by Buffalo Gals
“He was seven feet long, all stretched out, before they took him off. And so thin! They all said, ‘Well, Aunt May, I guess you were scared there! I guess you were some scared!’ But I wasn’t. I didn’t want him shot. But I didn’t know what to do for him. And I did need to get to Rosie.”
I have told this true story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history. Now the field that the poor man plowed and the rich man harvested lies on the edge of a little town, houses and workshops of timber and fieldstone standing among almond, oak, and eucalyptus trees; and now May is an old woman with a name that means the month of May: Rains End. An old woman with a long, wrinkled-pleated upper lip, she is living alone for the summer in her summer place, a meadow a mile or so up in the hills above the little town, Sinshan. She took her cow Rose with her, and since Rose tends to wander she keeps her on a long tether down by the tiny creek, and moves her into fresh grass now and then. The summerhouse is what they call a nine-pole house, a mere frame of poles stuck in the ground—one of them is a live digger-pine sapling—with stick and matting walls, and mat roof and floors. It doesn’t rain in the dry season, and the roof is just for shade. But the house and its little front yard where Rains End has her camp stove and clay oven and matting loom are well shaded by a fig tree that was planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother.
Rains End herself has no grandchildren; she never bore a child, and her one or two marriages were brief and very long ago. She has a nephew and two grandnieces, and feels herself an aunt to all children, even when they are afraid of her and rude to her because she has got so ugly with old age, smelling as musty as a chickenhouse. She considers it natural for children to shrink away from somebody part way dead, and knows that when they’re a little older and have got used to her they’ll ask her for stories. She was for sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge, and though she doesn’t do curing any more people still ask her to help with nursing sick children, and the children come to long for the kind, authoritative touch of her hands when she bathes them to bring a fever down, or changes a dressing, or combs out bed-tangled hair with witch hazel and great patience.
So Rains End was just waking up from an early afternoon nap in the heat of the day, under the matting roof, when she heard a noise, a huge, awful yowl that started soft with a nasal hum and rose slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr…And she got up and looked out from the open side of the house of sticks and matting, and saw a mountain lion under the fig tree. She looked at him from her house; he looked at her from his.
And this part of the story is much the same: the old woman; the lion; and, down by the creek, the cow.
It was hot. Crickets sang shrill in the yellow grass on all the hills and canyons, in all the chaparral. Rains End filled a bowl with water from an unglazed jug and came slowly out of the house. Halfway between the house and the lion she set the bowl down on the dirt. She turned and went back to the house.
The lion got up after a while and came and sniffed at the water. He lay down again with a soft, querulous groan, almost like a sick child, and looked at Rains End with the yellow eyes that saw her in a different way than she had ever been seen before.
She sat on the matting in the shade of the open part of her house and did some mending. When she looked up at the lion she sang under her breath, tunelessly; she wanted to remember the Puma Dance Song but could only remember bits of it, so she made a song for the occasion:
You are there, lion.
You are there, lion…
As the afternoon wore on she began to worry about going down to milk Rose. Unmilked, the cow would start tugging at her tether and making a commotion. That was likely to upset the lion. He lay so close to the house now that if she came out that too might upset him, and she did not want to frighten him or to become frightened of him. He had evidently come for some reason, and it behoved her to find out what the reason was. Probably he was sick; his coming so close to a human person was strange, and people who behave strangely are usually sick or in some kind of pain. Sometimes, though, they are spiritually moved to act strangely. The lion might be a messenger, or might have some message of his own for her or her townspeople. She was more used to seeing birds as messengers; the fourfooted people go about their own business. But the lion, dweller in the Seventh House, comes from the place dreams come from. Maybe she did not understand. Maybe someone else would understand. She could go over and tell Valiant and her family, whose summerhouse was in Gahheya meadow, farther up the creek, or she could go over to Buck’s, on Baldy Knoll. But there were four or five adolescents there, and one of them might come and shoot the lion, to boast that he’d saved old Rains End from getting clawed to bits and eaten.
Moooooo! said Rose, down by the creek, reproachfully.
The sun was still above the southwest ridge, but the branches of pines were across it and the heavy heat was out of it, and shadows were welling up in the low fields of wild oats and blackberry.
Moooooo! said Rose again, louder.
The lion lifted up his square, heavy head, the color of dry wild oats, and gazed down across the pastures. Rains End knew from that weary movement that he was very ill. He had come for company in dying, that was all.
“I’ll come back, lion,” Rains End sang tunelessly. “Lie still. Be quiet. I’ll come back soon.” Moving softly and easily, as she would move in a room with a sick child, she got her milking pail and stool, slung the stool on her back with a woven strap so as to leave a hand free, and came out of the house. The lion watched her at first very tense, the yellow eyes firing up for a moment, but then put his head down again with that little grudging, groaning sound. “I’ll come back, lion,” Rains End said. She went down to the creekside and milked a nervous and indignant cow. Rose could smell lion, and demanded in several ways, all eloquent, just what Rains End intended to do? Rains End ignored her questions and sang milking songs to her: “Su bonny, su bonny, be still my grand cow…” Once she had to slap her hard on the hip. “Quit that, you old fool! Get over! I am not going to untie you and have you walking into trouble! I won’t let him come down this way.”
She did not say how she planned to stop him.
She retethered Rose where she could stand down in the creek if she liked. When she came back up the rise with the pail of milk in hand, the lion had not moved. The sun was down, the air above the ridges turning clear gold. The yellow eyes watched her, no light in them. She came to pour milk into the lion’s bowl. As she did so, he all at once half rose up. Rains End started, and spilled some of the milk she was pouring. “Shoo! Stop that!” she whispered fiercely, waving her skinny arm at the lion. “Lie down now! I’m afraid of you when you get up, can’t you see that, stupid? Lie down now, lion. There you are. Here I am. It’s all right. You know what you’re doing.” Talking softly as she went, she returned to her house of stick and matting. There she sat down as before, in the open porch, on the grass mats.
The mountain lion made the grumbling sound, ending with a long sigh, and let his head sink back down on his paws.
Rains End got some cornbread and a tomato from the pantry box while there was still daylight left to see by, and ate slowly and neatly. She did not offer the lion food. He had not touched the milk, and she thought he would eat no more in the House of Earth.
From time to time as the quiet evening darkened and stars gathered thicker overhead she sang to the lion. She sang the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying. She did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did not know his songs.
Twice he also sang: once a quavering moan, like a housecat challenging another tom to battle, and once a long, sighing purr.
Before the Scorpion had swung clear of Sinsh
an Mountain, Rains End had pulled her heavy shawl around herself in case the fog came in, and had gone sound asleep in the porch of her house.
She woke with the grey light before sunrise. The lion was a motionless shadow, a little farther from the trunk of the fig tree than he had been the night before. As the light grew, she saw that he had stretched himself out full length. She knew he had finished his dying, and sang the fifth song, the last song, in a whisper, for him:
The doors of the Four Houses
are open.
Surely they are open.
Near sunrise she went to milk Rose, and to wash in the creek. When she came back up to the house she went closer to the lion, though not so close as to crowd him, and stood for a long time looking at him stretched out in the long, tawny, delicate light. “As thin as I am!” she said to Valiant, when she went up to Gahheya later in the morning to tell the story and to ask help carrying the body of the lion off where the buzzards and coyotes could clean it.
It’s still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won’t take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it. But you don’t need it. You followed the lion where he went, years ago now.
(1983-87)
Rilke’s “Eighth Duino Elegy” and
“She Unnames Them”
I learned most of my German from Mark Twain. My translation of Rilke’s poem was achieved by chewing up and digesting other translations—C.F. McIntyre’s still seems the truest to me—and then using a German dictionary and a lot of nerve. The “Elegy” is the poem about animals that I have loved the longest and learned the most from.
It is followed by the story that had to come last in this book because it states (equivocally, of course) whose side (so long as sides must be taken) I am on and what the consequences (maybe) are.
The Eighth Elegy
(From “The Duino Elegies” of Rainer Maria Rilke)
With all its gaze the animal
sees openness. Only our eyes are
as if reversed, set like traps
all around its free forthgoing.
What is outside, we know from the face
of the animal only; for we turn even the youngest child
around and force it to see all forms
backwards, not the openness
so deep in the beast’s gaze. Free from death.
Only we see that. The free animal
has its dying always behind it
and God in front of it, and its way
is the eternal way, as the spring flowing.
Never, not for a moment, do we have
pure space before us, where the flowers
endlessly open. Always it’s world
and never nowhere-nothing-not,
that pure unoverseen we breathe
and know without desiring forever.
So a child,
losing itself in that silence, has to be
jolted back. Or one dies, and is.
For close to death we don’t see death,
but stare outward, maybe with the beast’s great gaze.
And lovers, if it weren’t for the other
getting in the way, come very close to it, amazed,
as if it had been left open by mistake,
behind the beloved—but nobody
gets all the way, and it’s all world again.
Facing Creation forever, all we see
in it is a mirror-image of the free
in our own dark shadow. Or an animal,
a dumb beast, stares right through us, peaceably.
This is called Destiny: being face to face,
and never anything but face to face.
Were this consciousness of ours shared by
the beast, that in its certainty
approaches us
in a different direction, it would take us
with it on its way. But its being is
to it unending, uncontained, no glimpse
of its condition, pure, as is its gaze.
And where we see the Future, it sees all,
and itself in all, and healed forever.
Yet in the warm, watching animal
is the care and weight of a great sadness.
For it bears always, as we bear,
and are borne down by, memory.
As if not long ago all we yearn for
had been closer to us, truer, and the bond
endlessly tender. Here all is distance,
there it was breathing. After the first home,
the second is duplicitous, drafty.
O happiness of tiny creatures
that stay forever in the womb that bears them!
O fly’s joy, buzzing still within,
even on its mating-day! For womb is all.
And look at the half-certainty of birds,
that from the start know almost both,
like a soul of the Etruscans
in the body shut inside the tomb,
its own resting figure as the lid.
And how distressed the womb-born are
when they must fly! As if scared
by themselves, they jerk across the air,
as a crack
goes through a cup: so the bat’s track
through the porcelain of twilight.
And we, onlookers, always, everywhere,
our face turned to it all and never from!
It overfills us. We control it. It breaks down.
We re-control it, and break down ourselves.
Who turned us round like this, so that
no matter what we do, we have the air
of somebody departing? As a traveller
on the last hill, for the last time seeing
all the home valley, turns, and stands, and lingers—
so we live forever taking leave.
She Unnames Them
MOST OF THEM accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that “yak” sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others, it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves, and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw their agreement was reached and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.
Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift’s attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom—as they put it—they belonged.
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, effanineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating—though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is in fact their name, and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refus
ed to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot, dog, or bird, and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.
The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunneling away.
As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm,—that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, “You and your father lent me this—gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.”
It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, “Put it down over there, OK?” and went on with what he was doing.
