Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  1969

  One midnight 40 years ago I faced a pack of wild dogs howling down the cobbled street of a small Mexican pueblo. I knew the wild dogs of Mexico well. Individually they were scrawny, sulking curs; collectively they were brutal and brave — canine killers. And this pack had sensed a prey — the terrified 60-pound jaguar that had just leaped to my shoulders. Madre de Dios! The tigre and I were in trouble once again.

  I had spent several years working on an archaeological survey crew exploring the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. We were quite a mix — a bitter Cuban, a La Jolla millionaire, an aging surfer, a Carolina professor, their families and me, the solitary Canadian. We’d roll into the isolated settlements along the coastal plain, park our Jeeps, show our papers to the mayores and inquire about artifacts. The villagers would show us the pre-Columbian potsherds and plates they’d ploughed up in their fields or stumbled on in caves. Occasionally a campesino would show up carrying a magnificent burial urn. These always bore a carefully sculpted effigy — of a god, a bird or beast. Country people always named these urns for the creature they depicted.

  In one tiny hamlet fronting an enormous brackish lagoon the news of our purpose had arrived ahead of us. The locals were waiting with their string bags bulging with the handwork of history. We carefully inspected everything, identified the owners and made appointments to visit the region’s tombs and ruins that had given up the treasures. When we’d finished interviewing everyone only a small boy and his baby sister remained. He approached me shyly and whispered, “My father has a tigre.”

  Now, an Oaxacan jaguar effigy urn is among the most magnificent of all pre-Columbian artifacts — and among the scarcest. This was a pot I had to see. I arranged to visit the boy’s father, a butcher, the following day.

  We made many site visits after the next day’s sunrise, driving deep into the thorn forest and hiking high into the hills. It was dusk when we finally returned to our camp outside the village. While my colleagues prepared supper I set off to find the butcher and his boy. Their shop fronted a cart-track that was the hamlet’s only street. I was led behind the building to a hardpan courtyard where the tiger pot was kept. A little kitten on a rope cowered in a corner. It turned out to be the tiger.

  As I crouched down to inspect that animal I realized it was no ordinary kitten. It had very heavy legs, large feet and enormous eyes set in a big square head. Much of its coat had fallen out but where it hadn’t I could see that it was spotted like a leopard. Its very long tail was ringed with stripes of gold and jet. It was potentially a spectacular little beast but clearly one that was very ill.

  The butcher had recently shot its mother in the mountains. Her pelt had fetched a peso bonanza that encouraged him to return for her kits with the intention of raising them to adulthood for slaughter and sale as well. However, his shop meat was far too precious to share with small wild things so he’d fed them only water and stale tortillas. One by one the little carnivores had died of malnutrition. I was looking at the sole survivor and it was truly a mangy little tragedy.

  Sometimes we put our hearts before our heads and do dumb things. I began to negotiate for that little cat and so three mescals and 20 dollars later I was the owner of a baby wild cat. And a lot of trouble.

  The lagoon had been the last stop of our field season. We were soon packed and on our way up the coastal sierra and on to distant Oaxaca where we’d have real beds after months of hammocks, and beer with real dinners instead of water and endless beans with rice. As I drove our Jeep through hours of mountain switchbacks toward the city the little tigre yowled in a crate at my feet.

  In town we began a season of lab work on regular office hours. At day’s end I’d walk down to Oaxaca’s enormous market and negotiate for offal and leftovers to feed my little cat. He grew quickly. His eyes brightened and his coat began to grow in. Soon I had a magnificent animal with long strong legs, a sturdy square chest and a most handsome face. And his huge dark eyes got bigger and bigger. In no time he had grown to the size of a large dog and was ready for walks with a collar and chain. If we went down into the city centre the pedestrian traffic on the wide walkways of the Zócalo would part like the Red Sea. The locals found him absolutely terrifying. “Tigre, jaguar, margay, ocelot,” they’d whisper. I never did figure out which of a half-dozen possible species he was.

  Tigre lived in my apartment on a hundred feet of chain. He’d wander around the furniture, weaving in and out until he was finally jerked to a stop by the end of his tether. At this point a dog would have sat there and whimpered until its owner obligingly untangled the mess and the cycle could begin again. Tigre would simply turn around, retrace his steps and liberate the hundred feet. He was a very, very intelligent animal.

  He was also still a kitten. Sometimes I’d be walking through my living room and a yard-long furry arm would sweep out from beneath a chair and down me on the flagstone floor — playful kitty. He also enjoyed leaping onto the kitchen counters so he could plow through the piles of dishes, cups and glasses until everything lay shattered on the floor. I bought replacements in bulk. But whenever I got so desperate that I was ready to release him in the mountains he’d crawl into bed with me, cozy up and begin a purr that came from that place way down where the daily earthquakes that shook the valley of Oaxaca were born. This was a pet with a woofer.

  He was also a wild animal. He loved being outside and so when I was home I’d tie him to a tree in my courtyard so that he could explore the garden. Tigre eventually grew strong enough to sever his chain. He made a few breaks for the mountains and more than once was gone for several days. But he always returned. At night you’d hear him on the roof or calling from a tree. He was proud — he never came when you called him home but he made sure that you could see him and reach the short length of chain that remained hooked to his collar. I’d gently pull him down and he’d slip through the door ahead of me. In no time he’d join me in bed with his earthquake 20-cycle-rumble. Once again we’d have forgiven each other.

  However as Tigre got bigger life with him got harder. One day a visit to the market had yielded a whole heart from a bull. I carried it home, a heavy brown-paper-wrapped bundle the size of a volley ball. Upon entering the apartment I set it on the counter of the kitchen just outside my bedroom that had a bathroom at the back. I rushed in there to pee. When I tried to reenter the kitchen I was confronted by a jaguar, a lion and a sabre-toothed tiger. The Tigre had a kill and until it was consumed no creature was going to pass. A bull has a very large heart. The Tigre kept me prisoner in my bedroom for 24 hours. When he finally finished and fell asleep I slipped out and shortened his chain. We were finished. That midnight I led him up the cobbled road to San Felipe and freedom in the mountains. But first those wild dogs came and came and came.

  As Tigre trembled on my shoulders I began pulling cut-stones from the road. When the wild dogs leapt at me I’d split their skulls to save us both. Yet even with their brains spilling from their cranial cups and eyeballs dangling those dogs kept coming, growling, leaping, tearing. However, finally their losses were greater than ours and Tigre and I were able to beat a bloodied retreat for home. Our time together was not yet over.

  Some months later I returned permanently to Canada without the tiger. But cats remained central to my life. My partner loved them. At what was the nadir for me there were 18 cats sharing our apartment. The place stank. It was insane but despite the undifferentiated kitten chaos I still managed to find some favourites. Max, a pearl gray long-hair, often kept me company. He was always dirty and disheveled but one day he begged to be admitted to my darkroom where he began to clean himself up for the very first time. As I worked a long shift making production prints Max sat under the yellow safelight washing and grooming for at least a dozen hours. Then he jumped down, nuzzled my legs and cried at the darkroom’s back door that gave out to a fire escape. He’d always been an indoor cat so I endured more than an hour of his insistence before openin
g the door. Max strutted out into the world in his fancy new suit. I never saw him again. I still miss him.

  And Tigre? Well, some months after that encounter with the dogs I met an American artist travelling Mexico on a Guggenheim. He’d done some drawings in Chiapas that I loved. He in turn loved Tigre and often drew him. We finally affected a trade. I got a handful of pictures and Tigre retired to Florida, a location that I’m confident pleased him more than the icy streets of Toronto could have. When I look back I realize that Tigre taught me an important life lesson — a wild animal is a wild animal is a wild animal.

  2012

  Sculptors John McEwen and Dennis Gill and I are running a small skiff down a wilderness river to Georgian Bay. It’s a peaceful late September afternoon but I know that we’re being watched by moose, deer, birds and beaver. And while there could well be bears out there too, for sure we’ve got one in the boat. McEwen had welded up Ragged Ass Bear from a box of steel stars several years earlier just for the pleasure of it. Now after a few seasons standing in tall grass behind his studio, that bear is finally on the move.

  At the mouth of the river sits my small island with a high domed hump of the Canadian Shield at one end that’s come to be known as Sulkers’ Rock. What better place to put a bear in charge? When we arrive I call a friend up the coast for help and a half hour later three guys drinking beer turn up in a canoe. They get out and John gets in. Five of us grunt the heavy bear back and forth on the rock while McEwen directs placement from out on the water. Finally we secure Ragged Ass Bear in four holes drilled deep into the Canadian Shield and John drinks a toast with Ziggy, my cat.

  For an artist this was a dream installation. Makers of public sculpture spend much of their time negotiating with developers, architects, planners, unions and tradesmen. They have many masters to please and many compromises to endure. The works have to be bulletproof, safe, inoffensive and able to compete with power poles, traffic signs and all other cacophonies of modern life. This installation was almost perfect for McEwen. Only money was missing.

  Watching McEwen’s bear guard my rock took me back some half-dozen years to a visit I made to the Midi in France. On a gray winter day I crossed the Dordogne and drove north in a steep valley. Despite most things being shuttered for the season I spied a sign for a painted cave and went in. We’ve all seen photos and film of drawings in Paleolithic caves. What they don’t tell you is that the animals in those paintings are not flat. The hunters of 12,000 years ago sought out bulges in the rocks that could become bodies, cracks that could be limbs and tails and holes that would become eyes. The animal images they created are staged along the courses of the caves so as to become encounters. Exploring the surviving paintings today one is acutely conscious of keen intelligences speaking across the millennia.

  My cat Ziggy and McEwen’s ragged-ass bear

  McEwen is an admirer of the late ecologist Paul Shepard. It was Shepard’s contention that the painted cave is an externalization of our heads. The images within the caves may be of animals but are not about them. Rather they are fossil thoughts — the animal images represent human fears and triumphs, life and death — the encounters with great mysteries. These fundamentals are still part of our mammalian brain. It is this dark, non-verbal part of our consciousness that McEwen is trying to understand when he makes sculpture. He has produced numerous life-sized silhouettes of animals such as wolves and dangerous dogs. When these are encountered end-on, all one sees is a two-and-a-half-inch-thick slab of steel. As one moves, the profile of a predator appears. It can stir the hairs on the back of the neck, like rounding a path in a forest and suddenly coming face to face with a big wild cat or a bear. Over the millennia such experiences have profoundly shaped human intelligence.

  We have always modelled the world in order to comprehend and control it. A doll begins the experience of motherhood; lead soldiers emulate warriors. And teddy bears? We all know that the bear is a shamanic animal. While much art is beautiful or exciting, art that addresses the ancient and archetypal dance of predator and prey is rare. It seems to me, however, that when sited well McEwen’s works can take on that challenge. He has caught a corner of human experience that is deep and essential.

  As I write, it’s midwinter in Toronto. Up north, the cabin shutters are up, the boats pulled in and an unsafe rim of ice grows out from the riverbanks so I can’t now visit Ragged Ass Bear. But I know that he’s guarding my little harbour and cabin as the winter sun goes down. During the night he’s at his post but not alone. Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and its minor namesake wheel through the black sky keeping him company until I can return and see the stars of his coat flash brightly in the sun of a new spring.

  It’s Harumi’s second visit to the island and she’s a woman taking possession and a position. My bush cabin has failed to meet Japanese standards of order or cleanliness. It’s got spiderwebs in the corners, dead flies on the sills and pine needles accumulating where the floors meet the walls. She knows what a Canadian wilderness cabin looks like — her family owns one — in Japan.

  I’ve seen it. It’s got central vac.

  After her brothers took over their father’s pharmaceutical business and bolstered its success they rewarded themselves by importing a wilderness experience from the wilds of Canada. The monstrous log cabin ordered from British Columbia came loaded. In addition to sporting assorted rustic gables, balconies and tall stone hearths suitable for rock climbing, it arrived equipped with a full complement of trophy heads — angry bears, rampant bucks and ducks as well as schools of shiny dead fish stuck on little varnished escutcheons. All this game was elegantly misidentified by little brass plaques.

  The furniture squatting beneath the 30-foot ceilings was either twiggy or modelled on those log bridges you find in Jasper or Banff. Try to imagine them with upholstery. The Hudson’s Bay salesman who filled the family’s order of HBC blankets, parkas and toques must have promptly retired. It was only on the second floor that the cabin’s true location was revealed. Each enormous bedroom contained only tatami mats and a futon. But every time I sat in the cavernous living room below I expected a CP locomotive pulling dome cars to arrive at the front door.

  The biggest offenders in my cabin back in Canada are a series of animal hides. I’m no hunter but I had connections with a local auction house that often sold these things to Americans. They’d invariably be rejected at the border. Even caribou antlers, which lie all over the tundra and regrow annually, would be sent back by U.S. border officials as endangered ivory. Some of this orphaned stuff would get passed on to me.

  One morning as I paddle back from the open Bay I hear a series of percussive reports. It sounds like someone is being spanked or shot. When my little island came into view it all proved to be true. Harumi has hung a polar bear rug from a pine branch and is beating it with a broom. By the time I get to shore the hide has been through a shredder. When she sees me she storms into the cabin shouting over her shoulder, “It’s just an old stupid dead thing.” She slams the door. A wolverine and a musk ox had already been disciplined.

  During the great party of the ’80s I would annually contrive a Christmas poster to send to all the people who commissioned my photography. My assistants and I usually had fun cooking these things up. We always tried to connect them to events of the passing year. We often made use of leftover props and supplies from the year’s assignments.

  When a friend closed his studio he left a dozen rolls of nine-foot-wide seamless paper backdrops in mine. The neutrals were soon consumed but for years we were never able to repurpose several huge rolls of bright crimson paper. We became determined to use at least one in the course of creating our newest poster.

  My assistant, Crash Kowalski, and I were in the habit of closing a long day in the studio with a beer. During one of these sessions we decided to hang one of the red rolls from the ceiling and photograph the whole setup from the rear of the studio so all the lights, cables,
stands — the entire contrivance — would be revealed. The centrepiece would be a reindeer with a big rack leaping toward the viewer through a tear in the red backdrop. Merry Christmas!

  The next day I assigned Crash the job of phoning taxidermists all over southern Ontario to try to locate a rental ruminant. It took two long days. Eventually Crash was dispatched with a van to bring our model from a suburb to the city while back at the studio I prepped the lighting and background. I carefully cut the huge tears in the seamless for the head and neck to burst through. Two lower gashes would accommodate the forelegs.

  The buck arrived icy cold — it was early December — accompanied with a note demanding its return in a few hours. We’d have to work fast. We got the head placed in less than an hour but the legs proved to be tricky — every placement looked awkward. Eventually I had an epiphany. We’d been rented legs from the wrong end of the deer. The setup would have to be adjusted to reveal only hooves and ankles.

  When finally all was convincingly in place we had less than an hour to make photographs with a big view camera. As the whole tableaux was essentially a nature morte I’d elected to use studio hot lights instead of flash. The deep setup dictated a small aperture that in turn necessitated long exposures. Tests with a Polaroid back on the camera revealed a reindeer on the move. The head and hooves were blurred in every exposure despite my careful focusing on the ground glass.

  As the clock closed on our final hour the studio began to smell. The hooves visibly drooped and trickles of blood stained the paper at the animal’s throat. The deer’s mouth slowly opened and drooled. Our taxidermal trophy was actually a freshly frozen carcass.