Coyote Crossing

Though my ex- did get Thistle through the worst of his head tilt it’s still disconcerting. To himself most of all. He’s disoriented, his sense of balance is affected, and it’s clear whatever is causing the head tilt involves some discomfort.

The indignity is the worst of it, I suspect. He’s been unable to clean himself the way he prefers. I spent an hour or so this afternoon carefully freeing a formidable mat of hair and rock-hard fecal matter and a few other things from beneath his tail, which was entirely too familiar a process for his liking.

I learned three valuable lessons during that process:

1) cornstarch is a really good lubricant for extracting solid dried horribles from animal fur

2) himself seems still to trust me, more or less, despite my having disappeared inexplicably for a year and a half

3) tending thus to someone who needs me to seems to fill some sort of void.

After a brief and upsetting few hours in which a certain other household member seemed certain that rabbits are to kitties as zombies are to humans, and that the bedroom closet was thus the only possible safe place, we seem to have arrived at some sort of detente.

7 comments on "Settling in"

Settling into his new home.

4 comments on "Everyone’s moving to Hollywood these days"

Via Basin and Range Watch, a site you should be checking out regularly, this excerpt of a story from Dennis Casebier’s Mojave Road guide (Tales of the Mojave Road):

Last wolf of the East Mojave: Pauline Watson - standing, right - trapped this whitish-colored wolf while getting coyotes near their New York Mountains ranch, on a trapline set at Rock Spring, Cedar Canyon Road, in what is now Mojave National Preserve, 1920s. She did not want to kill it, and some folks from the city tried to take it to a zoo, but it died on the way to Barstow. Photo from the Pauline (Watson) Cote Collection.

There’s a metaphor for you.

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“That is their medicine,” she said. “They offer themselves up.”

She was speaking of hunting, and so I disregarded her words when they came to me, second-hand. Slob hunters are slob hunters, rednecks in the Adirondacks or wannabe-healers in Montana, and I have heard all kinds of justifications from them, though not usually so dressed in eagle feather jewelry.

“They offer themselves up.”

A feminizing of the wild, the most absurd point to which “she asked for it” could be reduced.

When I was ten — eleven? twelve? — I walked into the woods in Maryland, away from family without their knowing. Narrow trails led me among the red oak and maple, the dogwood, and then the forest filled with eyes. They regarded me for a long moment, then flashed white tails at me and moved away. I followed them to a small clearing, a bit of opening inside a creek’s bend, and though they looked up at me when I crossed over they did not spook. It was as if they had expected me to join them, and I sat among them in the grass as they cropped the century-old apples. It was dark when I returned.

There is a moment every now and then in which I hear one door closing and another opens in my breast. I lose my skin. I cannot move, and the light blinds me.

“They offer themselves up.” It is absurd. It cannot be. No species long survives whose members offer themselves up to hunters, clawed or fanged or drunken orange-clad. Fleet limbs for broken field sprints, hooves honed sharp against dire wolves and short-faced bears and lions, and now even the pumas take the sick and old ones first. A healthy stag, a wary doe could take an eye, break a mouthful of teeth. Two years ago on my way to the creek at night a loud crack came from the woods, too sharp to be anything but a hoof breaking an inch-thick branch, and then nothing but the rustling of leaves in wind.

I ran hard. I can run hard in the dark. In light I cannot forget what shape I am.

It has been a long time since I spent my days in thick forests. In the land where I spent most of my adult life the woods are park-like and broad, except where the way is blocked by walls of poison oak. The undergrowth, the vines and tangles and the head-high shade-growing trees I knew back east burn out too readily there. It has been so long since I simply passed among trees with no way to walk save that the deer made for themselves.

The black-tails to the north have no trouble with poison oak. They eat it. I could not follow them through, except when they presented themselves and ran with me at night.

I wonder sometimes if the puma knew exactly what he was doing. The “deer medicine” story was related to me by one who had found it useful. She had been trying to figure me out. She found some insight in the story. The woman in the story had been justifying her hunting, and so I disregarded her words.

They do not offer themselves up. They fight like hell to live. But they are curious, and we mistake that curiosity for slowness. They face the light in frank wonder. Harts open to the world outside. Their curiosity makes them vulnerable, and the world eats them. At the Deadfall Lakes two years ago we sat in a dark camp, no fire, and something made my hair stand up. I aimed a small hand light: green eyes. “We have eyes,” I said, and Matthew and I discussed who they might belong to for a time. Coyote, cat, and bear were all nearby, and for that matter horse and steer, but there was a fluid, calm motion to the disembodied eyes that felt wrong for any of those, and then I remembered my light had a focus ring. I widened the beam: a stag. Too many points to count in my dim light.

I resist; I resist. The deer medicine is not mine. Despite my staring jaguars down, I am not strong enough to face the world broadside. And why? This is not what courage is about. Taking on the world’s pain as avocation: what a grandiose, debilitating justification for codependence. The most absurd point to which “I deserve it” could be reduced. It is far too much to read into a metaphor.

They do not offer themselves up, but I wonder if I do. All this writing, all this watching an attempt to stare into the light. A walk into the forest and no walk back, and death is not the only path into those woods.

There are deer in the Mojave, planted there long ago for the ease of hunters, but I mainly do not see them: just their spoor. They stay up in the mountains, curl up under rock shelters during the heat of day, come out at dusk to drink from springs, from guzzlers. Not long ago I leafed through a book of photos, shots taken by tripwire of animals drinking from Kessler Spring, coyotes and badgers and bighorn, and a band of black-tailed deer standing lordly among the yuccas. The buck was flare-lit, overexposed, and stood with his head turned leftward toward the camera. He was well fed for a desert black-tail; he showed no ribs. He gazed straight at the camera. His eyes glowed green.

7 comments on "Deer Medicine"

Word arrives this morning that he’s feeling better. Thanks to those of you who’ve asked after him, and sent good wishes.

Looking for some email about him just now, I found this old comment I made to someone a few years back in a thread about “hero bunnies.”

If our house was on fire, Thistle would rescue the carrots from the refrigerator and leave us to sleep, locking the front door behind him for good measure as he went outside.

6 comments on "Thistle"

Los Angeles is getting the edge of a major storm, the first rain of the season. People at the bases of the burned mountains look nervously upslope, waiting for debris flows. Elsewhere it is calm, and the earth swells, drinking.

Tomorrow the Los Angeles River will be full, and Ballona Creek will fill its culvert as it flows through Culvert City.

I have been a Californian long enough that October rains bring me a sense of the calendar clicking over, a New Year beginning. Today I felt wet concrete against my bare feet and thought of miner’s lettuce. Today I watched the rain clouds pass the high peaks on their way into the desert. The tortoises will come out of their holes to drink tomorrow. The washes will be new-carved, braids of still-wet sand glistening when the sun returns.

3 comments on "Rain"

For Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a short video on the Paiute religious figure Wovoka, originator of the Ghost Dance movement.

A treat within the video: one of the locals interviewed is the late Judy Trejo, a marvelous Paiute singer whose two CDs are must-listens for any fan of North American Native music.

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