The American says there are bats and rare butterflies and larks even. I can manage only to navigate this room and to drag my bones down the stairs to the caves. Out the front door is a narrow garden to the east of the house that glitters with dew in the early hours of morning. Its terraces twin the wide flat white stone steps, thick lavender spilling over, brushing my legs when I descend to the caves, the camphor scent drifting into the air. It is so much harder to move around now. Skeet does not understand. You cannot understand stillness when you have the full range of motion. We are all just bodies when it comes down to it. Though when you grow old, you are edged out of even that. How little you are able to inhabit it. You notice that pleasures always involve verbs.
Through the window the breeze brings the sounds of songbirds, throats open, chests beating, an unremarkable greybrown. After observing southern-hemisphere birds glinting in their garish electric-coloured athletic kit, their European counterparts seem exceedingly drab. It occurs to me as I listen to them now, confined as I am, that I’m the caged one. I look down at my book full of notes. There are no signs of rests in birdsong. I flick my wrists to shake out the numbness and the fieldbook slaps onto the stone floor. I feel a jab of hunger, though I am unable to eat, my stomach knotted. Normally I take the same lunch every day, a whole-wheat cheese sandwich washed down with scotch, sometimes sherry.
After I came home from the post office, I searched the closet for the grey archival box that holds the few old notebooks that have survived, now yellowed, ink faded to grey. Vibration of bones. Sounds not made louder by adding but by taking away. Small kingdoms of concrete music but with geometry, interstitial, ringing, humming, speaking fragments, unforeseen. My spirits rise so high that I laugh out loud. Jejune. Thrumming with purpose. Full of ideas, unfocused but alive. It is how life is. You think it will be so different after the accumulation of time, but when I look at this I am reminded that it is still me on that page. You don’t go anywhere. The past contains the future. What will become clean, unfettered observations of sound. I remember what I thought when I wrote that. I wanted to become a great artist. I thought I would uncover a new way of seeing.
With humans there is a speaker and a listener. The speaker informs the listener. With animals, it is often just a call in the dark.
I find one of my field recordings, a labelled gold disc, and press play. Howl and howl in that white silence, a high world of grey skies, hunched and shivering in the wind. Jaws clashing and paws creaking in the snow, whimpering, barking, freezing in the forest as the stars and the moon begin to brighten the sky. I play the track again, numbered, dated, and hear that the vocalizations that rip and cut and clatter and then become graceful, full of focus. It amazes me that after all this time I can hear it as both joy and agony. Fairy tales grow teeth all around them.
It is impossible to get near wolves without distorting the data. These sounds were collected with howl boxes. Devices that record and emit digital calls, broadcast from an eighty-gigabyte computer duct-taped to a tree. Skeet and I used them to research wolves following an aerial wolf-hunting expedition with its snares and poison—part of a spectacularly ill-conceived wolf extermination project.
—
In the Yukon, where we first meet, we stay at one of the only hotels open in winter. The restaurant is through the lobby, past the dead-eyed fish doing what appear to be choreographed movements in the aquarium. We eat eggs and unnaturally square potatoes that taste like freezer, spooned from a metal bin. They are tough and dry. The waitress seems generally annoyed at people who install themselves like this, but I think she is keen on Skeet so she allows us to spread out our fieldbooks and recording equipment on the Formica table and sit thawing in the large banquettes for hours. Skeet rests his arm along the back of the burgundy leatherette and says, Why is it that when something’s fake, they add -ette to the end of it?
The oldtimers who drink their coffee here believe that some of the ravens have seen the gold rush. The ravens know where the gold is hidden, they say. Ravens can only live about thirty years in the wild, but we don’t correct them.
We ride in a pickup truck with chains on the tires. It gets so cold you can see rings around the moon. Nothing moves in forty below. But in March there is a low dazzle of sun out until eight o’clock at night. The snow is so dry I finally understand why mukluks. I sip coffee from a steel thermos, its steam making receding patterns on the windshield. We wait. Then we see a large black bird, hungry, mangled feathers. It is alerting a wolf to a small rabbit below. The wolf runs across the snow, a flash of silver. The raven waits for the kill and then swoops in with its long black wings. They feed together, and then, astonishingly, they play. I am overcome. For what occurs to them, with their torn feathers and bloodied scuffs of fur in this great bleak horizon. Their daring is in seeing that even in death, there is life. I watch stunned, toes numb, knuckles swollen, taking off my gloves to work the equipment. Eyes pricked with slanted snow, eyelashes freezing together. How alert you become with this sharp startling cold. In this eternal present. The sudden hush followed by the creak of snow, the barks and shrieks, this sense of something about to happen. The inscrutable eyes, the murderous claws, the glinting fur. Today it is just braided footprints. Glyphs in the snow giving warmth and shape to the blinding white, telling me why I live for this alone.
On the ride back the grey racks of branches are corrugated with ice, a line of snow on top of every one like a seam. We pass tracts of black pines and blue ice. We don’t speak for a long time. I appreciate this about Skeet. A high-pitched intermittent squeaking jangles the silence. Skeet punches the dash with his fist. I jump in my seat, looking at him, surprised by the sudden violence. I wonder if it is something he learned from his teenage mother, or one of the boyfriends he has mentioned. How could he possibly have escaped his origins so cleanly. How can anyone?
Dash rattle, he says. Once you’ve got one that’s it. There’s no way of finding the source. I’ve been on a whole road trip with one. Sucked dogs.
—
Skeet unzips his jacket and takes out the recorder wrapped in his sweatshirt. He breathes on it to warm it up. He says that this snow is reminding him of the one other time he saw his mother. It was in a ski town out West, near where he was conducting research on reintroduced wolves. She was there with a boyfriend. She didn’t talk much, but when she first saw him she smiled and ruffled his hair. Skeet waited with her at the bottom of the hill. Neither of them could ski. It’s for assholes with money, she told him. The boyfriend came down and turned to an abrupt stop, spraying her with snow. She threw her cigarette ember like a dart, just missing his ski. It sizzled unpleasantly in the snow. He laughed and she said, You’ll pay for this, fuckface.
We pass dwellings long abandoned by prospectors. Rusted skillets and saws nailed to the silver wood. Woollen blankets chewed to lace by moths on feather beds. Raccoons the size of hatchbacks scratching in the attics. Sometimes these houses were left with coffee cups still sitting on the tabletop. Records husked from their sleeves, as though someone had meant to come right back.
A great black hawk drifts above.
Ah could my hand unlock its chain / How gladly would I watch it soar / And never regret and never complain / To see its shining eyes no more.
Emily Brontë?
It’s the only poem of hers I can ever remember.
I know the one. I like how she begins by identifying herself with her hawk, saying that they are both wholly alone. We are quiet for a while, only the shrill bleating dash between us.
She kept a lot of pets, I finally say, watching the blurring white out the window. Of which I know the animal liberationists would not approve, but I never quite knew what to do with the information I read about her catching her dog sleeping in her bed. She punched him in the eye until he was half blind. I mean, who punches a dog? And then you read those poems, and marvel at how people can be two things at once.
Only two? Skeet says, turning to look at me.
&n
bsp; We are silent for a long time. After a while I begin to hear a fragile and beautiful sound that seems to come from him. It is underwater and dusky, full of faded chords. He tells me it is from a recording he once heard. A man with a harmonica and music box who believed he could hear and play the sound of the sun humming.
In the evenings, we have started going out for a pint of beer at the Snake Pit. I leave well before the alcohol insinuates itself as it does each night—chairs broken, teeth knocked out, the floor sloshing with beer. Skeet tells me that after everyone leaves, they bring out plastic bags full of sawdust and throw it on the floor to soak up the urine and vomit. Some of the people who come out to drink here literally have dirt on their faces. The kind of characters who sound invented to anyone who lives in a city down in the south. There is a misanthropic old sea captain with tattoos of naked women up each sinewy arm who has told us he wants to be taxidermied and positioned in this bar when he dies.
Taxidermy is a revolting act, I tell him. I’ve never understood why exactly anyone would choose to be in a room with decapitated animals. He grumbles something and moves to the next table. I see Flo tattooed on one finger. Flo must have been quite something to put up with that old brute. I find it extremely loud in here, shattering crackling swells of sound, the ambient crescendoing murmurs. It batters my ears. So attuned now to singular sounds made in near silence. I find noise being drowned out with noise torturous. It makes me feel claustrophobic.
Dear enemy effect, Skeet says after taking a long sip. Read it, never seen it. He looks around the room. Recognize and respect your enemy neighbour’s territories. Expend energy on enemy strangers only, he says, referring to the raven and the wolf from the field. I’ve seen it in that study we did with territorial songbirds. Skylarks can remember their neighbours’ songs from one year to the next and accept neighbours as dear enemies as a conditional strategy established over time.
I have witnessed the stranger-neighbour tolerances in owls and larks too, I say. They’ve used the sound files to conduct audio playback studies to test it.
But that wasn’t just tolerance, he says. They played.
I think that’s why we still have Paris. Dear enemy. The same thing applies in war.
How do you mean?
I don’t know. When Hitler supposedly screamed into a telephone, Is Paris burning?, it was not. Damaged, certainly. There were barricades, trenches dug into the streets, trees felled on the boulevards, buildings shot through with holes. But it stood, recognizable. People who weren’t there began to wonder. Had life in Paris under the Germans been a bit too easy? Who had collaborated? These questions were made even more uncomfortable by the unavoidable comparisons between the still-beautiful Paris and all the other cites of Europe, devastated and in ruins.
Skeet takes another sip of his beer and then unclenches his fingers and slowly swirls the glass on the wooden tabletop. I read that Hitler was a vegetarian.
And so what? I snap. He also preferred murdering people who’d committed no crime.
He remains silent.
I cannot help my emotions, Skeet. We had no idea that the Nazis were not going to win. Everyone now has the benefit of knowing.
Just then an intoxicated young man slides over. His friend has gone to the washroom. Skeet and I have noticed this friend, a Klondike boy one table over, who most nights sits peeling the label off his beer. You can see, even from a distance, that he has a glass eye and a rough patch of skin under his chin that looks as though it has been sewn on. Wide curved shoulders with blades that stick out like wings. Blond hair straight as iron filings. The young man asks us if we’ve seen his friend’s father. You know, the nutjob in town, he says. You might have seen him jumping in the freezing river. Balls flying out of his Speedo. He stares straight ahead. He’s a mean drunk. Messed him up enough that he wanted to blow his own brains out. He took his old man’s shotgun. He stops to sip his beer, making a trigger-pulling motion under his chin with his finger. He was fine, he says, swallowing. Then he laughs with an awkward force that makes his throat sound like a cracked reed. The bullet missed his brains entirely. Came out his fucking eye.
The boy eventually comes back from the washroom and his friend returns to their table. We sit without speaking for a while.
Listen, Skeet shakes out a cigarette, to that voice.
From the old speakers comes a stalled sound from the throat, rasp and alive, and there is a slow bang accompaniment that makes me think of horsetails blown horizontal in a wind.
Wanda Jackson, he finally says. Funnel of Love.
I look at Skeet leaning back in his chair. It is the first time I’ve heard him say the word love. He hasn’t mentioned a girlfriend. I shouldn’t expect him to. What he must think of me, too. But I think they are different now. Not a lot of emotion. I think they must see everyone from the past as fools. Everything has changed. Their telephones don’t ring. They are not writing letters. They communicate their bodies through the wires, not even wires. They don’t talk of it and divulge far too much to the world outside, both.
The next day we drive farther out, along the potholed highway near the glaciated Tombstone Mountains where sabre-toothed tigers once roamed. Once you are in the north there is always the myth of farther out. Nothing is ever north enough. At the bar they talk of Core, a man who lives upriver and comes into town each season for a new woman. We pass the granite mountains, flat and jagged like grave markers. In this tundra, there is the beep of the sound recorder and the dry creak of snow under our feet. A large white frozen lake sits silently, occasionally cracking like a gunshot, making us jump. We find a quiet place at the edge of an opening. I look at Skeet.
What?
Nothing.
Why are you looking at me like that?
I don’t know. It’s just. You’ve been doing this for so long, but then I see the way you flick the switch and get quiet, waiting for something to be revealed. As though you’ve always been living one way and the plane is about to shift each time.
Because it does.
When I ask him what brought him here, he says, Does it have to be one thing?
Well, I say, just what is it that you want to do with your one wild and rare life?
He sucks air into his lungs. I was on a vigilante ship in Japan. I got aboard an illegal fishing boat. I had stolen part of their navigation system. And as I stood there, I watched a fisherman hook a shark right in front of me. He gaffed it and then slammed it against the deck. It slid right to my boots. The shark was bleeding and gasping and flapping all around, frantic to survive, while the fishermen sat there trying to figure out how to get them out of their waters. They talked and looked on while this shark almost broke its own back trying not to die. They eventually cut the line and threw him back into the water like a piece of garbage. Like he was nothing. That’s when I knew.
And ever since you’ve never once stopped to ask, Am I doing the right thing?
No, he says.
WOLF
The wolf is the night that has swallowed the sun.
The shards glint in its borderless eyes.
THERE IS A PAINTING ON THE COVER of a catalogue Tacita presents me from an exhibition that took place in Paris before I arrived. It has a circle of silvery-white shapes so thick I want to touch them. They are lit by another constellation entirely. It is calm, luminous, almost mystical. The bottom right corner reads in tight script, Lev Aleksandr Volkov. It is utterly unrelated to the rest of the works. They are compelling in a more lawless way, but this one painting stands alone. I trace my finger over the image and two words move across my brain like celluloid. They say, like the suck of a high edge that draws you closer, Choose me. I rip off the cover, fold it, and begin to carry it with me, like a magical egg, a prayer, a jewel.
The dinner party invitation arouses a feeling of apprehension. I have shed my childhood shyness, which was where a separateness had grown, silently, suddenly, like flowers that bloom in the night. My grandmother Queenie always said that i
t wasn’t that I was shy, it was that I needed to be found. With this group, I am aware that being a woman is harder. Tacita says some women can be treated as though they are disposable, merely promised by their looks. I wonder what it is that they wear to their parties, but in the end I wear the same white dress. I smooth my hair, conceal my accent, concentrate on overcoming my bookish French. But I am full of a wildness I haven’t known for so long. A wildness when out with my brothers in the forest, peeing against trees the way they did, without shame.
I walk into the dark pink air. Through the cemetery, past Baudelaire and de Maupassant, along the dusty gravel path that slips through the bright green centre of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I walk through the remote, quiet streets of Île Saint-Louis, and eventually to the tenth. I am excited about this new pleasure of company. I thought it would take away from my inner life, but instead it has begun to outline it sharply. Oddly when there is the possibility of its being exposed, it forces me to understand what it is. It makes me aware that I have never relied on other people to know who I am. But these people, all so unknowable, are what make entering into this more extraordinary. I want to take my time arriving because I want to hold this moment, really hold it, and turn it over. I feel the cool night on my skin, and the burn of my feet rubbing in my shoes. I pass by the stare of dark windows that will fill again with bread and flowers and charcuterie by morning. The velvet gleam that recedes as the lights come on along the banks of the river in the moored barges, the quiet lapping of water against their sides.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 4
