Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences
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It was the moon, that's what they say. It's the moon's fault, and the blood. It was in his father's blood. I never knew his father, and now I wonder what become of him. He was from up Whitewater way, and had no kin around here. I always thought he went back there, but now I don't know. There was some talk about him, tales, that come out after what happened to my husband. It's something runs in the blood, they say, and it may never come out, but if it does, it's the change of the moon that does it Always it happens in the dark of the moon. When everybody's home asleep. Something comes over the one that's got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can't sleep, and goes out into the glaring sun, and goes off all alone -- drawn to find those like him. And it may be so, because my husband would do that I'd half rouse and say, "Where you going to?" and he'd say, "Oh, hunting, be back this evening" and it wasn't like him, even his voice was different But I'd be so sleepy, and not wanting to wake the kids, and he was so good and responsible, it was no call of mine to go asking "Why?" and "Where?" and all like that
So it happened that way maybe three times or four. He'd come back late, and worn out, and pretty near cross for one so sweet-tempered -- not wanting to talk about it I figured everybody got to bust out now and then, and nagging never
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helped anything But it did begin to worry me. No so much that he went, but that he come back so tired and strange. Even, he smelled strange.
It made my hair stand up on end. I could not endure it and I said,
"What is that -- those smells on you? All over you!" And he said, "I don't know," real short, and made like he was sleeping But he went down when he thought I wasn't noticing and washed and washed himself. But those smells stayed in his hair, and in our bed, for days.
And then the awful thing I don't find it easy to tell about this. I want to cry when I have to bring it to my mind. Our youngest, the little one, my baby, she turned from her father. Just overnight He come in and she got scared-looking stiff, with her eyes wide, and then she begun to cry and try to hide behind me. She didn't yet talk plain but she was saying over and over, "Make it go away! Make it go away!"
The look in his eyes, just for one moment, when he heard that That's what I don't want ever to remember. That's what I can't forget The look in his eyes looking at his own child.
I said to the child, "Shame on you, what's got into you?" -- scolding but keeping her right up close to me at the same time, because I was frightened too. Frightened to shaking
He looked away then and said something like, "Guess she just waked up dreaming" and passed it off that way. Or tried to. And so did I. And I got real mad with my baby when she kept on acting crazy scared of her own dad. But she couldn't help it and I couldn't change it
He kept away that whole day. Because he knew, I guess. It was just beginning dark of the moon.
It was hot and close inside, and dark, and we'd all been asleep some while, when something woke me up. He wasn't there beside me. I heard a little stir in the passage,
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when I listened. So I got up, because I could bear it no longer. I went out into the passage, and it was light there, hard sunlight coming in from the door. And I saw him standing just outside, in the tall grass by the entrance. His head was hanging. Presently he sat down, like he felt weary, and looked down at his feet I held still, inside, and watched -- I didn't know what for.
And I saw what he saw. I saw the changing. In his feet, it was, first They got long, each foot got longer, stretching out, the toes stretching out and the foot getting long, and fleshy, and white. And no hair on them.
The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over, then, like a worm's skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I looked. It got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue -- blue, with white rims around the blue -- staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face.
He stood up then on two legs.
I saw him, I had to see him, my own dear love, turned into the hateful one.
I couldn't move, but as I crouched there in the passage staring out into the day I was trembling and shaking with a growl that burst out into a crazy, awful howling. A grief howl and a terror howl and a calling howl. And the others heard it, even sleeping and woke up.
It stared and peered, that thing my husband had turned into, and shoved its face up to the entrance of our house. I was still bound by mortal fear, but behind me the children had waked up, and the baby was whimpering. The mother anger come into me then, and I snarled and crept forward.
The man thing looked around. It had no gun, like the ones from the man places do. But it picked up a heavy
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fallen tree-branch in its long white foot, and shoved the end of that down into our house, at me. I snapped the end of it in my teeth and started to force my way out, because I knew the man would kill our children if it could. But my sister was already coming. I saw her running at the man with her head low and her mane high and her eyes
yellow as the winter sun. It turned on her and raised up that branch to hit her. But I come out of the doorway, mad with the mother anger, and the others all were coming answering my call, the whole pack gathering, there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon.
The man looked round at us and yelled out loud, and brandished the branch it held. Then it broke and ran, heading for the cleared fields and plowlands, down the mountainside. It ran, on two legs, leaping and weaving and we followed it
I was last, because love still bound the anger and the fear in me. I was running when I saw them pull it down. My sister's teeth were in its throat I got there and it was dead. The others were drawing back from the kill, because of the taste of the blood, and the smell. The younger ones were cowering and some crying and my sister rubbed her mouth against her forelegs over and over to get rid of the taste. I went up close because I thought if the thing was dead the spell, the curse must be done, and my husband could come back -- alive, or even dead, if I could only see him, my true love, in his true form, beautiful. But only the dead man lay there white and bloody. We drew back and back from it, and turned and ran, back up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed dark.
(1979)
Five Vegetable Poems
The first four of these poems have to do with threat and survival, fragility and toughness, what lasts and what can't last. I think Westerners may sometimes perceive plants a bit differently from those who grew up where water can be taken for granted. In the West, one is often forced to see the plants as quite contingent. By now, however, anybody anywhere who can take trees for granted probably also believes that the so-called shortage of bison on the Great Plains is a liberal conspiracy.
The fifth poem, "The Crown of Laurel," is what Adrienne Rich has called a re-visioning. Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living ways of telling the world, narrating reality, but in order to be useful they must (however archetypal and collectively human their structure) be retold; and the teller makes them over -- and over. Many women and some men are now engaged in what almost seems a shared undertaking of re-telling re-thinking the myths and tales we learned as children -fables, folktales, kgends, hero-stories, god-stories. So John Gardner in his brilliant novel Grendel (Beowulf as seen by the monsfer), and Anne Sexton's equally brilliant Transformations of folktales; and the work goes on, and this poem is part of it. Very often the re-visioning consists in a 'simple' change of point of view. It is possible that the very concept of point-of-view may be changing, may have to change, or to be changed, so that our reality can be narrated.
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Torrey Pines Reserve (For Bob and Mary Elliott)
&nbs
p; Ground dry as yellow bones.
A dust of sand, gold-mica-glittering.
Oh, dry! Grey ceanothus stems
twisted and tough; small flowers. A lizard place.
Rain rare and hard as an old woman's tears runnelled these faces of the cliffs.
Sandstone is softer than the salty wind; it crumbles, wrinkles, very old, vulnerable. Circles in the rock in hollows worn by ocean long ago.
These are eyes that were his pearls.
One must walk lightly; this is fragile. Hold to the thread of way. There's narrow place for us in this high place between the still desert and the stillness of the sea. This gentle wilderness.
The Torrey pines
grow nowhere else on earth.
Listen:
you can hear the lizards listening.
Lewis and Clark and After Always in the solemn company (save on the Desert Hains) of those great beings (we did not think much about it, trees by our tribe being seen with the one eye) we walked across a forest continent
Ohone! ohone! the deep groves, the high woods of Ohio! the fir-dark mountains, the silent lives, the forests, the forests of Oregon!
West Texas
Honor the lives of the terrible places: greasewood, rabbitbrush, prickly pear, yucca, swordfern, sagebrush, the dingy wild-eyed sheep alert and deer like shadows starting from the rock. In gait and grace and stubborn strength with delicate hoof or filament root, stonebreakers, lifebringers. Let there be rain for them.
(1985)
(1980)
(1973)
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The young fir in the back of the car
was silent, didn't admire the scenery,
took up residence without comment
in the high field near the old apple,
trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge.
When the wind came up, the branches said Ssshhh to it, but the trunk and roots were taciturn, and will be a hundred years from now, perhaps.
Where the glass bubbles and colored lights were, will be rain, and owls.
It won't hear carols sung again.
But then, it never listened.
The Crown of Laurel (1982)
He liked to feel my fingers in his hair.
So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them, and wears it at parades and contests, my dying fingers with their kitchen smell
interlocked around his sunny curls.
Sometimes he rests on me a while.
Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest
It wasn't to preserve my Virtue' that I ran! What's a nymph like me to do with something that belongs to men? It's just I wasn't in the mood. And he didn't care. It scared me.
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The little goadeg boys can't even talk, but still they wait till they can smell you feel like humping with a goadeg in the woods, rolling and scratching and laughing -- they can laugh! -- poor little hairycocks,
I miss them.
When we were tired of that kind of thing my sister nymphs and I would lie around, and talk, and tease, and stroke, and chase, and stretch out panting for another talk, and sleep in the warm shadows side by side under the leaves, and all was as we pleased.
And then the mortal hunters of the deer, the poachers, the deciduous shepherd-boys: they'd stop and gape and stare with owly eyes, not even hoping even when I smiled... New every spring like daffodils, those boys. But once for forty years I met one man up on the sheep-cropped hills of Arcady. I kissed his wrinkles, the ravines of time I cannot enter, gazing in his eyes, whose dark dimmed and deepened, seeing less always, till he died. I came to his burial. Among the villagers I walked behind his grey-haired wife. She could have been Time's wife, my grandmother.
And then there were my brothers of the streams, O my river-lovers, with their silver tongues so sweet to thirst! the cool, prolonged delight of a river moving in me, of his flow and flow and flow!
They send to my roots their kindness, even now, and slowly I drink it from my mother's hands.
So that was all I knew, until he came, hard, bright, burning dry, intent: one will, instead of wantings meeting; no center but himself, the Sun. A god
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is like that, I suppose; he has to be.
But I never asked to meet a god,
let alone make love with one! Why did he think
I wanted to? And when I told him no,
what harm did he think it did him?
It can't be hard to find a girl agape
to love a big blond blue-eyed god.
He said so, said, "You're all alike."
He's seen us all; he knows. So, why me?
I guess that maybe it was time for me to give up going naked, and get dressed. And it took a god to make me do it Mother never could. So I put on my brown, ribbed stockings, and my underwear of silky cambium, and my green dress. And I became my clothing being what I wear.
I run no more; the winds dance me. My sister, seamstress, sovereign comes up from the dark below the roots to mend my clothes in April. And I stand in my green patience in the winter rains.
He honors me, he says, to wear my fingers turning brown and brittle, clenched in the bright hair of his head. He sings.
My silence crowns the song.
(1987)
V
"The Direction of the Road" and "Vaster Than Empires And More Slow"
The relation of our species to plant life is one of total dependence and total exploitation -- the relation of an infant to its mother. Without plants the earth would have remained bare rock and water; without plant respiration we'd suffocate promptly; without vegetable food (firsthand or, as in meat, secondhand) we starve. There is no other food.
Deo, Demeter, the grain-mother, and her daughter/self Kore the Maiden called Persephone, raped by the Godfather's brother and buried to rise again, are myth-images of this relationship, recognized by 'primitive'farmers as fundamental. It is still fundamental, but can be completely ignored by a modem city dweller whose actual experience of plants is limited to florists' daisies and supermarket beans. The ignorance of the urban poor is blameless; the arrogant ignorance of the urban educated, particularly those in government, is inexcusable. There is no excuse for deforestation, for acid rain, or for the hunger of two-thirds of the children of the earth.
A very savvy genre, science fiction often acknowledges our plant-dependence -- filling a room in the spaceship with hydro-panic tanks, or 'terraforming1 the new planet so the colonists can raise grain -but with some notable exceptions (such as the film Silent Running), science fiction lacks much real interest in whafs green. The absolute passivity of plants, along with their absolute resistance to being replaced by an industrial-age substitute (we can have iron horses, steel eagles, mechanical brains, but robot wheat? Plastic spinach? If you believe in that
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you must eat the little green hedge on your sushi plate) probably makes them terminally uninteresting to the metal-minded and those to whom technology is not a way of living in the world, but a way of defeating it.
All the same, both the stories that follow are quite conventional science fiction. "The Direction of the Road" is yet another point-of-view shift, but with the attention focused on Relativity. 'Vaster" is a story about boldly going where, etc. In it I was, in part, trying to talk about the obscure fear, called panic, which many of us feel when alone in wilderness. I have lost the trail on an Oregon mountain in logged-over second-growth forest, where my individual relation to the trees and undergrowth and soil and my relative position in their earth-and-ocean-wide realm, as an animal and as a human, were, you might say, brought home to me -- but then, who's afraid of a goddam tree? We can wipe 'em all out -- in a century by clearcutting in a generation by pollution, in the twinkling of an eye -Direction of the Road
THEY DID NOT USE TO BE SO DEMANDING. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare; most of the ti
me it was just a jigjog foot-pace. And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style. There he'd be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside at the fields, or straight at me: and I'd approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly so that at the very moment that I'd finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size -- sixty
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feet in those days -- I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish.
Sometimes on a hot afternoon one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting-place, and lie down with his back against mine for an hour or more. I didn't mind in the least I have an excellent hill, good sun, good wind, good view; why should I mind standing still for an hour or an afternoon? It's only a relative stillness, after all. One need only look at the sun to realize how fast one is going and then, one grows continually -- especially in summer. In any case I was touched by the way they would entrust themselves to me, letting me lean against their little warm backs, and falling sound asleep there between my feet I liked them. They have seldom lent us Grace as do the birds; but I really preferred them to squirrels.
In those days the horses used to work for them, and that too was enjoyable from my point of view. I particularly liked the canter, and got quite proficient at it The surging and rhythmical motion accompanied shrinking and growing with a swaying and swooping almost an illusion of flight The gallop was less pleasant It was jerky, pounding one felt tossed about like a sapling in a gale. And then, the slow approach and growth, the moment of looming-over, and the slow retreat