“Want to swing east by the swimming hole and I’ll wait by the south big spruce?” Charlie asked.
“OK—it’s a plan.” All our directions are based on home base, on the cabin. That’s understood.
I backtracked a few hundred meters and then started east down the slope. A half-hour later I turned south, meandering up toward Charlie by the large spruce where we had agreed to meet. I saw some coyote tracks, but also fresh deer tracks. With still half the distance to go, I heard a shot where Charlie was supposed to be waiting. One minute later I heard another shot from the same direction. So now I rushed on and found him standing with a smile beside a fork-horn buck.
We had mutually logged about one hundred hours in the woods this November, during which time we saw deer for a total of about ten seconds, but we had feasted our eyes and ears continually and experienced 359,990 seconds of bonding time to the Hill. Bit by bit, almost every piece of it—every nook and cranny, individual trees, ledges, slopes, thickets, and creeks—is becoming attached to memories that make this home. This was one of them.
As we were admiring our spikehorn, we heard a raven, and then it flew over and called out some more. We left it the entrails and then dragged the deer out to have Jerry tag it at the Weld store, bringing along the now-less-soggy dollar bill that Charlie had stuck up onto the ceiling log by the big black stove to dry that morning. This stove, a Star Kineo, may be over a hundred years old, and it is the heart and hearth of our home. It is what makes the whole hunting enterprise possible in the first place. It is the hub, like the spider’s web from where she hunts.
Fire, Hearth, and Home
THE FIRST THING CHARLIE AND I DO EVERY NIGHT WHEN we get back to the cabin is make or revive our fire in the stove. This is also the second thing I do every morning as soon as I get up there now, in spring, summer, fall, and winter. Our big iron stove is centrally located. It is next to a thick white pine tree trunk from the edge of the clearing that is inserted into the center of the cabin. I lift off one of the four round stove covers, put in a strip of birch bark and some dry kindling, light the bark with a match, and a minute or two after the cover is back on, the fire comes to life.
Some truths come to you when you squint and try to peer far into the fog-shrouded future. Others stand up clear and strong in front of you. The role of fire in making a home is one of the latter.
Flash back to fifty years earlier: Bodo Muche, a newcomer to Africa like myself, and I had met a week earlier in Arusha, a small town at the foot of Mount Meru in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). He hired an old tobacco-chewing m’zee (“grizzled old man” in Swahili) and his two rugged spear-toting sons, Karino and Mirisho, and together we started at dawn and hiked up on buffalo trails through dense heath and old forest. We reached the mountain’s ancient volcanic crater by late afternoon. There was no sign of anyone ever having been there, but we saw plenty of fresh sign of Cape buffalo, rhinos, and elephants. Descending into the crater, we were enveloped in fog and saw low but thickly gnarled trees with huge spreading limbs that were shrouded with dark green cushions of moss and long flowing lichens. Parts of the level crater floor looked like a flower-sprinkled grazing meadow, and we found a copse of woods there next to a shallow pond. We needed water, so we camped there.
We picked our spot under a big tree, and Karino and Mirisho left with their machetes to gather dry wood. A fire seemed an obvious priority, and we wanted logs that would burn a long time. Within the last month (when I was there in 1962), a friend had been gored and trampled by a buffalo, another chased up a tree by an elephant, and I (or at least my scent and sound) had been charged by a rhino that had apparently been nearsighted but frightening nevertheless. Our pond had trampled mud around it from all of these animals coming to drink there.
Everything seemed suddenly less threatening after we got a fire going. We gathered around it and drew closer. I doubt if we would have slept that night if it were not for that fire. We heard occasional splashes and sometimes the breaking of twigs. But we felt safe by the fire. We just assumed, as though by instinct, that it provided safety.
We had not brought enough food with us and had to shoot a bushbuck.
In the evening after we got it, we sat most of one night around the fire to cut it up and to share it by roasting the meat on sticks. During that time we swapped tales. Fire had made this magically wonderful but scary place hospitable, bringing us together, giving safety and food. The setting and the occasion seemed primal. Where else but around the warmth and safety of the flame could we, a million or more years ago, have plotted the hunt, recruited helpers, shared information, planned, celebrated, flirted, all while sharing good food and being congratulated if not admired for being a good provider and/or cook?
Evidence of ancient campfires is hard to find, and even more difficult to distinguish from that of wildfires. However, new methods are allowing us to determine the temperatures of the fires from the remains, and in conjunction with their placements (such as in deep caves), solid evidence now shows that we used fire as far back as at least a million years, predating our species to at least as early as Homo erectus. The latest evidence came from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, where bone was burned deep in caves at the typically high temperatures of cooking fires. Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University, posits that fire, which allowed the cooking of tubers and meat and facilitated digestion and therefore provided a new source of high-energy food for us, was an evolutionary tipping point that drove larger brain development and thus spawned Homo sapiens from our apelike predecessors.
When a troupe of chimps chases a monkey up a tree where it has only a limited number of escape routes, the troupe can surround it to cut off those escape routes and then catch it “by hand.” However, such hunting is not possible in open habitat where we evolved, where prolonged high-energy chases were required. Furthermore, even if and after we killed an antelope, it would have been visible and could have been taken from us by the much stronger carnivores, lions, leopards, hyenas, dog packs. In order for us to utilize the prey, we may have had to bring it “home” to keep and to cook it, in a nesting place where the family resided. It seems likely that no real hunting culture among apelike creatures could have been possible until they had solved the problem of a haven, such as a cliffside, or cave. A fire there would have sealed the deal, because it would have been used to guard the entrance. A fire, though, would have to be tended, and the safe home it provided would have, as in mole rats, bees, termites, and all other social animals, provided the means for division of labor. The strongest runners chased the prey. Others who were less able could now stay home for their own safety, and to provide service by minding the kids, tending the fire, and processing and cooking the meat. The hearth became the home.
Keeping fire, and presumably much later also creating it, would have been a precious skill. No other animal has ever mastered it. But before we invented the tool to make and then catch a spark and turn it into a fire, we had to “understand” fire. We had to know its behavior, its quirks and characteristics. Otherwise we would have had no idea what to do with a spark, to make it grow into a tiny flickering flame, and to tenderly nurture it, keep it alive, and make it grow. These skills are not rote. They are built on understanding or “empathy” for the fire, as though it were alive. Our understanding of fire required something akin to what psychologists and behavioral biologists call “theory of mind,” the capacity mentally to place ourselves into the life of another being or thing, which allows us to predict how it might react. A possible precursor of that capacity may have been our intense social nature, which was also a precondition for our hunting tradition requiring us to track animals. The fire then allowed us even more opportunity to be social and to learn from others, which, with the new nutrient boost of meat and fats, promoted brain growth to create an unprecedented spiral of evolution of intelligence.
One of the most important things we had to learn about fire, even before we learned how to create it, was t
o keep it enclosed and isolated as though it were a dangerous beast. Fire is obedient, but only if we adhere strictly to certain rules. If we do, it makes life under otherwise severe conditions possible. We learned to enclose fire to control it, and for tens of thousands of years its place was central in our homes, usually held between slightly separated rocks. Now we have learned to enclose it in a metal box. Judging from the many guests at my cabin, it seems that few of us are capable of handling fire even when it is enclosed in a stove. Even when caged, a fire still has a strong tendency to punish by producing suffocating plumes of black smoke, or by not consuming the fuel offered and then simply dying.
Our forebears were undoubtedly well aware of the irritating habit of smoke to seemingly follow you when you spend much time near it. To help make the smoke go up you need to build baffles around it; you essentially build a house around the fire and leave a hole at the top for the smoke to escape. In this way the fire is less easily put out by rain, the smoke escapes from the top rather than into the area where you are sitting, and you retain more of its heat. Our hearth has traditionally been three stones arranged in a triangle, which may be placed in the center of a surrounding structure made from brush, animal skins, bark, or sod. We learned that we could burn the ends of two or three logs and keep pushing the ends inward, to feed the fire to keep it alive.
What better illustration of this method is there than the tipi, perhaps the best home that has ever been invented? The Native Americans, in their highly original design, were able to capture an open fire in several buffalo hides on a few lodgepole pine poles. The smoke went straight up and out a smoke hole which, with two projecting earlike flaps, could be closed during rain. The tipi was used by the Arapaho, Arikara, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Gros Ventre, Kiowa, Mandan, Pawnee, Plains Cree, as well as the Sioux, and was adopted by the early white explorers in western America, including Buffalo Bill, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson. The tipi was easy to make, and easy to disassemble and carry to and re-erect at a new place. It was warm inside it in winter, cool in summer, well ventilated, and was sometimes artfully decorated, but its essential feature was that it contained a central fire. Although especially designed for a roving life following the buffalo herds, the tipi was also used for “permanent” settlements and for overwintering on the prairies. It is currently still in style with those who appreciate its beauty and practicality.
For most of our history, homes, if we built any, were like a cage to hold and keep our fire and/or its heat. Eventually with larger homes we had a “fireplace,” first by cementing our rocks around it, and then by putting it into a cast-iron cage (the first iron stoves began to be used in quantity around 1728). However, enclosing the fire to some extent defeated its purpose, since the smoke and heat were not easily separated. After Benjamin Franklin in 1741 invented a stove with an enclosed fire where the fumes were circulated around a baffle to yield more heat with less smoke than in an open fireplace, the physical contact between fire and home started to become divorced in parts of the Western world. Recent technological advances in design have greatly helped to capture more heat and to direct the smoke away and out in a flue and then a chimney. And now, with central heating, and outdoor wood burners, the hearth and the home have become significantly separated. However, we may still maintain symbolic semblances with fake fires, and thus the artificial has become real.
All over the world people still gather around “the hearth,” so named for the Greek goddess Hestia. We are the animal that has learned to make, and live with, and use, fire for much more than cooking. Previous claims that we are separate from other animals by our ability to reason, to have emotional lives, to make tools, to anticipate, have fallen by the wayside in the path of science. Association with and control of fire, though, still stands as a unique Homo trait. And so it may be a, or even the, defining human trait, since at least (somewhat arbitrarily) four designated human species, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis, H. floresiensis, and H. sapiens, apparently used it.
A fire, depending on how skilled we are in controlling it, is a centering place to hold us around it. When we could not carry it with us, we would have been bound to it; we could not go far from it. However, after we came to depend on fire, we eventually would have learned to control it to the point that we could carry it with us, such as in coals surrounded by ash enclosed in perhaps wet hide or bark.
The campfire almost literally made our home a movable one. Perhaps it permitted us to leave the womb of Africa and to spread out and eventually inhabit the planet. A fire allows us to go to distant, seemingly inhospitable places because it can be our castle, kitchen, social center, and school.
Jack London in his famous story “To Build a Fire” dramatized how important the control of fire is for human life in the north in winter. I loved his story when I was a teenager, because there was scarcely anything I liked to do better than go out into the woods in the winter, build a fire, and roast something on it, preferably with some of my buddies. The fire allowed us to get and stay away from our domineering housemother at our boarding school. But ultimately, most of the globe (except for a lowland belt around the equator) would have been uninhabitable by us were it not for our use of fire. Perhaps this “mobile home” allowed us to spread around the globe, because it gave us the means to home almost wherever we went. It was not the reason, but the means.
Modern genetic techniques have revealed the entire human population before 1.2 million years ago was a mere eighteen thousand five hundred individuals. We were then restricted to Africa and had remained homebodies for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet finally, only about fifty or sixty thousand years ago, perhaps due to some invention of home-making (such as making fire?), a small band of us left Africa. We know it was only a few individuals, because the geographic genetic patterns of the current human species show a remarkable similarity, despite superficial differences of “race” that developed later. This small population originating in central Africa, after spreading to southern Africa and crossing north to leave Africa, came to and through Europe and Asia, and from Asia one branch spread across the Pacific and into Australia and New Zealand while another crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska during or before the last Ice Age ten thousand years ago. From there these by-now Asians, soon to become Paleo-Indians, spread quickly over the North American continent and also quickly moved all the way down through South America to Tierra del Fuego. In terms of our human history, this settlement has struck many as a mass migration of a restless herd, and it does not seem to jibe with our “other” biological identity as homebodies. But let’s think about that.
Almost all over the world, most people live generation after generation in the same locality, because almost nobody wants to go elsewhere when home is as good as it can get. Even in America, perhaps through a filter of restlessness, as most of us are descendants of people from other continents, those who have found a good home tend to stay there. At the boundary of my hometown, Wilton, in Maine, is a sign that reads “Wilton, a good place to live, work and play.” And people have always stayed here, if they could. The surnames on the gravestones of the original settlers over two centuries ago are much the same as those of the people who are still here. So if we humans are so prone to stay in place, how can one reconcile our species’ takeover of continent after continent, until there was hardly a tiny island in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean that we didn’t colonize? If there are huge advantages to staying home, why did we risk dangers to spread widely? It doesn’t make sense—or does it?
We don’t have to look far into history to see clearly that the spread of our species all over the globe was not just an odd ancient phenomenon. It is one that is still in plain sight. By far the majority of the people living in my town, and in every town in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand, are derived from recent immigrants from thousands of kilometers away. Millions have streamed to America from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the migrations are continuing at a rapid pace. Both the Chinese
and the Romans erected massive walls to stem the flow, and we are now using the latest technologies to accomplish the same. True, we now have steamboats, railroads, and jet planes and means to get to and on them. But maybe that is the point: we have not changed, but we have quite suddenly invented new means, and that has made the spread possible.
We are not dealing with an either/or reality. We are not either wanderers or settlers. The example of the migratory locusts and many other insects may be extreme, but it does show us that in one situation animals are homebodies, and in another they are not. All depends on costs versus benefits, and means. In insects, the same individuals that we would in no way classify as migratory may be suited to wander at one age of their development and be strictly settled down in one place in another; the juvenile stays to feed and grow while the adult has wings and can and does wander far. The same separation of two behavioral tendencies simply by age applies to us. In general, young adults tend to have the travel itch, and they explore. There are advantages to some to move on, and for others to stay. We are like the frogs that reproduce in a puddle: those that strike out may find a lake and start a new population there, or perish. It all depends on what might be out there that we hope or expect to find. But why leave when we have found a home? Is it just by pull, or is push involved as well?
We are like the birds that stay at home all winter when they can, but leave when they have to. We differ from them in one major respect, though. The chickadee has a very specific habitat requirement. Take it out of that habitat to which it is specialized and it dies. Provided we have access to the hearth or its equivalent, we can live almost anywhere, from the Arctic deep freeze to innumerable isolated tropical islands, and we don’t need to come back. But again, why did we not just stay on our home island rather than leapfrogging into the known dangers of the sea, where untold numbers of us undoubtedly perished?
The Homing Instinct Page 26