The Animal Dialogues Read online

  Copyright © 1997, 2007 by Craig Childs

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: December 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02433-4

  Contents

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: Great Blue Heron

  Animalia

  Animal

  Carnivora

  Bear

  Coyote

  Mountain Lion

  Dog

  Raccoon

  Cat And Mouse

  Jaguar

  Aves

  Bald Eagle

  Peregrine Falcon

  Hawk

  Northern Spotted Owl

  Broad-Tailed Hummingbird

  Raven

  Great Horned Owl

  Violet-Green Swallow

  Bird

  Artiodactyla

  Mountain Goat

  Pronghorn Antelope

  Elk

  Bighorn Sheep

  Camel

  Deer

  Et Cetera

  Smelt

  Porcupine

  Praying Mantis

  Rattlesnake

  Sea Lion

  Red-Spotted Toad

  Rainbow Trout

  Mosquito

  Squid

  Wasp

  Blue Shark

  Human

  Animalia

  Animal

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  ALSO BY Craig Childs

  House of Rain

  The Way Out

  The Desert Cries

  Soul of Nowhere

  The Secret Knowledge of Water

  For

  Jasper and Jaden

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some of the stories in the following pages originally appeared in a book I wrote in 1997 called Crossing Paths. Other stories have been written since then. They need not be read in any particular sequence or all in one sitting. They are not in chronological order. I have hoped, in fact, that you, the reader, might come upon this book by accident, finding it on a desk, left open to a passage on mountain lions, or flipping its pages until you are caught in the stares of fifteen sorcerous ravens. This is how each story came to me: unexpectedly, halting my breath before I could draw it in. If you are one of those people who insist on reading books from left to right, I recommend a sip of clear water before starting each new chapter. Even better, I suggest that before you read the next story, you open your door and walk into the woods where only birds and spying raccoons might see you, or into a desert of lizards and jackrabbits, if that is what is at hand. Paw up the dirt and taste it on your lips. Drink out of a stream or from the lucid depths of a bedrock water hole. Return to your house, where this book waits on a table. Pull up a chair and see what other wild creature comes to speak with you.

  Introduction

  GREAT BLUE HERON

  I was very young when I woke before dawn and grabbed the small knapsack beside the bed. In it I placed a spiral notepad, a sharpened pencil, a paper bag containing breakfast, and a heavy thrift-store tape recorder with grossly oversized buttons. I walked outside, through the neighborhood, and at the edge of a field full of red-winged blackbirds, I took out the tape recorder. Their officious prattle lifted like shouts from the stock market floor. I pushed record and listened.

  In time I moved on, recording birds in different trees, in other lots. I ate cold toast with careful bites. Writing things down: the time, the place, what the bird looked like. My penmanship was terrible, shaky, typical for elementary school. I wanted so badly to be able to write like an adult. Occasionally I would just make loops with the pencil so that it looked like cursive. I worked at the entries, putting the last letter or two of a word on the next line if it wouldn’t fit. It was important, as important as anything, and I acted as if I knew what I was doing, as if I knew something about birds. Which I did not. I understood only that they flew and that they did it well. I would hold the pencil in my teeth and hum thoughtfully as I had seen the adults do.

  With my tape recorder, I walked these fields fanning below the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. So rarely was I awake at this time of the day that it felt like my birthday or Thanksgiving. I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face. I had a fantasy of running away to the woods, becoming a nomad and a hermit, but soon enough the sixty minutes of tape ran out. I returned home. There I ate breakfast a second time.

  Not for decades would I hear of John James Audubon or Aldo Leopold or Ann Zwinger. In these decades I would grope into the land. I would be blatantly watched by grizzly bears and hummingbirds. I would blow dust from tracks and crawl on my stomach through forests to see the animal. My truck would be buried axle-deep in the sandpits of New Mexican back roads. I would become a river guide in the North American deserts and take young students from cities into the wilderness, teaching them how to smell for coyotes and how to let tarantulas walk over their hands. I would rope into canyons looking for all the fear and quiescence and exquisite forms that roil in the wilderness.

  Now I go out walking. Sometimes for a hundred miles, circling mountain ranges or following canyons for weeks and months. More often it is a quarter mile in an afternoon, shuffling around the trees, looking for a soft place to sit. Out of habit, my eyes train on shapes and movements, and if I see any animal, it is invariably unexpected. I have no idea how proficient trackers do it—choosing their animal, then finding it. I choose a coyote and I get a very rainy day. I choose an elk and get a deer mouse. Then a mountain lion comes from behind while I am crouched, looking at its tracks.

  To see the animal, you must first remain very still. You may have to huddle in the dark of a street culvert for three nights before the raccoon comes. You may have to sit naked on the tundra before the grizzly finds you. Or you will simply have to be there, driving the highway the moment that a caravan of unhurried red-backed salamanders passes from one side to the other. That is when you must leave your car and get on hands and knees in the roadway. Just be careful not to touch the salamanders, because the acid from your fingerprints will burn into their backs. When you encounter an animal, it may be as startling and quick as the buzz of a rattlesnake. Or you may have time to note the shift of wind and the daily motions of light.

  Times that I have seen the animals have been like knife cuts in fabric. Through these stabs I could see a second world. There were stories of evolution and hunger and death. Cross sections of genetic histories and predator-prey relationships, of lives as cryptic as blood paths in snow. I have talked with those at the Division of Wildlife who know. I have rummaged through clutters of skulls and skeletons in a musty museum basement and read the reports of field biologists. But it is outside where the grip of the story lies.

  It was at a guide house near the Colorado River in Arizona that I saw the great blue heron. We were cleaning gear at the end of a river-running trip. Open ice chests and tired people. Equipment was being moved with dry, cracked hands that bleed as they often do midway through the season. The man behind me told me to look up, and I pulled my head out of an ice chest. Sweeping into view twenty feet above was a great blue heron. It h
ad the monstrous wingspan of a flying dinosaur, its snakelike neck stretched ahead, its long legs trailing behind. As it reached the telephone pole directly over our heads, its wings changed. Feathers spread with the fullness of a parachute. They stalled the air, these domed wings suddenly occupying more space than both of our bodies combined. With limber figure-skating grace, it landed on the flat of the pole top. The wings remained out for a moment, the heron teetering for balance. Then they closed.

  “Jesus, look at that bird,” said the person behind me. And, Jesus, I looked at it. Head to toe, it was nearly five feet tall, a subtle steel blue that tricks the eyes. It surveyed the landscape of mobile homes and river equipment below. From our vantage point we could see straight up its body. Its head was colorful, with contrasting grays and blues and the yellow of its saber beak. Balanced on the long neck, the head moved independently of the body. Head motions were a language in themselves, with the weight of the back of its skull balancing the lightness of its beak.

  People came and shunted gear, maneuvering around us. We did not move. The two of us were cradled by this bird, taken in as if it were a magician. You see these herons on the river daily, sweeping out from the riverbank, swerving among the dazzling white egrets. You see them wait until the last moment before they fly and screech, as if doubting you have the effrontery to come this near. But never a view like this. Not straight up, not right into its eyes. You want to ask questions now, now that the heron is so close. But you can’t. You can’t get a word out. You just stare for as long as you can because suddenly it will be over, you will get your name back and life will begin again. The two of us down here are members of a species famous for road building, artwork, and claims of superiority. People of reason, we ask many questions and give voluminous answers, but for now we were dead silent. The heron had us. It is a stalker, one so patient and still that time turns to ice as it waits and watches for fish in the shallow water. It held to the telephone pole perch, its slender, armored toes overhanging every edge. It straightened its feathers, leaned back and preened through them, aligning the steel-wire breast feathers that swept out at their tips like whispers. Its eyes tilted down, an adaptation useful for when your food swims at your feet.

  You cannot look at this bird and decide who is superior and who is not. The encyclopedic vocabulary of a raven is no more admirable than a red-spotted toad’s ability to drink through its skin. The human penchant for deciphering the world has no greater merit than the unusually large eyeball of a pronghorn.

  People kept moving. Stoves and dry boxes were carried in and out, arranged and rearranged. Knots were tied—double half hitches, trucker’s hitches, bowlines, clove hitches—securing equipment to the top of the van, tying off tarps and random lengths of rope. The heron’s neck retracted into a slight S shape. Its center of gravity shifted down. You see them do this before they fly, and they always pause as if to make certain that this is the moment. Its wings opened and flashed against the sky. With one stroke it was off. With two and three it glided. Air foiled beneath it, turning to an invisible clay of a very certain shape. The bird raked us with a stone-ground voice as it turned west toward the Colorado River, back to the desert and the water, away from the guide house and mobile homes where once there had been desert and water for as long as heron generations could remember. The heron was then gone.

  The man with me said only “Mmm.” What else was there to say?

  You see these things, even if you are not looking. You come out and the animals will find you, even if you never know they are there. Whether you are observant, curious, unaware, reluctant, or apathetic, they will find you. As they move around you, they will make tracks of different sizes, different gaits, different numbers and shapes of toes and claws, leaving signatures as they turn their weight into the ground to watch you. Their scents will have the sweetness of wool or the dark molasses smell of good soil. Always there will be a brilliance of form and function in such discreet and flagrant abundance that the universe must be nothing but a bottomless grab bag of ingenuity.

  This book is a collection of my own encounters, staring at animals for as long as they would stay. The experiences are translated, now made of words, like trying to build the sky out of sticks. Verbs and nouns do not always change to the weather as they should. They may not dry out and crack on hot days. Even my eyes have betrayed me as I have watched a tiger shark, losing its shape and its direction, and my ears have been misled as I have listened for a mountain lion in a canyon.

  I have written this book to share nuances that I have witnessed, to cultivate a familiarity with animals in their most original of contexts. At times I have been blasphemously arrogant and then learned from them to be quiet. In the mere studying of short-tailed weasel tracks in snow, I have been instructed in temperament and precision. There is, of course, an instant drama to an encounter, but remember that beyond the single moment is the long and ornate process of living.

  The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children.

  Ardea herodias

  Animalia

  ANIMAL

  Animals are watching. Right now they are in the woods, many of them looking back over their shoulders or peering down at us from bridges of tree branches as we march below, snapping dry wood with our boot soles and squashing soft, fleshy mushrooms.

  My companion stops.

  “Did you hear that?”

  I stop too, listening to a chittering forest of birds.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Something moved over there,” he says. “An animal.”

  We both drill our eyes through the trees.

  I am sixteen years old and, like my friend, I am lost in the mountains of western Wyoming. Not interminably lost, we just do not know exactly where we are—besides being on an untrailed flank of the Teton Mountains, over our heads in jackstraw timber. We had taken off from a road at a random point that morning and barged our way into a steep forest where no signs point the way. We wanted to see what it was like in here. Day packs are slung on our backs, containing water and some food. We have no maps, no compasses. No whistles, flares, or shelters. We have knives in our pockets and the clothes we are wearing—all that is needed for a day of going nowhere.

  I peer with my friend through a thousand broken shadows, seeing no movement save for twigs springing back as small bark-colored birds flit from one tree to the next. All the way along, we have been hearing animals snitching and scratching, elk lumbering about with heavy sounds, pine squirrels chattering, scolding from overhead. But all we have seen are these few birds. Everything else is lost to us behind tree trunks nearly touching one another. I squint to see better.

  “How big an animal?” I ask.

  “Big,” he says. “I didn’t see it, but it sounded like something big.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “I don’t either.”

  Only so long can we stare at nothing, so we start moving again, ducking under branches, touching the ground with our hands, and leaving the big animal—whatever it was—behind. Drunken, wild forest, it is far denser than we anticipated, battering our shins as we step through trapdoors of dead wood. Our hands slash in front of us, clearing branches and beards of dry, stringy lichen. Spiderwebs snap like trip wires across our lips, our foreheads, our arms. We’ve been side-hilling for hours, taking so many brief, natural paths that we don’t really know how to get back.

  Ahead we find a big dollop of scat on the ground and we stand around it, sweat dripping from our eyebrows, wiped on the backs of our hands. The scat looks like a big can of hash dumped on the ground. It is full of berry hulls and black digested meat.

  “Bear,” my friend says.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “A big bear.”

  “Grizzly, you think?”

  “What’s grizzly scat look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My
friend turns a grin toward me. “What if it is a griz?” he says excitedly.

  Should we be excited? I wonder. Better than being nervous, I suppose. I don’t want to see the bear. I just like the tingle in my spine telling me there is one nearby.

  “Let’s keep going,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I agree.

  Stupid kids, why not?

  All we have to follow are animal trails, faint inclinations left by elk or deer or bear that passed through. Even squat clearings left by waddling porcupines come in handy. They are all short-lived, ending as suddenly as they began, putting us back in thick trees where birds send warnings ahead of us, criers calling through green crowns. I crawl under a toppled tree, and my nose grazes the ground. I smell leaf rot and animals. It is the odor of spices in an earthy, slightly unpalatable dish: bonemeal, bobcat urine, wood fungus, worm dung. This is the other side of the coin from the rest of my life, from doors and walls and movie screens. This is the place that does not belong to humans. Animals have scuffed the ground, shat upon it, cleared twigs out of the way, folded down grass in their sleeping. They are talking, leaving messages written in scents on leaves and tree bark, whistling to one another, hearing voices in the distance.

  As we move, a deer bounds away, stabbing its hooves into the ground with punctuated sounds. Only the tips of its fawn-colored ears are visible over ferns and serviceberry bushes. We look for the deer, but it is gone that fast, vanished back into the folds. After that, a gray jay sails in and lands on a branch to see who we are, its soft, inquisitive eyes following us. I feel as if we are dragging tin cans into the wilderness, startling animals from their many private gardens.

  A little farther comes a sound like the weight of an elk crashing through dead branches. My friend and I freeze, both listening and wondering if the weight of an elk might also sound like the weight of a mountain lion. I step up on top of a rotten stump, and see nothing.

  “What is it?” my companion asks.