot him as he was about to cross the road.

Even though that person was right—the coyote would soon have died a miserable death from mange—I was filled with dismay. It seemed to me that he had come in out of the wild propelled by the same curiosity about humans that humans have when they try to get close to wild things, and I treasured his presence, felt there was something magical about his having come to us. I mourned that little coyote to an extent that surprised even me. His sudden death left me with a sense of a gap, an abrupt truncation of an experience that promised to yield more. And I could not reconcile myself to that casual, unthinking shot.

Although Peter doesn’t hunt, many of our neighbors do, sometimes for a taste of wild meat, sometimes for trophies or to sell the fur, and sometimes—probably most often—to eliminate what they feel are pests. More than once I have been amazed and then offended to hear people remark that there are too many deer, coyotes or foxes this year and that people ought to go out and kill a bunch of them.

It isn’t that I don’t understand the impulse: the day the two coyotes circled me, I was afraid. If I’d been used to it and had had a gun, I suppose I might have tried to kill at least one of them. When raccoons in the yard eat all the dog and cat food set out in the yard, a gun is one solution to the problem, and if during calving season there are a lot of coyotes around, it only makes sense to think about protecting the calves. But I had always been one of those city people who hate hunting, believing, although knowing nothing about it, that non-Native hunters were gun-crazy and cruel and filled with nothing else but a lust for blood. I couldn’t imagine that urge as anything else but perversion. Now that I was living with animals every day and giving serious thought to their place in our world, I began to examine more carefully my set of beliefs with regard to them, and to wonder about hunting them.

Hunting out of necessity, for one’s food supply, is a different story from shooting animals as pests or hunting when one could more easily buy the meat at the supermarket. And there are different ways of hunting out of necessity. For example, the respect Native hunters show for their prey is legendary, stemming as it does from a different belief system than ours. Hugh Brody, in
Maps and Dreams
, tells of accompanying Beaver hunters who had killed and were butchering a cow moose:

As always, virtually every part of the animal was taken: the digestive system was cleaned out, the intestines separated from other entrails, the liver and heart carefully set aside…They observed also the conventions that surround the treatment of an unborn calf. First, they prepared a thick bed of partially digested browse which they poured from the animal’s stomach…Each part of the surrounding reproductive system was disconnected from the womb and set aside. Then the womb itself was placed on the bed of the cow’s stomach contents and sliced open…the foetus was carefully laid on the mat of stomach contents, protected with more digested grasses and some membranes, then covered over with spruce boughs and a few dead branches. Such respectful tratment of the foetus was as automatic as any other part of the butchering…there was no question of its not being carried out.”

If there is to be hunting for food by non-Natives on any large scale, this kind of respect for animals needs to be learned, or rather relearned. The origins of hunting as a human activity are so old that they are lost in the past—there are, of course, still some hunting cultures extant today—but because of its very age as a human
activity, it appears that to eat other animals is instinctive and subdued only by an act of will. One of the greatest transitions for most of the human race took place ten thousand years ago when farming was invented and survival strictly by hunting gradually became, in much of the world, a thing of the past. The chief reason for this act of will seems to be a spiritual one: the belief that it is wrong to kill and eat other animals.

But hunting to live, facing starvation otherwise, engenders in humans a very powerful respect for the animals which must be killed, while hunting for sport, precisely because it isn’t necessary, can engender a casualness, a carelessness and a lack of respect for the animals. To the extent that we kill casually without good reason, we brutalize ourselves, we brutalize the human race.

John Haines, the American poet of excellent reputation, off and on during his more than twenty-five years in the Alaska wilderness made his living by running a trapline. To be both a poet and a trapper is a strange and contradictory combination of professions, the one requiring unusual sensitivity and thoughtfulness, the other unusual coldness, possibily even cruelty, or at least the ability to shut off feelings. His book
The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness
addresses the dilemma of hunting: what harm, in the true balance of things, someone killing animals for their fur actually does, and what the true nature of animals themselves is, questions that are at root intertwined. Haines acknowledges the sense of mastery that the hunter feels:

There is passion in the hand that pulls the pelt and strokes the fur, confident that it knows as second nature all the hinges and recesses of the animal body.

But he acknowledges that he was haunted by the animals he trapped.

I lay awake at night, watching my trail in the snow overhead, and saw myself caught in a trap or snare, slowly freezing to death. I felt the cold grip of the metal, the frost in my bones. A pair of great yellow eyes seemed to stare at me from the darkness, and looked into my soul. Very likely I bestowed on the creatures more capacity for pain and suffering than they possess, but there was no way to be sure of this. Their lives and deaths haunted me like a wound in my own flesh.

In the end even Haines the poet, the contemplative and educated man, cannot quite resolve the dilemma, nor feel quite at ease with himself. For him, the mystery remains, both of the true nature of the animal and thus of whether he did wrong in doing something which so satisfied him.

But however close that familiarity, something is always withheld; the life of the animal remains other and beyond, never completely yielding all that it is.

Like Haines, I don’t understand the why of them; I don’t know what their essence is, or what they know of existence and death, or of the meaning of their own lives. At their core, they remain strangers, as Barry Lopez says, the Other. What is that “all” that Haines speaks of which even the intimate knowledge of joints, sinews, organs and blood never reveals?

Those who study animal behavior in its natural setting and who make films of the naturalists’ work for programs like “Nature” and
“The Nature of Things” seem to me to be merely trying to fill up the void between us and them with interesting, but not very useful facts, facts which give the illusion of understanding. Ask a question and they have an answer to give; it will not tell us the thing we most want to know, that we all want to know. And it often seems to me, watching scenes of animals in the wild copulating or killing each other, that despite their reverential tones, attempts either fumbling or whimsical at explanations of behaviors that don’t make sense in terms of human understanding, and in some cases their clear anthropomorphizing of them, in their unbecoming inquisitiveness, nobody shows less respect for animals than the people who make these films.

If we do not come to truly know animals as trappers, hunters, naturalists, zoo-goers, photographers or pet owners, the question of how we might come to answer the essential questions about them remains. North American Natives are, as always when Nature is invoked, instructive on this point. Faced with the necessity of hunting them to survive, and thus being forced to know their habits and behaviors as well as or better than professional naturalists, they dealt with the mystery in two ways: one, they treated them with reverence as Hugh Brody describes and as is reiterated many times in their own words and in quotations and descriptions gathered by anthropologists, explorers, traders and missionaries, and in their carvings and paintings; and two, because they played such a large part in their lives and their dreams, they believed on another level they were at least emissaries of the gods, sometimes embodiments of them, and tales sprang up to explain creation in terms of them.

Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki in
Wisdom of the Elders
quote a statement made by an Inuit hunter named Ivaluardjuk—Joseph Campbell also quotes him in
Primitive Mythology
—as it was reported by Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen:

The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.

In the hierarchy of being of some Native mythologies wild animals are placed closer to the gods than are humans. This is a view that accepts and honors the fact that in our fascination with science, we in the modern world have forgotten and denied the ancient and continuing mystery at the core of the animal, the mystery at the heart of Nature about which Haines has written so eloquently. The longer I live out here, the more I think that that Native belief must be true.

As the years passed, I found myself more in tune with the animal world around me. Walking in the hills one day, over an area I often walk, I came upon the skull of a yearling deer. Although the animal had been dead long enough that the skull was white, it had not been there a few days before, and I drew the usual conclusion that a coyote had dragged it there. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why a coyote would have bothered since any trace of flesh or marrow had vanished, and there were no teethmarks where an animal had gnawed the bone for the calcium.

It was a beautiful skull: bleached to a pristine whiteness, small, delicate, with slender antlers swelling outward, then curving gracefully inward to point to each other in perfect symmetry. I picked it up to look more closely, thinking I had never seen anything before of such grace, such pure loveliness. I held it in both hands, gazing
down at it, and as I admired it, I turned to face in the opposite direction. As I turned, I glanced up and there, standing evenly spaced along a higher ridge, staring quietly down at me were twenty-two mule deer.

The moment was, as Aldo Leopold says of the beauty of a flight of cranes, “as yet beyond the reach of words.” I felt blessed in having found so perfect a skull; when I turned and saw the deer hovering over me, watching me as I picked it up and admired it, holding it with reverence, as if it were somehow holy, it seemed to me as if they had given me the skull, as if it were a gift to me. In fact, as I told the story months later to a group of artist-conservationists in South Dakota, one of them said spontaneously, in an awe-filled whisper, “Ahhh—it was a gift.” At moments like that, rare as they are, I feel that every sacrifice, every second of pain that has been the direct result of coming here to live has been worth it and more. Here I feel myself constantly moving close to a level of understanding about the nature of existence that I can’t imagine coming in any other way, in any other place.