My neighbor and the trapper are both third-generation Ozarkers. They could have gone away from here after high school, as did many of their classmates, and made easy money in the cities, but they stayed because they love the land. This brings us together in our opposition to damming the river to create a recreational lake, but our sensibilities are different, the product of different personalities and backgrounds. They come from families who have lived off the land from necessity; they have a deep practical knowledge of it and better skills than I have for living here with very little money. The land, the woods and the rivers, and all that are in and on them are resources to be used for those who have the knowledge and skills. They can cut and sell timber, clear the land for pasture, sell the gravel from the river. Ozarkers pick up wild black walnuts and sell them to the food-processing companies that bring hulling machines to town in October. There are fur buyers, too, so they trap animals and sell the pelts. These Ozarkers do not question the happy fact that they are at the top of the food chain, but kill to eat what swims in the river and walks in the woods, and accept as a matter of course that it takes life to maintain life. In this they are more responsible than I am; I buy my meat in neat sanitized packages from the grocery store.
Troubled by this a few years back, I raised a dozen chickens as meat birds, then killed and dressed the lot, but found that killing chicken Number Twelve was no easier than killing chicken Number One. I didn’t like taking responsibility for killing my own meat, and went back to buying it at the grocery store. I concluded sourly that righteousness and consistency are not my strong points, since it bothered me not at all to pull a carrot from the garden, an act quite as life-ending as shooting a deer.
I love this land, too, and I was grateful that we could all come together to stop it from being destroyed by an artificial lake. But my aesthetic is a different one, and comes from having lived in places where beauty, plants and animals are gone, so I place a different value on what remains than do my Ozark friends and neighbors. Others at the meeting last night had lived at one time in cities, and shared my prejudices. In our arrogance, we sometimes tell one another that we are taking a longer view. But in the very long run I’m not so sure, and as in most lofty matters, like my failed meat project, I suspect that all our opinions are simply an expression of a personal sense of what is fitting and proper.
Certainly my reaction to seeing the dead bobcat was personal. I knew that bobcat, and she probably knew me somewhat better, for she would have been a more careful observer than I.
Four or five years ago, a man from town told me he had seen a mountain lion on Pigeon Hawk Bluff, the cliffs above the river just to the west of my place. There is a rocky outcropping there, and he had left his car on the road and walked out to it to look at the river two hundred and fifty feet below. He could see a dead turkey lying on a rock shelf, and climbed down to take a closer look. As he reached out to pick up the bird, he was attacked by a mountain lion who came out of a small cave he had not been able to see from above. He showed me the marks along his forearm—scars, he claimed, where the mountain lion had raked him before he could scramble away. There were marks on his arm, to be sure, but I don’t know that a mountain lion or any other animal put them there. I suspect that the story was an Ozark stretcher, for the teller, who logs in many hours with the good old boys at the café in town, is a heavy and slow-moving man; it is hard to imagine him climbing nimbly up or down a steep rock face. Nor would I trust his identification of a mountain lion, an animal more talked of at the cafe than ever seen in this country.
Mountain lions are large, slender, brownish cats with long tails and small rounded ears. This area used to be part of their range, but as men moved in to cut timber and hunt deer, the cats’ chief prey, their habitat was destroyed and they retreated to the west and south. Today they are seen regularly in Arkansas, but now and again there are reports of mountain lions in this part of the Ozarks. With the deer population growing, as it has in recent years under the Department of Conservation’s supervision, wildlife biologists say that mountain lions will return to rocky and remote places to feed on them.
After the man told me his story, I watched around Pigeon Hawk Bluff on the outside chance that he might really have seen a mountain lion but in the years since I have never spotted one. I did, however, see a bobcat one evening, near the rock outcropping. This part of the Ozarks is still considered a normal part of bobcat range, but they are threatened by the same destruction of habitat that pushed the mountain lion back to wilder places, and they are uncommon.
Bobcats also kill and feed on deer, but for the most part they eat smaller animals: mice, squirrels, opossums, turkey, quail and perhaps some of my chickens. They are night hunters, and seek out caves or other suitable shelters during the day. In breeding season, the females often choose a rocky cliff cave as a den. I never saw the bobcat’s den, but it may have been the cave below the lookout point on the road, although that seems a trifle public for a bobcat’s taste. The cliff is studded with other caves of many sizes, and most are inaccessible to all but the most sure-footed. I saw the bobcat several times after that, walking silently along the cliff’s edge at dusk. Sometimes in the evening I heard the piercing scream of a bobcat from that direction, and once, coming home late at night, I caught her in the road in the pickup’s headlight beam. She stood there, blinded, until I switched off the headlights. Then she padded away into the shadows.
That stretch of land along the river, with its thickets, rocky cliffs and no human houses, would make as good a home ground as any for a bobcat. Females are more particular about their five miles or so of territory than are males, who sometimes intrude upon one another’s bigger personal ranges, but bobcats all mark their territories and have little contact with other adults during their ten years or so of life.
I don’t know for sure that the bobcat I have seen and heard over the past several years was always the same one, but it probably was, and last night probably I saw her dead in the back of my neighbor’s pickup truck.
In a few days it will be Christmas. I have been snowed in for several days now, which is of no account. Toward the end of December I always go into town and stock up on extra feed for the chickens, dogs, cat, wild birds and supplies for myself, for there is usually a week or more during January when the lane to the mailbox is impassable to a truck because of ice or snow. The weather came a bit early this year, but I have already stocked up and do not need to get out.
The lane is a county road, and after he has cleared the school bus routes, the man who drives the township grader may clear my way. But the township is a poor one and the grader is old and undependable and held together with baling wire and ingenuity so he may not get here before the snow melts.
A few years ago, after another heavy snow, the man cleared the lane. It was bitterly cold that day, so when I heard him coming I went down to the end of the driveway and invited him in for coffee. He accepted, drove the grader up to the cabin, and turned it off. Instantly a look of distress swept across his face. He had forgotten that his battery was not holding a charge, and now that the engine was off he would never get it started. But I have a battery charger and plenty of extension cord, so while the coffee percolated he hitched the grader up to the charger. We sat by the wood stove talking of roads and weather, and by the time we had emptied the coffee pot, the battery was charged enough to start the engine. Country living requires cooperation.
Fifteen years ago, when I was working as a librarian at Brown University, I had a forty-five-minute drive to work each day. Before that I worked at a state college in New Jersey and had an hour-long commute. I grew to loathe winter, dreading the drive on slippery, congested highways. Winter was an enemy I had to fight. But no longer. I plan my sales trips so that I am off the road in bad weather. Instead, I repair equipment, label honey jars, prepare for the spring bee season, and generally work around here in the barn or cabin. Winter is not an enemy. It is a time of less going about and brings quiet an
d peace.
The mailman has not been able to get through on the back roads for several days, but he telephoned to tell me that he is going to try to make it today, so I shall walk down to the mailbox later on to see what he has left. It is a walk that I enjoy at any time of the year. Tazzie and Andy like it too, and in more benign weather they rush on ahead joyfully. When the drifts are hip high, as they are today where the lane skirts the river’s cliffs at Pigeon Hawk Bluff, I try to urge them to break a path, but they look at me wisely and pretend that they are too loyal and obedient to do anything but walk at my heels. Pantywaist dogs, I scold. This makes them wag their tails happily. Are they my dogs or am I their human?
Brian telephoned last night from Boston and asked what I was going to do for Christmas. Not much, I admitted; what was he going to do? Well, he certainly hoped to have a Christmas tree, and so should I. I protested against cutting a tree, bringing it into the cabin and covering it with little shiny things. No, of course that would be inappropriate, he said, but certainly with all those trees around, one of them might be a Christmas tree, mightn’t it?
He was right, as he usually is. So I declared the pine tree outside the three big windows to be my Christmas tree and hung suet on it as a gift to the blue jays, nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers. The woodpeckers have already found it.
The feeder with birdseed in it goes all the way across the windows, and the usual winter birds are feeding at it: juncos, cardinals, titmice, tree sparrows and finches, both purple and gold. The red-bellied woodpeckers like it too, and when they come so close I can see the faint pencil-thin streak of red on their bellies that gives them their name. This morning I counted eight eastern bluebirds up on the power line. They do not come to the feeder because they are not seed eaters, but they congregate where there are other birds and feed on the sumac and dogwood berries they find at the edge of the field now that they have stripped the pepperidge trees.
Inside, Tazzie, Andy and Black Edith are luxuriating in the warmth of the wood stove. The public radio station is outdoing itself in programming during Christmas week. Last night I heard the Bach B Minor Mass, and today they have promised a program of Renaissance Christmas music. It feels snug and cheerful and peaceful here.
The secretary of the park superintendent just telephoned to cancel an appointment I was supposed to keep with him this afternoon concerning the dam that my neighbors and I are worried about. A group of local people, egged on by political and commercial interests, are requesting that a dam be built on the river just below my place on the federal land. Several thousand people have signed a petition offering the river and themselves to the Corps of Engineers as a sacrifice: an environmental, economic and personal disaster. It is also an absurdity, but politics has a way of turning the absurd into reality, so I have to pay attention. I do not think that dams get built by two thousand people asking their congressman for one; on the other hand, I do not know how they do get built, so I have been making it my business to find out. My appointment with the superintendent was part of this business.
However, neither he nor I can keep the appointment today. Winter on the banks of the river has canceled it, and mocks the making of plans. It is not a good time of year for political activism anyway; it is a time for privacy and indwelling. I am going to go out now and split firewood enough for a couple of days, and bring it in to dry beside the wood stove. Then I shall break up bits of a dead branch from the oak that grows by the driveway for kindling tomorrow morning’s fire. In wintertime on the river I think this is as far ahead as it is wise to plan.
Yesterday was one of those clear bright days that we often have here in winter in the Ozarks. The temperature rose enough to let the icicles on the chicken coop begin to melt. The blue sky and bright sunshine drew me out of the cabin, where I had been dutifully labeling honey jars for several days. I proposed a walk to the dogs, and we headed out across the field to look at the beehives back by the woodlot.
The dogs ran on ahead, stopping briefly to snuffle excitedly where a pair of wild turkeys have been scratching and feeding during the past week just beyond the barn. All three of us had watched them from the windows, some of us more noisily than others.
The snowy roadway across the field was covered with footprints: deer, turkey, rabbits, woodrats and mice had all been forced out in recent days to look for food, and their tracks crisscrossed the path. For the past two days I have been seeing an uncommon number of hawks, both red-tailed and rough-legged, hunting in the field for rats and mice. At one spot I found a ragged depression in the snow stained with blood. Bits of down suggested that an owl had taken a victim there during the night.
When I got back to the beehives, all appeared quiet. It was still far too cold for bees to fly. I hoped that they had enough honey to feed on for the winter. If they did they were alive, clustered inside their hives, metabolizing fiercely, fueled by honey, to keep the temperature in the cluster at seventy degrees. Now that the days are beginning to lengthen, they will raise that temperature inside the brood area to ninety degrees as the queen starts to lay eggs. The cycle begins anew.
To open a hive and check them would be cruel in these temperatures, for all their generated heat would escape and the seals that they have so carefully made to keep it in would be broken. Still, by walking in front of the hives, I could tell about the health of the colony within. The bees in strong and able hives had been tending to sanitation, flying out to defecate, spattering the snow with their yellow droppings, and carrying out the corpses of some few sister bees who had died of age or cold.
Walking along looking for these signs, I discovered a young opossum crouched between two beehives. Opossums, and skunks too, can be a nuisance to bees in the winter. The bees are too lethargic to defend themselves, and the opossums reach their forepaws inside the hive, stir up the cluster, capture bees one at a time and suck them dry of their honey and soft body parts. I once came upon a full and contented opossum sitting in front of a beehive ringed with husks of bee bodies, looking like a human glutton who had just overeaten at a clambake.
The opossum I found yesterday had not begun to feed. He was young and looked inexperienced. He was small, no bigger than a kitten, and frightened of me. He opened his mouth wide and tried to look fierce as an adult would do, but his teeth were still small.
There is only one species of opossum in North America, Didelphis virginiana, and this one, like the rest of his kind, had an untidy grayish coat, a naked, prehensile tail, and deceptively soft-looking pink feet. His blackish ears were edged in pink too. Opossums, this hemisphere’s only marsupials, are among the most primitive of living mammals, and this one, with his head back and his jaws open, had a prehistoric look. Opossums eat fruit, nuts, insects, carrion and an occasional chicken when they can get one. In the Ozarks they are considered vermin, and are sometimes hunted for sport and trapped for their fur.
Some weeks ago I found an adult opossum in the chicken coop. I had returned home late after spending an evening with friends. The dogs greeted me as joyfully as though I had been gone for weeks, and leaped about as I walked over to gather the eggs and close the chicken-coop door. When I switched on the light in the coop we could see the opossum in a corner under the droppings board. His mouth was wide open, displaying formidable teeth, and he was ready to fight. The dogs often take themselves off on their own hunting expeditions and they must know how fierce an opossum can be, for they quieted down immediately and discovered that they had important business over by the cabin door, where they waited circumspectly for me. I threw a piece of kindling at the opossum to drive him from the coop.
With the memory of this encounter in mind I didn’t expect much action when the dogs came looking for me as I stood in front of the beehives. The opossum saw the dogs before they saw him. He tensed his body and opened his mouth even wider, drooling with the effort. A tiny, choked growl warned the dogs to come no closer, but also attracted their attention. Tazzie must have decided that he was a cat and of no a
ccount, for she walked behind the opossum and upended him with her nose, sniffing his rear as she does with the cat, a behavior that appears to be both affectionate and curious. The opossum had probably never met with such an indignity and was confused.
Andy is an old, experienced hunter. He knew that this was no cat and rapidly decided that this particular creature was not as fierce as others of its kind with which he had tangled. He took advantage of the momentary confusion, and, surprising me with his quickness, rushed the opossum and grabbed him by the back. I called him off, but once he has caught an animal he is an efficient killer, and it appeared that he had already snapped the opossum’s backbone. Both dogs sat beside me obediently, and we all looked at the opossum, quiet and still, lying in the snow.
I called the dogs to heel and we walked back to the cabin. I was filled with remorse for having stood there and allowed the dogs to bait a young nocturnal animal so desperately hungry that he had been driven out in the daylight in search of food.
After shutting the dogs in the cabin, I walked back to the beehives. When I got there the opossum was gone. I could see the tracks in the snow where he had run from the hives to the safety of the woods and thickets. He had played possum, gone limp, feigned death, practiced the ultimate in passive resistance.
I returned to the cabin sobered, thinking about what had happened as I walked along the roadway where most of the animal tracks had been obliterated by my own and those of the dogs.
I do not like opossums to hustle their dinners in my chicken coop or beehives, but that is the way creatures get on, and I would not kill one for doing so, Ozark custom to the contrary. I was relieved that the young opossum still lived. His life had touched mine on a bright and sunny day, and I was grateful for the encounter. I would have been sad and guilty had he lost it because of our contact. I hope he found something to eat after all, and fed well.
A Country Year Page 11