by Patrick Lane
The snails’ spiral shells are a coruscating spin of mottled yellows and browns, and a single one can carve a hosta into an emerald filigree. I hate killing snails, but if I didn’t there wouldn’t be a hosta or a primula left anywhere. Their blossoms are frayed stars in the garden, their fringes tattered.
I was up an hour before dawn this morning and stood on the deck in the dark with a cup of coffee when Roxy came bounding up with a half-dead siskin in her jaws. Where would she have found a bird at this hour? Aren’t the birds safe in the branches of trees when it’s dark? Unless this is a siskin left over from yesterday, one who smashed its head against a window of the house in some futile flight from a hawk or in a fight with another over who is dominant and who gets the latest girl. Roxy played with it in a desultory manner, bored by the bird’s refusal to struggle. The siskin was locked into the stillness brought on by fear and shock.
I have tried to rescue the occasional bird from her. Like all cats, she loves to play with her prey before killing it. I gave up when I tried to wrest a white-crowned sparrow from her jaws. When I gently tried to ease the tiny bird from her, Roxy looked directly into my eyes in much the same way the lion did that I watched eat a gazelle on the veldt of South Africa. She clamped down her jaws on the bird just as the lion did on her gazelle. I gently pulled and heard the crunch of her teeth on feather and bone. She let the bird go, then gave me a look of disdain and walked away, leaving the dead sparrow on the grass for me to do with as I willed. I’ve never tried to save a bird from her again. The cats are acting as they should and it is not for me to prevent them.
I am finding it easier in these spring days to leave the confines of the garden. The larger world outside, the fields, woodlands, beaches, and islands have not been a problem for me. It is the busier, frenetic human world that disturbs me. I think it always has. It is only now, sober and still vulnerable, that I feel the madness of activity that surrounds me, cars racing up the street, the muffled beat of sound from three teenagers passing with their music turned as loud as their hearts.
Anxiety, the close neighbor of paranoia, isn’t good for me, especially now in these early months of recovery. I’m able though to go to the grocery store and walk the aisles without twitching at every quick movement, jumping at the sudden sound of a can of creamed corn dropped behind me, the appearance of some harried mother at my shoulder with a rattling metal cart piled high with a week’s groceries and a desperate child who feels exactly as I do. I can go to the bank now and drive past the local mall with its liquor store and not have it bother me too much. That I notice it is there each time I drive by is indication enough of my past and my going there sometimes three times a day to buy liquor as my tolerance for alcohol rose higher and higher.
The garden has been a sanctuary for me these past months. Inside the high fences I feel safe with the plants and birds, our cats, and my woman whose love for me surpasses understanding. Her tolerance and patience have been remarkable.
I know the need to impose solitude upon myself will pass, but for now I treasure the peace and quiet it offers. My daily life is a reflection of my need. Birth and death are practiced here daily by all living things and I participate in that cycle as I step into the simple round of plants, animals, insects, and birds.
The golden northern bumblebee and the red-tailed bumblebee are both busy in the garden now. They feast on the nectar of wallflowers and Pieris japonica blossoms as they await the largesse of the apple blossoms to come. They are huge females and now that they are foraging they will have expanded their tunnels in the earth. There are smaller females looking after things underground as they wait for their mothers to return with nectar.
I am aware of how much and how little I have paid attention to their presence here in the garden. Like the spring winds, they are ubiquitous. Here it is sweet April and the garden is awash with perfume. The bees, drunk with the surfeit, work the spring blossoms. Their hives double in size each day as eggs are laid by the queens and grubs poke their heads above their waxen cribs.
The blue orchard bees have been around since mid-February. They are a common spring bee and are essential island pollinators. In the wild world they build their nests inside holes in trees or fallen logs, but in the garden I have set up a few condominiums for them. Blocks of wood drilled with holes three inches deep are perfect nesting places for the bees so long as they are given a sunny southern exposure. Each hole will hold one egg. These bees are solitary and by June they’re gone.
The western leaf-cutting bees haven’t appeared yet. I only notice them when I see the circles cut in the delicate, lime-yellow leaves of the acacia tree. They line their nests in the earth with the fragments of leaf they carve. Bee wallpaper, something to delight the young when they are born.
Later in the spring I will keep my eye out for the virescent green metallic bees. They live in burrows communally and begin with one over-wintering female. Their thorax is a bright metallic green with tiny hairs that become decorated with golden pollens when they are at work in the garden. They are one of our most beautiful bees.
I saw my first sandhills and bald-faced hornets today and wondered where their nests were. Last year one was in the fir above the pond and the other in the redwood above the driveway. The hornets chew their way along the cedar boards of my fence. The gray, weathered wood is what they are harvesting. They leave behind red trails of fresh cedar. The fluffy wood, mixed with their saliva, is turned into the paper they build with.
There are five apple trees in our garden and I don’t know the varieties with the exception of the Spartans. The trees were here before we arrived. An hour ago I watched a short-tailed ichneumon fly hunting the trunk of the apple tree. Its thin, coral body searched relentlessly among the crevices and lichens for caterpillars. The apple tree is always active with caterpillars, particularly now that the first tender leaves and blossoms are appearing. As the caterpillars appear, so do the ichneumon flies. On finding a caterpillar, the fly will lay a single egg high on the insect’s thorax where it can’t reach it. The caterpillar then carries its own death with it as it feeds. Once the caterpillar spins its cocoon, the parasitic-fly egg hatches, and kills and feeds on its pupating host.
The ichneumon flittered its long antennae over the bark. Its movements were quick and nervous as it searched the tree branch for prey. It feeds on nectar like all the ichneumon flies. Today it had enough to eat and more important work to be done. I watched it for half an hour, but no caterpillar was to be found. They will appear in numbers soon.
The garden is almost ready. It has suffered this past two or three years because of my neglect. I let the garden go a little bit each year, only watering and doing some desultory, necessary weeding. At Christmas this year, fresh from the treatment center, I looked out and saw a garden in trouble, overgrown in places and dying back in others from too much shade or sun, insect predation, or crowding.
A raccoon is in the garden, attracted by the pond and the flower beds where worms rise close to the surface. Raccoons are beautiful but are also obnoxious predators and can wreak havoc in the garden. The mossy lawn and beds had several dozen holes dug down four or more inches. Still, I love their presence, the delicate way they walk, as if they were ballet dancers with wrestlers’ shoulders. I was out for a quiet moment under the stars and watched her walk across the lawn. Such a burly wanderer.
The raccoon follows the stepping-stones, leaving damp tracks on the blue granite. Her long toes splay slightly and her claws like slender knives scratch the stones with the sound of whiskers on a tender palm. She stops by the water’s still edge and stares at an element she knows better than she knows the air she breathes.
Her button-black, upturned nose catches at the night. What is alive and what is dead? she seems to ask. Her nose tells her everything as she dips her paws into the pond’s water and begins to wash with an obsessive wringing motion like a woman who has lost everything. The slide of her curved claws on naked stone is movement without mind.
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She takes the iridescent body of a tiny tree frog from her mouth and places it in the water. She washes it with a kind of praise as if the frog’s body were a jewel found after journeying across the yards of night. The frog’s body, its legs extended, turns over and over in the water until it is finally clean of the imagined sand and grit. The raccoon rises to her haunches and lifts the body to her mouth. Her bites are made slowly, each one precise. First the head and then the front legs, the body with its minuscule organs of heart and liver and lungs is next, and last the long back legs, until there is nothing left. Done, she places her paws back in the water and cleans them.
She seems always to be in a dream place, as if her mind is far away. I watch her drop to her front paws and amble over to investigate the iron pot at the foot of the fir tree. It is an ancient pot, one I bought in Japan years ago. I keep it full of water for the birds. She looks into it for a moment and then tips it onto a stepping-stone beside the blue iris. She rolls the pot off the stone and courses the air with her nose. The peanut butter and bread is what she moves toward. The frog was only a small appetizer. It is the open sandwich I have made that interests her. That it sits on wire mesh in the cavern of a live trap in the corner of the yard seems only a small concern to her. She meanders over to the trap and circles it slowly. She has been trapped before. Hours of planting can be turned into a wreckage in a single night as she digs for beetles and worms under the young foliage of a new garden bed. I set the trap an hour before nightfall and decorated it with a slab of fresh bread and peanut butter.
I watch her in the moonlight as she circles the cage with its inviting open end and the spring-loaded trapdoor that hangs above it. All she has to do is walk inside and step on the trip-plate just in front of the bait. First she digs around the perimeter of the trap in hope she will find an alternative entrance, a safe exit. Finally she walks, a humpbacked little bear with a ringed tail, up to the mouth of the trap and peers in. The peanut butter is just a few feet away. She stretches her paw inside and then withdraws it.
Finally, after stepping up and down in impatience she moves inside the opening. Nothing happens and she takes another slow step and then another until finally she is only a long reach away from her prize. One step more and she comes down on the trip-plate, the trapdoor slams shut behind her. She turns and attacks it as if she could eat her way through the wire mesh and back to the open night. She thrashes around and, finding once again there is no way out, picks up the sandwich and begins to eat what she got trapped for.
The sudden clang lifts me off the step and I go down and squat beside the trap. She stares at me with her fine, bright eyes, but she doesn’t stop eating. She is a female and her belly is slightly swollen. The kits she is carrying are a week or two away from birth. I have caught her just in time. The cats have followed me down, but they stay a respectful distance away. A chirring growl greets us all. The sandwich is finished and she warns us all of her keen claws and bright, needle teeth. Her brawny little bear body thuds against the cage and then she settles into a corner.
I will leave her there until morning when I will drive her to a beautiful lake where there are golden skunk cabbage and freshwater clams and a plethora of beetles and eggs for her to feast upon. Lorna and I will stand at the back of the truck and watch her scramble out of the open cage and down to water where she will splash in and hide under a fallen alder log or run to the nearest tree and climb to safety. The last we’ll see of her will be two sharp black eyes staring at us from the water weeds or from a high fir branch. Our nocturnal guest will have found a new, wild territory.
Regnavit a ligno Deus, “God reigned from the wood.” The raccoon in her slow perambulations was like a small, nocturnal god as she visited. In the wild wood there are many creatures, each one a part of who I am, each one an extension of myself like spirit arms extending from my shoulders and touching what cannot be touched by flesh.
That is what I think of as I climb into bed beside my woman. The raccoon will sleep fitfully in her cage as she awaits morning. She is a little god of the garden and I lie on my back and think of her as I stare at the ceiling. Roxy has curled up against Lorna’s belly and Basho sleeps in the blue easy chair in the corner of the living room by the fireplace. I have trapped one of the little gods and while I did not kill her, still, I have trapped her.
Somewhere in the future of another life I will have to pay for this and the many other interferences I have made in the natural order of things. I think of this as I begin to fall asleep. I offer a small prayer to the little bear-god in her cage and ask her forgiveness. I hope she knows she will be the god who reigns on the margins of the mountain lake that will be her new sacred glade. There are visitations and departures. Everything moves just before stillness, just before sleep.
As I lie in that place between this world and the dream, I think of a night in a cabin near Old Hazelton on Highway Sixteen. It was back in the spring of 1969. I was living temporarily with Ken and Alice Belford under the shadow of the mountains on the high valley floor above the Skeena River. Ken and I were loading boxcars at a little sawmill down the road.
I half-dream the late afternoon of an April day back then when we stopped the truck and rescued a thrush that had been running down the narrow bush road in front of us. Its wing had been broken, perhaps by a hawk attack or an owl’s or in some battle with another male in the late days of mating. I remember carrying it back to the cabin. Ken and I drank whiskey and built a cage for the bird out of woven willow wands we’d cut from the swampy side of the creek bed just beyond the cabin. The thrush lay wrapped in a blanket in a cardboard box behind the kitchen stove where Alice was making a stew. She would appear and disappear, finally going to bed in the lean-to.
The two of us wove willow wands and were, for that night, entirely happy in the dream that we were somehow making a place where the thrush could live until its wing was mended. That the broken wing of a wild bird would never heal did not occur to us. All we wanted to do was make some kind of reparation, give something that might resemble love back to a wilderness that was slowly being torn apart by the loggers and the mills, the clear-cuts, and the mines.
It was dawn when the cage was done. It was an artful thing, perhaps six feet high and swollen out at the middle in a woven platform. We both lifted our glasses to the empty bottle and the night and our friendship, then we went to the box behind the stove and lifted out the bird with its bound wing.
It was dead, of course.
I remember our bewilderment, our sudden sorrow.
Ken went to bed in the lean-to where his wife slept fitfully and I sat in my chair and stared at the cage that was now a kind of strange artifact. The sweet contentment we had when we were building it was no longer there, yet I remember looking at the woven willow wicker cage and thinking how beautiful it was. I sat there in a sad wonder at what we had wrought, the dead bird lying on the table’s edge, waiting for the grave I’d dig for it come afternoon.
I lie here in the half-sleep and think back on that time, the arrivals and the departures, that spring running to summer and my leaving the north to head back east on another crazed quest that I knew, even as I drove it, led nowhere, nowhere at all.
I have moved three large boulders into the new shade garden. Ferns and rhododendrons and other plants are in the ground. The pebble path needed some large boulders to balance it. The largest of them weighs over three hundred pounds and the only way I had of moving it was to get on my knees and wiggle it slowly forward to its spot halfway down the path. It took two hours. The other boulders were slightly smaller but no less awkward. My back hurts now and will for a week. Lorna will give me an admonishing I-told-you-so look, but there is nothing to be done about that. I’ve wanted large stones for this part of the garden for years and when I saw these three in the pile beside a farmer’s field I knew they were the ones. They sit in my side garden, looking like they’ve been there since time was imagined.
Now, there’s another rhododen
dron to be moved, five more sword ferns, and an azalea I’ve had in a pot for a year and which did not set buds last fall. It will when I put it beside the largest of the three boulders. The sun will warm the stone all year and the warmth will be passed on to the moist earth. The azalea will benefit from it and some acid fertilizer. This fall will see new buds, next year white flowers.
That is the eternal optimism of the gardener. The struggling plant of spring will find new reasons to bloom the following season. The gods of the garden are always on the gardener’s side so long as he pays obeisance to them. Fortune comes to those who worship in the green worlds. As Virgil said, “Fortunate is the man who has come to know the gods of the countryside.”
We must cultivate the gods of stone and water, plant and animal. How else to explain the sickly rhododendron that blooms profusely after being moved to a different spot? How else to explain what moves a gardener to choose a particular spot? He cannot know the exactness of the right soil, the right light, the right everything. How else but mysterious instinct? And it is the gardener’s instinct the gods direct. That occasionally the move does not work out is only a momentary problem, the fault lying in the gardener and not the god. It is not a judgment by the gods but, rather, an acknowledgment that sometimes magic simply will not work. The sky gods often misjudged old Gaia, the goddess of the earth. Hubris, that Greek excess of pride, is a grievous fault in both gods and men.
I’ve stood in the gathering dusk and seen in the shadows Shakespeare’s “elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves.” The little gods dance their dance on the stones by the pond; they sleep beneath the bracken by the fir. Already they’ve woven their fans among the vines and lilies.