by Brian Brett
For several years we kept two dogs on our farm. The border collie, Samantha, to round up the sheep, and Olive, to fight off the raccoons that prey on our chickens. Samantha was such a good shepherd that you hardly noticed her working. We used to delight in sending people out for walks in the fields. A motley, rambling crowd would leave and then return in a tight cluster, tripping over each other’s feet, not realizing the dog had invisibly, patiently grouped them. She looked at you with eyes that said: “I can get around you.” And she could. Everything they say about the intelligence of border collies is true. Her partner, the giant, galumphing hound Olive—as black as an olive and as graceful as Olive Oyl—has about three brain cells, and not all of them are switched on at the same time. One of her favourite tricks is to drop her ball in the pond and then mourn its disappearance after it sinks—staring at the water, sometimes for hours, hoping someone will rescue the ball.
Sam died before dawn at Malcolm Bond’s new pet hospital. Pancreatic cancer. It was sudden. We thought she’d eaten something bad, but when Malcolm opened her up she was full of cancer. We never had the chance to say goodbye. Dead dogs stick to us like ghost limbs. After my first dog died I locked myself in my room for two days with a bottle of whisky. Leonard Cohen knew the feeling exactly when he sang about fathers and dogs dying.
Olive was so sickened at the sight of Samantha’s body in the wheelbarrow that she drooled. She refused to come near the grave and say goodbye as we buried her. Olive sat on the far side of the pond, staring at the water.
At least Samantha had a good week before her death. She and Olive had driven a marauding deer off the property. The next night we came home with a quarter of beef and they had a feed of scraps. The dogs must think we’re the ultimate hunters. We go out for a few hours and return laden with bones.
Then they treed the biggest raccoon they’d ever fought in their lives. It was almost as big as Sam. It took both Olive and me to kill it during another one of those brutal, five-inthe-morning fights. Sam loved it. Everybody was bleeding by the end. She always tracked the raccoons and then let Olive move in. In her youth Sam actually used to climb the fruit trees after them. We buried Samantha in the late morning with twin lambs that had been stillborn in the night. We were too distracted to notice them until we were burying Samantha. Then we realized one of the ewes was calling. Her calls led us to the dead lambs.
So now Samantha has two lambs to shepherd under the willow tree where we buried her with a lovely little black-and-white, Oriental-looking stoneware lidded pot that I turned on my wheel ten years ago. We dragged up a quartz-crystalline rock for a headstone and Sharon transplanted some flowering snowdrops next to it. Later in the afternoon Olive slipped out of the house, alone, took her favourite ball down to the willow tree, left it on the grave, and returned to the house, silent with the private sorrow only a dog understands.
24
CREATURES
OF THE NIGHT
AND NOW THE day has come to its liquid end, the sky as blue-dark as deep water—another of the many blues that our sky has given us over the years. At dusk the peafowl make their regular night flight to the maple, using our upper deck as a launching pad. Perched on the rail, they pump themselves up like Thai kick-boxers preparing for a match. Building a rhythm, their heads bobbing before they leap, the birds pound their wings against the air until they rise like helicopters into the high tree, where they perch, faintly silhouetted among the leaves.
In the gathering darkness the dogs are desperate for a night walk, so we go down to the gravel intersection beyond our farm. Our footfalls echo in the relative quiet, accompanied by the frail and querulous cry of the killdeer and a couple of crickets. A lonely tree frog makes itself known by the pond. Our spring “wall of frogs” is muted now, and we will nervously await their return next spring. Like so much of the world, they are endangered. Out of 6,000 known amphibians, 1,900 are threatened with extinction from the chytrid fungus. Already 170 have gone extinct. All we can do is provide habitat for our gang, planting more shoreline reeds and willows to shelter them from the fish, herons, and raccoons.
Sharon and I decide to relax in the hot tub. It’s a wasteful, monstrous thing, our tub—an energy hog. I’ve got to devise a solar supplement. But when it’s given to you free, it’s difficult to resist, especially since I’m tortured by osteo-arthritis, a by-product of my genetic condition. My bones have crumbled. They hurt. An evening soak temporarily relieves the pain and gives me the opportunity to consider the elasticity of the day.
The barred owls across the road launch into a territorial war that startles us. We undress and sink into the hot water. A shooting star flares overhead. It’s early—meteors occur every night of the year, but they’re best in August, during the Perseid shower at its zenith, and they flash right and left and thrill us. Although our tiny valley blocks sunsets, it makes for good darkness and star viewing because the forest obstructs the glow of Vancouver on the northern horizon. The Milky Way is a wide gauzy river that cuts our sky in two, and we often use star charts to refresh our memory of the constellations.
The meteor reminds me of my wilderness years—when I wanted to hike every mountain I met, and the stars seemed so bright I could almost reach up and touch them. How original the world is in your youth! The joy I found in staring at a fire for hours as if I had invented it. I couldn’t get enough of my night fires—like a ten-year-old jumping off a dock into a lake, over and over. I wish I could always live within that delight, at perfect attention, but the moments seem to grow more rare, though they still happen—like the day I was lying on my back in Blackburn Lake’s cool water, motionless as endless clouds passed—so still that a dragonfly landed on my nose to rest before flying off again.
Those mountain campfires many decades ago saved me from the street-kid world I also toyed with then, taking me away from a lifestyle that would have killed me. The campfires gave both flame and shadow, and the glowing eyes of deer lurked in the shadows. Sometimes I built fires at cave mouths and watched the shadows they cast on the walls, and sometimes I would dance alone between the fire and the wall, creating personal shadow-puppet mythologies, as old as the Thai Ramakian or Plato. They were my mystic alternative to the hardness of urban shadows and the electric glow that dims the stars above cities. If you look deeply at a fire you can understand how alien the world is and perhaps remember the astonishing moon of your childhood. The mind loses its sense of mystery when mystery is ignored—or, worse, when earnest people insist that every mystery must have a meaning, and therefore a human use, the rationale we use to justify saving the Amazon or the great trees of Haida Gwaii. Yet their magic lies not in how they can be used, but in what they are. Our greatest mysteries are great because they are mysteries. Sometimes it’s that simple.
The sky above the pond is shape-shifting with bats, and we admire their eerie fluttering. In an early year on the farm Sharon and I were sitting close together on the deck, watching a moon rise, and she grew jumpy about the bats. I told her that the story about bats getting caught in people’s hair was a myth, and as soon as I finished speaking one darted between us, so close it touched both our heads, before it somehow flipped up without crashing into the wall and darted away. Sharon hollered one of her famous “Gawww” screams, which the parrot so loves to imitate, and I had a hard time holding back my laughter.
Tonight she decides to leave early and make tea. She departs with much fluttering of her towel. She’s still twitchy about the bats. As she passes the guest room window I notice the chewed-up corner where Bonnie, a black Labrador, went through it years ago, and I immediately think, “I have to fix that window,” knowing I won’t for a long time, because there’s an enormous backlog of other projects that are more important. The fifty-year plan, as we call it.
No, I’m not optimistic about our prospects. My health is a mess, my joints below the waist are corn flakes, my liver is shot, and my blood pressure is through the roof. Sharon and I are both as high-strung as piano
wires, and that can make for a chancy relationship. Our finances are dicey because of our farming habit. I’m growing old, but I shouldn’t have that privilege—considering the misadventures of my birth—so I call myself a lucky child of the world, as we are all lucky children of the world, being born into this whirlpool. I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask for more. I’m embarrassed by how much we’ve taken, and when I witness the sense of entitlement of people around me I can only feel ashamed of the angry members of my First World culture.
All of this brings me back to that damned window. It got wrecked on the day we last renewed the mortgage, increasing it for the third time in ten years—a standard business practice for a farmer and another hazard of expensive island living. A friend of ours had a black Labrador, big and gentle tempered. A sudden series of medical tragedies left this dog blind and deaf. The vets weren’t sure it was permanent, and our friends had previously booked a skiing holiday for two days, so we agreed to take Bonnie while we all awaited her diagnosis. There is nothing sadder than a blind, deaf dog. Bonnie also had a character flaw we weren’t warned about; she didn’t like to be left alone, especially in her present condition.
We were gone only two hours, signing the papers for the mortgage, but it was dark by the time we returned. Another of those black raincoast nights. During a recent one Sharon and I actually bonked heads as we crept home from a cheerful dinner with the neighbours that extended beyond the dusk hours.
As soon as I entered the house I saw the damage. Bonnie had started on the door, chewing the cedar trim. This is not as depressing as it sounds, since another friend’s dog had already chewed the same door, so we were old hands in the dog-chewed-door lifestyle of the islands. Then she’d leaped onto a bed, sucked up a few mouthfuls of windowsill, forced the window open, and escaped. Glancing at the damage, I rushed out to look for her. A block away, at the roadside trailhead to the neighbourhood forest park, in near-perfect darkness, I met our neighbour riding her horse.
Islanders, out of necessity, develop a tolerance for interesting behaviour. After a few close encounters in the night between my truck and her horse, I’m less skittish about her riding habits and I know to keep an eye out for her. So when this big, dark gelding’s nose appeared out of nowhere and started frisking me for treats, I was more interested in hearing his rider warn me about a black dog lurking in the forest. I started calling back to the house for more flashlights and for Sharon to phone the other neighbours and warn them we had a lost dog.
I’d be the first to admit that humping through the forest on a recently installed artificial knee, using a bad flashlight to search for a blind, black, deaf dog, is not intelligent behaviour. At the same time, if the human race waited around for its intelligence to catch up to its technology, we’d still be living in caves (where we’ll probably end up anyway). Besides, I’d recently gone cross-country skiing during a freak snowstorm, so I figured I was already toast with the doctors. I never paid much attention to their instructions, which might explain why my health is shot.
By the time the night mist settled to chest height, we had our cars lined up, high beams illuminating the forest’s edge. Our stalwart equestrian neighbour hoofed the trails, and Sharon and I crawled through the cedar swamps, attempting to trace the occasional plaintive howl that Bonnie released.
The only way to know wilderness is to lose yourself in it, let yourself be captured. I’ve spent enough nights camped alone in untravelled forests to understand that haunting. I could only imagine what a blind, deaf dog thought of it in her lonely agony. Isn’t that what we all are? Blind, lost dogs in a forest? We set our own dogs after her; however, because they knew her, they wouldn’t bark, and they couldn’t lure her back. They kept returning, panting, desperate for further instruction. Gradually, I caught glimpses of her shadowy form and figured out where she was heading. Alongside her, our own black Lab’s eyes glowed green among the primeval ferns, wetly reflecting my lamp.
I wondered if Bonnie had some residual sight and the dim beam of my flashlight was scaring her, or maybe it was my thumping human vibrations in the forest. She was terrified. She was fleeing! I began shouting out directions to Sharon, trying to get her to double back on the road. Sharon kept mishearing my directions in the echoing cedars and stumbled into her own swampy misadventures, while I slashed through a jungle of ferns and crawled over waist-high logs sprouting mushrooms bigger than wheelbarrow wheels.
I’m now screaming, “Bonnie, stop! Bonnie! Lie down,” hoping she might be able to sense my booming voice. Meanwhile, I’m alternating this with instructions to my working dog—“Bring her in! Bring her to me!”—and hollering directions to Sharon, still slogging through the swamp: “Get on the road! Go around the back of the park.” If Sharon could double back, we’d have the dog between us. But of course, at this point, I’ve got the search party completely confused with my contradictory instructions. I’m in a panic that we are going to lose this dog in the night, a dog so old and ill she’d die of exposure. I’m banging my bad knee on branches and stepping in holes, cursing like a trooper in battle—it never occurred to me that Bonnie was also the name of a neighbour on the other side of the park.
I finally latched onto Bonnie’s tail, and she stopped walking, throwing her head against my thigh, inhaling my odour—releasing a huge, trembling sob of relief as she realized it was me—the despair of a dog gone blind and deaf. Thankfully, our neighbours were away that weekend, so we never had to explain the swearing and strange instructions to Bonnie from the bush across from their house.
Two days later we learned the dog had a terminal brain tumour. She’s now cold and mouldering in her grave, and my knee doesn’t feel any better these days. Aside from the numbness her death left behind, I’m grateful I abandoned city living for so many years—that I had the opportunity to receive that blind dog’s gift of another rich night in the nearly primeval cedar forest that dwells beyond our farm. It makes me remember the words of Wallace Stevens: “The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”
Yet we are living in what scientists call the Holocene extinction event, the greatest era of extinctions since the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago. And “the wild” is becoming an idea, not a place. The physical world has become a tourist destination for the exploding urban populations. Our delights have shifted from being spied on by tiny owls to coveting shoe brands endorsed by basketball stars.
The Inupiat people have a word, uniari, that means the nervous awe felt in the face of an overwhelming encounter with a natural phenomenon. It’s a disappearing word and emotion.
LATELY, MANY ENVIRONMENTAL THINKERS have speculated that when civilizations reach a tipping point they can’t recover. Writers as diverse as Ronald Wright, Jared Diamond, and Margaret Atwood have suggested that we’re fast approaching ours. We are exhibiting the mutant behaviour of the creatures we have caged in overcrowded, sensory-deprived conditions. We have factory farmed ourselves. The accelerating scale of our looting suggests that, recognizing our damage to climate and wilderness, we have collectively begun to grab the last from the gutted stores in the hurricane city we have made out of our home. In A Scientific Romance, Wright points out that the human species has stripped off the top fossil fuel and mineral layer of the earth, and if any kind of environmental or major economic collapse occurs, rebuilding will be inhibited by our inability to reach any deeper resources. Atwood also notes this danger in Oryx and Crake.
All this great tumult has happened since we discovered the portable memory bank called writing. The first clumsy markings of symbols for moons and seasons and game animals became hieroglyphic variations for keeping track of goods that led eventually to the alphabet, which enabled us to leap beyond our ecological niche and move so quickly from hunter-gatherers to small farmers to global looters, and to inevitable collapse, the way a slime mould culture in a petri dish will begin with a few cells, build cities, collapse, and explode, creating other cities until the petri dish is
filled and the whole mess melts down. But nature abhors vacuums. Once we are gone the environment will fill with other spawn.
We are only a mote in the eye of time—laughing and weeping and exterminating and being born. Though it will be a terrible era when the dominion of humankind collapses, as eventually it must, it seems to me that if there is some unified field out there to this universe, it will be the law of the whirlpool in the creek bed—entropy—the enormous ability to create and diversify. That’s why, as much as I admire the single-celled amoeba, I love the deer of my fields and even the dangerous, distressing, almost erotic, yet grim and joyful confusion of Beijing.
HUNTER-GATHERER CULTURES WEREN ’T any more ecological than us. Their damage was usually only less because of smaller populations and either a cultural rejection of technology or a lack of it. Is that an answer? In my worst moments, I believe we are approaching our ecological destination— scraping the earth’s surface clean of minerals and metals before returning to our hunter-gatherer niche.
You can’t practise “traditional” whale hunting with high-powered rifles and harpoon cannons; that’s the world of shellfish-headed spears, rope, and seal bladders and a few crazily intrepid individuals in a canoe, individuals who could return one day. Cluster bombs will become rocks again, missiles will be spears, and we will revisit the caves and huts where we might belong, gathering roots, perhaps small-farming a slash-and-burn garden patch, chasing a few mammals and lizards about, eating grubs, watching the shadows of our fires on the walls.
MAYBE MY THOUGHTS go this way because I’m in my decadent tub, and able to enjoy the luxury of the night. The stars are fading as the moon breaks above the cedars. I hear a noise by the back gate and remember the chickens are not locked up. The dogs are in the house with Sharon. I get up, dripping, step into my sandals, and seal the tub, preserving the heat with my homemade double cover. Then I’m padding around the house to the gate. Everything is quiet, the chickens murmuring in their coop. I lift the ramp and drop the latch to lock the coop tight, as the moonlight shafts through the trees in silver bars. My whole world is going primeval again. I exit the outer run, careful I don’t take a slide on any loose mound of chicken shit. I look at the woods beyond, and start to imagine them rustling with dinosaurs, until I hear a clickety-click in the nettles. Oh no, here we go again—and the dogs are inside. I double back to the road behind the coop while the sheep shift tentatively toward the lower field.
