This Side of Wild: Chapters Four–Five

I was sitting on the side apron at Los Angeles International Airport some years ago, waiting in a long line of commercial jets, which were roaring and snorting flame, and looked out the side window of the plane and was amazed to see a scruffy coyote stalking an even grubbier-looking jackrabbit in the grass divider between the runways.

I watched the two until we were out of sight, taking off—both still intent on their drama, as oblivious to the planes as if they were alone in the forest primeval.

Nor was that the only evidence that the wild has supplanted the tame.

One hot summer desert day, I was riding my horse on the edge of an ancient dry lake bed, slightly higher on the old shoreline, when I looked out to see at some distance—perhaps half a mile—a jackrabbit ripping out across the dusty bed, leaving a dust line like a bone-dry contrail.

When worked the way this one was being worked—played in from the side—unless they could find some cover to dodge and jerk and hide in, or a safe haven, they were pretty much consigned to death.

If you spend a lot of time with nature, you inevitably run into the concept, the reality of death.

While now and then you hear somebody talking about how "...beautiful and elegant the predator-prey relationship is, how natural and proper the death of the prey is,” it is usually so much misunderstood balderdash by people who have not witnessed it very many times, or worse, by people who have witnessed only highly edited versions on film.

It is often said that nature has no disdain, and therefore the natural death lacks the concept of anger, of revenge, of meanness, and that it is even sometimes—shudder—beautiful.

But only in the way the stupid, bloody slaughter of a bull in a bullfight can be called beautiful. The truth is the bull is virtually maimed and tortured, hacked and cut and stabbed until it is near death and then ceremoniously stabbed with a sword.

Conversely, most animals do not kill before they eat, and the prey is often eaten slowly, miserably, and alive—in great torture and pain.

While initially as a hunter/trapper when a child, and also later, I had witnessed the concept and reality of death. As new knowledge it had now become something of less interest to me—especially after having worked on an ambulance for two years with the attendant horror and nightmares that go with that—and I no longer had that first blush of excitement or thought I had a need to know.

I watched her one day walking along, her nose down, studying a lizard in its meanderings, and once, when riding with a friend who had brought a very old deaf and blind little female dog for the ride, I saw the mare do something I would not have believed, nor would my friend, had we not both seen it.

Where the jackrabbit had been running straight and flat on the surface of the lake with a coyote slightly to the rear on either side, the rabbit’s only hope was to outrun the coyotes in a straight run—a vain hope.

And again, I had a small doe—almost a fawn, barely out of spots—jump into a canoe with me as I sat fishing near the shore of a small lake in Minnesota to avoid being caught by domestic dogs.

But they were both older and wiser coyotes and knew that even if I did not somehow intervene, coming under the mare to take the rabbit would be tantamount to committing suicide.

A roadrunner chased a small lizard from the left side in front of our traveling animal cavalcade.

I stood down and loosened the cinch and let her breathe all she could take in and thought once more of how often I seemed to control things from my supposed platform of being a human, and therefore a superior being.

My life had for the last half hour been completely controlled by a horse, two coyotes, a roadrunner, and a jackrabbit. Not to mention the lizard. I was merely along for the ride—very precariously, as it turned out—which reminded me once again how really minor man can be when it comes to competing for space and time and food.

But then air travel became more and more difficult and time-consuming due to enhanced security and driving grew much more attractive and comforting, and consequently, the highway quickly became a thronging hive of cars, trucks, vans, thousands (it seemed) of motorcycles, and huge families traveling together—especially approaching any holiday, like Easter or Christmas.

As an adjunct to this increase in traffic, the population at the highway rest areas virtually exploded.

And this fact—children running amok—was perhaps the primary factor leading to the war.

Still later I found that even the smallest birds—sparrows, wrens, chickadees—had wonderful innate intelligence, could work complicated math problems, and live—actually make a living and a family and live—in weather and conditions that would drop a human dead in his tracks.

In 1946 we lived in a camp outside of Manila, which came in constant contact with belligerent soldiers called “Huks.”

There were wild chickens almost everywhere—literally thousands of them—and they soon came to learn that machine-gun fire resulted in a chance to get at the rations or other food, and they would come running if they heard automatic weapons firing, trying to find the rice balls among the bodies of the casualties.

Similarly, the small birds in the rest areas began to learn that the automobiles and trucks that came roaring in brought with them a wonderful smorgasbord of insects caught and carried in their radiator grilles.

These birds were scraggly-looking black birds—we used to call them “grackles.”

They would rush and peck at both small and large birds who were feeding in the wrong size vehicle and, furthermore, they policed each vehicle to make certain the birds “assigned” to their radiator did a good job of cleaning out the bug carcasses.

The water inside the bathrooms was not potable and was separate and sealed in the rooms by tight doors.

Memories take on life, a valid life, that is more vital, more real than the actual event. It is, in some sense, much like scurvy, an illness brought about by a lack of vitamin C, common to sailors in navies of old who could not carry enough fresh food on long sailing voyages.

I have been attacked by moose, charged by bear, run down by feral dog packs, struck by rattlesnakes, bump-attacked by sharks...even put on top of my car by an angry weasel not much bigger than my thumb.

But I found that my whole dog team loved and worried about me so much, they curved downstream and worked back up to me to surround me as I lay clutching my lacerated knee, whimpering and pushing their warm bodies against me.

I wasted nothing, fed the meat to my dogs or ate it myself, tanned or sold the pelts, did everything legal by state and federal law, worked within the ecology to help keep a correct balance in nature, and yet...

I had seen crows and one other raven in traps but never with this kind of rage. And the noise he was making! It was beyond even rudimentary, infantry, truck-driver jailhouse swearing—I know he condemned me to eight or nine slow deaths.

Or I should say I did not see him again, but many times—past counting—in places where you would least expect it, often under duress or when things were either going bad or about to go bad, there would be a raven.

Proof of this possibly evil, or at least cantankerous connection, would come just a year later.

My body was then sixty-five years old, but my brain—in a scientific achievement of incredible adeptness—had stopped at the age of thirty-eight or so, and with wonderful abilities of delusion convinced me that this would all work.

I once saw a kennel in Canada where they fed more than a hundred puppies twice a day in large, rubberized circular dish troughs, and when it came time to feed, the puppies—trained to a T—ran screaming in circles around the dishes until the ravens (perhaps fifty of them) had carefully, and slowly, picked through the food for themselves before letting the pups in.

I wondered then, for the first real time, how much of our intelligence, or supposed intellect, which made us feel superior and full of manifest destiny—how much of that was and is purely self-delusional—and I knew.

So we found the keys on the ground and wire-tied them back into the machines so the ravens couldn’t pull them out, thwarting them just this once, just now an insult to them, so that they had one more thing to say, one more thought.

And that brought perhaps a new bit of knowledge to come from the ravens: They, and all birds, are said to have descended from the dinosaurs. Extrapolating backward and knowing that the dinosaurs had literally millions of years to evolve, grow, and perfect what they were, isn’t it probable that if a raven could make jokes, could make pranks, could drop orange peelings on my head:
Couldn’t dinosaurs laugh?