by Nina Burton
Because wasn’t a veranda with a view of the water just what we were missing? That way the cottage could be opened up to a broader perspective than inside its own walls. The sea was home to creatures with other senses, other songs. They were different from ours, but in their own way they were just as remarkable. Beneath those creatures, billions of grains of sand gave testimony of vanished landscapes, for if the history of life were as deep as the Mariana Trench, our own era would merely be the foam on the surface. And yet we had managed to pose such a serious threat to life that we must quickly navigate towards a new era. Or would it always take disasters to make us change our ways?
Through the ticking of my alarm clock I heard the wind whining over in the sound. It spoke of uneasy waves in the ocean kingdom I’d come from and still carried with me.
Chapter Five
The Power of a Wild Ground
Replacing the rotted wall took time. It had become very obvious that all sides of a house are connected, as a piece of the floor had to be torn out as well. There also had to be wiring for the new wall’s outlets under it, and once the electricians were at it, they might at the same time run wiring to the various outbuildings.
Their workplace started out dark and cramped. After they wriggled their way into the crawlspace they had to work from a prone position, and their conversations under there were muffled. When those tall boys finally crawled out from the foundation they had to creep down into the metre-high pumphouse to instal a fuse box for the outbuildings. They were probably looking forward to running the electrical cables across the property instead, but that turned out to be the most troublesome part of all. Given the terrain, it became necessary to hand-dig the barren forest soil, and the electricians couldn’t do that. They had to settle for laying the cables across the ground in duct pipes. Who could bury them later? The first person I asked refused the second he saw the property. So it seemed like this wouldn’t be a quick job.
But electricity is the sign of modernity and would finally reach the smaller buildings. It would also be nice to have a little evening lantern on the property, for the darkness felt like a remnant of the unknown lands beyond civilisation. For that reason, a number of the neighbouring houses left a light on all night, even though it blotted out the stars. Folks preferred to be in the countryside under urbanely illuminated circumstances.
Was this true of me as well? It wasn’t necessarily the wilderness I longed for. I was of two minds when it came to my relationship with the wild. As an author, I sought out exacting, elucidating words, but I knew that spontaneous impulses could bring them to life, much like in Carl Jonas Love Almquist’s story Ormus and Ariman. Ormus was an orderly god who each day organised everything, while Ariman was an unpredictable god who each night changed what Ormus had planned. The result was unsettling, unusual and strangely beautiful.
Even as a concept, ‘the wild’ was ambiguous. It was sometimes described as what was free or desolate, sometimes as something untamed or violent. Other languages had other associations, as in the French sauvage, a word used for wild species as well as for recluses – perhaps they were connected, given that wild animals, too, typically live independent lives.
Thoreau was probably seeking this very sort of distance when he built his solitary forest home at Walden. It was hardly wilderness, for the nearest urban area was within walking distance, but it was still beyond the sphere of a community. He could concentrate in silence on his own thoughts even as he was close to wild animals. Everything he discovered was captured with a tool he himself had helped shape: a lead pencil that had been developed for his father’s pencil factory. Everyone there was surprised that he would leave a thriving company to laze around in the woods, but in fact he dawdled as little as any of the animals he spent time around. Like them, he went each day on a solitary hunt that demanded all of his attention. It was a pretty typical life, for an author.
Since an excavator had half promised to show up, I stayed at the cottage with my papers for a while. The days passed and he didn’t appear, so maybe something had come up. I am sympathetic when it comes to the unpredictable, because now and then it interferes with my writing. In fact, it sometimes seems that this unknown variable X is at the core of the equation.
It appeared the unexpected had begun to make itself at home around the property as much as it had in the cottage. The sugar bowl I had put out in the spring to lure ants out of the kitchen mysteriously disappeared one night. The same fate befell a small ceramic bird and a pair of shoes that had been left outside the door. Who had taken them? There was no fence around the place, to be sure, but even undefined borders ought to be respected. Even when I was alone it felt as if someone were moving around outside the house.
One day I spotted a strange man walking across the rocky hill. ‘Hello!’ I called, hurrying up to him. He explained somewhat embarrassed that he was visiting my neighbour and didn’t know where the property line was. He had been following an animal path, which he pointed out to me. ‘They were here first,’ he added. ‘You, or your predecessors, built right over their paths.’
He was right, of course. A territory is older than a property line and of a different nature. It’s a meeting of space and time where the terrain is marked by memory. The true owners of this place were the wild animals that sensed and lived by every detail of it.
They were also the wardens. It was impossible to ignore the birds’ loud territorial calls, and since they were species-specific I could assume there were a number of avian territories on the property. The nuthatches reacted like motion sensors to anything that moved, so their calls were frequent. Surely there were also a number of four-footed animals. I had seen, for instance, a roe buck chasing a doe across the hill.
And, of course, I knew that the squirrel’s territorial instincts were strong. One evening she alerted me to someone sneaking by. I was sitting on the half-finished veranda and writing when she began to chatter angrily from up in a nearby birch, her tail flicking. She was facing north, so I looked that direction just in time to spot another reddish-brown tail vanishing towards the public land. That bushy tail belonged to a fox.
All of a sudden, I knew who had been taking things from the property. Naturally, a fox doesn’t distinguish between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, but considers all useful items its own, more or less the way we humans do in nature. To top it off, the property was apparently part of the fox’s territory, so we were neighbours.
After this sighting, my thoughts gradually began to revolve around the fox. And it was as though my curiosity was reciprocated. Blueberry-studded territorial markings showed up on stumps and stones around the house, and it seemed to me they were edging ever closer.
Since the man who could bury the electrical cables never showed up, I packed my things to leave. The last evening was warm, and once again I sat under the veranda roof to write. My thoughts were far away when from the corner of my eye I spotted something approaching. I looked up and my pen fell to the floor. The fox was coming across the grass. It was big and grizzled with grey, like a wolf, and when our eyes met it took a step right towards me. I thought I could see a smile playing at its half-open mouth.
In the span of a second, I felt my blood pressure rise. Wild animals don’t normally come towards people; they prefer to avoid us. Confused, I put up my hand to ward it off, and the fox turned back as in slow motion.
When I finally crept into my bunk in the small hours, I heard fox-yips from down by the public lands. It sounded raw and wild. The next morning, I found the fox’s calling card by the door.
The issue of what is ‘wild’ seemed more pressing to me after the fox’s visit. It wasn’t only to be found in nature. As a child I associated it with games about the Wild West, although I had no idea why Indians and whites fought or who the Sioux were. A quarter-century later, my life partner at the time and I were on our way to meet them. We were to write a collection of documentary stories on American
Indians.
Much had changed since the time of American colonisation in the 19th century, when the land west of the Mississippi was called the Wild West. Before the territory was incorporated into the United States, the masses of immigrants streaming in saw it as nothing but a wilderness to conquer, and when the land was made United States territory in the 1890s, the Wild West era was over. The end was marked by the United States Army’s massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee.
Indians viewed the land, like the air, as belonging to all – it couldn’t be owned. The Oglala band of Sioux had long moved freely across the prairie, where massive herds of buffalo gave them food, as well as skins for tipis and clothing. The buffalo, therefore, was considered an essential part of the world. But when borders and railroads were drawn over the prairie in the 19th century, the land the Indians had roamed was divided. Within a few years, six million buffalo were destroyed by soldiers, railroaders and white hunters. The broad swaths where the Plains Indians had lived vanished, and instead the government resettled Indians in areas where the soil was considered too poor to grow crops. When it turned out that ore could be mined from these areas, those treaties too were cast aside.
The story behind the United States’ Indian reservations is not unique. White colonists have subjugated indigenous cultures since the time of Columbus, and similar events have played out all over the world, including in Sweden with the Sami. The difference was that it didn’t become the stuff of popular culture.
In the 1970s, a new generation of Indians in the United States began to protest – both against historical injustices and the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Oglala demonstrated by occupying Wounded Knee, where the Indian massacre had taken place, and later the uprisings continued on their Pine Ridge reservation. This was where my writer partner and I were headed.
When we got off at the final stop of the local bus to walk to the reservation, the driver gave us a warning: ‘Watch out. Those Indians don’t like outsiders, and there’s been gunfire at the border of the reservation.’ We put down our backpacks and exchanged quizzical looks. Was this a revival of the Wild West? But the lawlessness mostly seemed to be outside the reservation, so we elected to continue.
We arrived just as the Oglala were about to have a general meeting, and the men who approached us were suspicious. Who were we? Anthropologists? Border control consisted of a long, searching gaze. Then we were accepted. We even won their friendship, and it extended far enough for us to be invited to their religious ceremony one evening.
The locale was in stark contrast to highly decorated churches. It was a plain room with the blinds pulled down, since Indian religions were still opposed at the time. Everyone simply sat on the floor around a tray of sand. This represented the Earth. On it were packets of tobacco tied with bands whose colours marked the cardinal directions – east and west, north and south, sky and earth. Holy buffalo meat was meant to have been placed on this altar as well, but prairie dog meat had to stand in.
The sparing nature of the space turned out not to matter, for all life on Earth was connected in darkness. When the lights went out, a shaman’s drum sounded for a few minutes before chanting voices came in. They prayed for ‘all of our relations’, but this didn’t signify any one tribe. The Oglalas’ ancestors were named for buffalo, moose and eagles, because they had understood their relationship with the other creatures of Earth long before Darwin did. With equal reverence the prayers counted the animals that were usually eaten. Time seemed to slow as the walls of the room gradually expanded to encompass the vast family, as if the prairie were once again wide and open. Soon my legs were asleep, but I was moving through a world that was whole and limitless. For there in the dark I realised that words like ‘wholeness’ and ‘holiness’ have a common root. An awesome thought: everything was connected and had the same value.
Then the scent of salvia spread, and a basin of purifying water was passed around for all to drink from. It was time for the sacred pipe. It was passed to me as well, and I accepted it. As I drew in the smoke, I thought of how the mouthpiece had been touched by all the lips that had formed prayer in the darkness. Was also I now one of those who had prayed for the great family of life?
The Oglala ceremony lingered inside me for a long time as something deeper than an exotic memory. It was born of a spirit I found in many Indian cultures. A story from the Pit River Indians of California, for instance, describes a long migration in which father Bear, mother Antelope, son Fox and daughter Quail meet a series of other animals from their large family. One is the old medicine man, grandfather Coyote, who sees his kinsman in unruly son Fox.
Coyote is often a trickster in Indian legends, someone who moves outside an orderly world. Like a joker, he can unexpectedly turn the rules of life on end, but he’s not evil. In Indian mythology, the world was not created by any kinglike, vengeful sort of god, but by animals who embodied the mysterious nature of the wild. There the fox too can be seen as a trickster, and in some tribes the fox has been an object of worship. Thoreau understood this. To him, the fox, like the indigenous people of America, represented a more natural life than that of white society. To him, it was a good testimonial that the fox had retained the freedom of the untamed.
That autumn I left the property to its fate, but when a cold snap arrived in January I wondered how the cottage and the animals were managing, so I made my way there with a bag of birdseed.
On the property I was met with an embroidery of tracks in the snow. Among light little squirrel hops were both fox tracks and impressions left by the splayed hooves of roe deer. Like droppings and gnawed branches, tracks are signs one can interpret, so now I found myself wondering about a very recent past. I had read that roe deer can produce a secretion from their cloven hooves when they suddenly change course. It’s a way to warn relatives about something they’ve spotted. Were there scent messages hiding among these mixed tracks?
Naturally, the property must be full of tracks year-round, although I hadn’t seen them until the snow. The field mice must have made their tunnels beneath the crust, and apparently one led to the cottage, for I found mouse droppings under the sink. They were collected in a corner, next to a rag that perhaps had been a mouse mattress, so the toilet and the bed were neatly separated. If the mice had found something to eat there, besides an old kitchen sponge, I’m sure that too would have had its own spot. At the home of my first long-term partner, the house mice gathered sugar cubes inside a sofa, and I once came across a big-eyed mouse in the pantry, where it had just fortified itself with a bit of gorgonzola ahead of the day’s sugar transport. She was adorable, but after that the kitchen got a humane mousetrap.
Since mice must eat constantly, they need to have food in their immediate vicinity. That’s why they’re drawn to well-stocked houses and barns, although this habit has not endeared them to humans. I recalled a tale of how, in a single day, seventy thousand mice were killed in a grain depot – a good illustration of our view of mice.
Yet our own mammal forebears were mouse-like creatures once upon a time. What’s more, we share 80 per cent of our genes with mice, as well as certain traits. Mice, for instance, are extremely social, and when they’re not communicating with their ultrasonic voices they skilfully read each other’s feelings by way of expressions and scents. When mice saw other mice suffering, in one horrific experiment, they clearly demonstrated sympathy.
We humans, of course, neither perceive the ultrasound nor the subtle expressions, but when mice sounds are brought down to a frequency that humans can hear it’s said to sound like birdsong. Male mice, like birds, want to impress females with their songs, and it’s said that together a pair can sing relatively complex duets. Apparently this predisposition to song is innate, for it is controlled by the same so-called FOXP2 gene that lies behind birdsong and our own speech. When this language gene is mutated, male mice sing much simpler songs that won’t attract a mate.
I once
lived close to this tiny world, for as a child my sister and I kept a pair of Japanese waltzing mice. We counted them almost as family, and to make sure they would feel at home an acquaintance built a small mouse house out of cardboard. If you lifted the roof you could see how well organised it was inside, with all the newspaper they had gnawed into hieroglyph-like shapes we couldn’t understand. And I’m sure they couldn’t understand us either. In their eyes, perhaps, we were frightening masters who might reach down at any moment and pluck them from their hamster wheel. Still, I tried to communicate my tender feelings by stroking their fur with my index finger.
My clearest memory is of the day it was hard to replace the roof once we’d peered into the mouse house. No matter how hard I pushed, something was in the way. A mouse neck had become trapped between the hard cardboard wall and the roof. When I placed the dying mouse in my hand, I saw little eruptions appear in its pelt. They looked like the spinning stars Van Gogh painted near the end, but it was my dripping tears that caused the fur to swirl. Mice and people have always had a complicated relationship.
A Japanese waltzing mouse, of course, has a different life than a field mouse. It might become a child’s pet or a researcher’s lab animal, while field mice live free. On the other hand, field mice are eaten by predators such as foxes, so their existence too is fraught. When I filled a seed feeder in the birch tree and some spilled on the ground, I felt that the mice were deserving of such a bounty.
For myself I made soup before getting into bed to keep warm in the chilly cottage. After reading for a while, I turned out the lights and listened to the silence, or perhaps just what I called silence. The world outside was probably full of signals that passed me by.