On the edge you mustn’t lie
Or the little grey wolf will come
And will nip you on the tum
And will nip you on the tum
Tug you off into the wood
Underneath the willow root
I feel a wet, cool line drip down my stomach. When we go around the table, I see her face. She stares at me in a way that is terrifying, as though I am being dragged by my hair. She has one walleye and one piercer. No categorical questions, inquiries into age, or preferred colour or animal. I suddenly see that her skirts are hitched up and she sits with her knees apart, feet on the seat of her chair, like a bird. Her hand, resting on the table, is upward. The thumb and index finger touching, forming an O. They will take it, she says, in a thin whisper voice. They will steal. A sickening feeling. A sharp pain and waves of flushing heat and nausea. I turn and run, Tacita behind me. We pass by the blind in the window, cracked in a half smile. I hear, Pretty thing, the way she runs.
Our shoes scattering across the floor with a graceful urgency. I run so fast that I fall on the uneven stones down the lane outside and skin my palms. Tacita stops and takes my hands in hers.
What is it, I? What did you see?
My breath is hard to find. You didn’t see it?
I ran because you did.
An amethyst.
There was an amethyst?
Yes.
What do they symbolize again? I think amethysts—
No, Tacita.
Ivory, what?
That woman had an amethyst the size of a human heart between her legs.
Tacita takes out cigarettes, but her hands shake too much to light one. She fumbles the pack, avoiding my eyes.
I am filled with an unnameable fear. Take what? Steal what? Whatever she was trying to say, Tas, something bad is going to happen. I know it. Did you hear how she changed her voice? And that stone. With her one terrifying eye she looked me goddamn straight in the face.
We take a tacit vow of silence around the channeller. I recognize the fear in Tacita’s eyes. It is the same as my own. It is the first time I realize that Tacita and I have the same eyes.
REINDEER
Rangifer tarandus. Reindeer husbandry; day by day, lichen. Sense of coherence of reindeer herders and other Samis in comparison to other Swedish citizens. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, Vol. 72.
THE SKY IS EDGING TO BLUE. Skeet stands at the kitchen sink, high-pitched clinking and the low rumble of submerged objects. He relieves me from the mundane routine, these ritualistic gestures that over time take on small ceremony. He finishes the dishes and wipes his hands on his pants. In the Yukon he had said that he was amazed at how I always knew which direction to walk in without frightening the animals. He wanted to know where I learned it. Lapland, I tell him. Reindeer there have been hunted for forty thousand years. They know a few things about avoiding humans, sensitive to the very smell of us. You get to know wind, and approach, and how to hide your humanness.
It was a disaster that trip, I told him, at a time when I could scarcely afford disaster. I didn’t know the protocol, and had failed to apply for a permit to research in the field there. When I returned, the conservatory was furious. It’s the kind of misstep that can end funding. I had flown over Moscow, over St. Petersburg, its dark rivers, and over thick leafless forests, tangled black. It is where I met Ondine. At the only tavern in a small town in Lapland.
She is with radical cartographers. After a few weeks fog makes aviation difficult, and, grounded, they install themselves at the tavern, run by a Sami ex–reindeer herder, a few short hours from the Arctic Circle. The bar accepts gold dust as payment for liquor and has thickly lacquered knotty pine everywhere, the kind with black routed edges. Cups go cold, ashtrays overflow, liquor is consumed. We don’t talk about the weather.
Do you know that the Finns have their own unit of measure? Ondine says. Poronkusema. It literally translates as reindeer’s piss. She looks up from the map. It measures about seven and a half kilometres. Apparently how long it takes a reindeer to travel before it has to relieve itself.
It’s true, I say, unlacing my boots and rubbing my toes to get warmth back. They have small bladders. Comparatively.
Are you a reindeer expert? she says, a smile breaking across her face.
God no. I began with birds and then started researching based on the communication, not the animal. I had an echolocation phase for a while in the seventies, marine animals, which then led to bats. I focus mainly on birds now.
There’s not a lot of birds around here, she says.
I’ve been recording reindeer near the easternmost part of the park. At the sound lab, we’ve created baseline data so that changes to sites can be compared. Forests can look unchanged, but recordings of soundscapes, over time, can reveal things that aren’t obvious to the eye. I’ll take the recordings back to the lab when I’m done.
Where is the lab?
Oslo, I say. I had to do a lot to convince the university of my animal language project. I published papers, passed stringent peer review, made the rounds of scholarly conferences. Eventually I built a lab out of a white square they gave me, with two small windows that face Kuba, a greenspace with tall maples. I had to acquire all the instrumentation, rewire the voltage to accommodate the sound equipment. Half the time I forgot to eat, and ended up resorting to those revolting nutritional shakes, the kind they give convalescents. All the reels of analogue tapes and books of discs are being catalogued digitally. The sound data and the cymatics images are being translated into computer-generated spectrograms. The music of insects, vibrations of bones, everything from hummingbirds to whales, I tell her. Every single object in the lab has a purpose. There is not a lot of space, but it doesn’t really matter. It is a self-contained world, possibly the closest thing to a home I’ve ever known. Ondine nods. It still amazes me how surprising sound is. You know if you slow down a hummingbird chirp, it sounds like you’re listening to a dinosaur.
So, what will you do with the recordings, this dictionary, when you are done with it?
There is a movement in Japan, I tell her, where people nominate the most beautiful soundscapes. Thousands and thousands of people responded. The way the waves hit a particular shell from a sea creature on a particular beach, they said. The queenly creak from roots to sky that a particular forest of pinewood makes swaying in the wind, they said. And so the association went to listen to each sound, and if they agreed, it would become one of the most beautiful soundscapes in Japan. These places are now protected. They are like heritage sites. If you wanted to build a factory next to one, you would probably have a hard time. They are protecting the environment by using sound democratically. It’s exactly what I want the dictionary to do for animals.
She nods, her eyes strikingly bright.
What about you? Where did you last fly?
Chernobyl. When people moved out the animals moved in, she says. She was there to chart the zone that has become an accidental wilderness. The levels of radiation meant that first there were no humans. Fifty thousand people had fifteen minutes to leave. But birds, and wild boar, elk, deer, bison, lynx, and wolves all came back. They thrive in a deadly forest where the reactor still smoulders. Now there is a ring of silent fire that encircles the pine woods, the abandoned apartment buildings. Some people still live there. They choose the post-nuclear world, the winding forests and dark bogs. They say they are not afraid of dying early.
What are they afraid of?
Modern life, she says.
Ondine is like no other pilot I have flown with. They are always men. Either too quiet or not quiet enough. She calls everyone she flies with pal. She picked it up when she flew in Texas. She says that around the pilots, the less female the better. Mostly, she says, they are pretty macho. Not one of them would look me in the eye like I belonged there. She takes a sip. My co-pilot wore a cowboy shirt. A leather belt with a big silver buckle that had an oversized star in the middle like a bu
ll’s eye. Stiff, dark jeans with a perfect white seam down the centre of each leg, where no doubt his wife had ironed them into existence. The seams were distracting. I remember thinking, How do you get laid in those jeans?
People get laid in jeans? I think but don’t say.
Anyway, she goes on, it turned out his wife was cheating on him. When she left him, she demanded half of everything he owned. He was so pissed I was scared to fly with him. And then one day he flew under a bridge in a fully populated town. He lost everything. His job, his licence, every single penny. And he couldn’t have been happier. That was his plan. To give her half of nothing.
Ondine is tall and lanky, with wide-apart eyes and hair now flecked with white that she wears up, keeping it back with a clip near her temple. She has one grown son, Lucien. When she is flying, even when he was small, she says she is so engrossed in what she is doing she forgets she is a mother.
Flying was always at the centre of my dreams, she says. It didn’t come to me naturally, but once I dreamed it, I knew it. I went to the hangar the next day and could suddenly fly. My instructor just looked at me stunned.
Did anyone try talking you out of pursuing such a dangerous profession?
Like who?
I don’t know—parents?
I never knew my parents, she says. I was left at a convent in Paris, raised by nuns.
I know about the nuns, I tell her.
When I turned eighteen, they pushed open the doors and directed me to the street. Your time here is up, they said. Bon courage. Whatever you do, do not become a prostitute. I worked a bunch of destroyingly boring jobs until one day I went up in a plane. I loved the sense of freedom. I find it impossible to tolerate anything slow. To be passive. So I spent every single franc I’d ever earned, liberating them from my pocket, large as folded flags, into the air. She drains her glass.
We drink several more glasses of whisky. Ondine finally says, All my hours logged, all your animal languages. Are we just like everyone else, she asks, obsessed with collecting things?
What does everyone collect? I ask, genuinely interested.
I don’t know, she shrugs. Friends, money, objects. I think it comes from a fear of dying. As though things will somehow hold you here.
Well what does have permanence?
Good question, she says, fishing in her bag and pulling out reading glasses. Apparently not my eyesight. God, I despise getting old.
Which part?
All of it. Feeling like I’m running out of time and there is something I have yet to do.
What would you want to do?
I don’t know. That’s the problem, she says. And then you lose your looks. All these seams on my face. She takes another sip. Your powers flag.
It’s true, I think. When you are old you are transparent. Is it possible to hide and yet be annoyed when no one notices you? I was almost hit by a car crossing the road to this tavern and I thought, I don’t want to die here, run over like a dog. Beauty is wasted on the young. Like leaves in autumn at their most brilliant, when the tree doesn’t need them. But it’s just some inches of skin, I say, realizing how truly indifferent I am to minor vanities. All women eventually become invisible in the same way. For someone like her, there is more to lose. Where does the thing that is left over after the attractiveness has served its purpose go? But what I say to her is, Aren’t you bothered more by not being called upon to give your opinion? Or, by eventually not being here at all? Besides, I tell her truthfully, you are still beautiful.
She laughs. When something is still something, it’s not.
Ondine produces a small glass jar of lip balm. She unscrews the lid and holds it in front of me. I shake my head just as the lid falls from her fingers and rolls on its edge along the wooden planked floor. It wobbles loudly and trundles into a large pair of brown leather boots.
I feel dazed by the alcohol. I realize that when I was describing the dictionary to Ondine, for a moment, I felt a twist of regret that it began as something else, and that I had to alter it to see it through. That I let go of art because it meant Tacita. It meant Lev. With painting, I felt a sense of completion, laying down brushes, standing back to look at a canvas. I couldn’t really explain it to her, but the project doesn’t just involve collecting data. It involves releasing messages stored in the voices of animals that represent the memories of all we have lost. Edison believed that after we die, memories disperse or swarm like bees and enter other human skulls.
Ondine looks at me intently. You know what I think? she says, her expression suddenly becoming serious. I think that we are all fallen creatures who once knew how to fly.
I excuse myself and in the lavatory splash cold water on my face though the tiny room itself is sealed off and startlingly arctic. The loo paper has a ghastly scent and is dyed pink with perforated rose patterns, discarded in a pileup of squares like deleaved cabbage in the white plastic pail beside the toilet. It smells of floor cleaner and cold. I have spent so much time alone. Though it strikes me how hard it is to really be alone. It is one thing humanity has never really valued. I remain still in front of the mirror. Temps morts, as the French critics say of the Italian filmmakers when they keep the camera running after the acting has finished to record the moments of error. The back of a head, an empty room that waits for an actor to drift back in. They see what the error is. The error is life. My own eyes meet my own eyes. I’ve been looking at Ondine’s bright eyes for so long I am almost surprised by mine. They are shining black. They tell the deep time of things. I am suddenly reminded of Tacita. How much living she has missed. Being in Ondine’s company makes me think of her. Her courage, her heart, her brain. I feel the sharp agony of her absence. Why did you have to go? I think. You have been gone so long. Come back. I can’t remember the last time I’ve spoken with anyone, really spoken to them. And suddenly I think I might be crying a little.
When I return to the shiny wood banquette, the suffocating heat in the bar hits like a change of season, making the time lapse feel pronounced. There is a sticky smell of liquor and stale cigarettes. While sitting in one spot you can become deeply intoxicated without knowing it. There is nothing to measure your sobriety against. How long was I in the bathroom? Ondine has gone. She leaves a note written on the white scallop-edged paper placemat, weighted by a triangular glass ashtray. The leather boots say the weather is clearing tomorrow. She has gone to sober up and suggests I do the same. I wonder for a moment if this is a euphemism for a sexual encounter. I know there used to be talk at the university. Has she slept with a researcher in the field? Is she a sapphist? I speak of it to no one, of course, how lovers leave me empty. Why talk and eat and make up other arrangements with other people? Why look at each other from across a table to see that you know nothing of each other? We all just tell each other stories about our lives, decorating them with the most compelling things. For me, everything is too difficult to explain. I don’t want to tell my story, I want to listen. When I am alone, I work with astonishing energy. As soon as I am at a social gathering with others, I become sluggish, I fall into lethargy. I am lucky. Happy to find that the work is the best expression of who I am. My eyes slide to the left where the bartender is quarrelling good-naturedly with three men on barstools, wolfing down plates of god knows what. The men are small and pale and presumably half my age. They are a bearded, cheerful people, though addicted to spirits.
We will meet at dawn, her note says.
But we don’t. A blast rips through my dream. I find myself thrown from the bed. Snow dusts up the night sky. There has been an explosion. The nickel plant glows orange, hotter than lava. The conservationists and cartographers are rounded up and questioned by the authorities and made to show their papers. Everything that was once in order, now is not. This curious system of exchange that occurs when authority is threatened is far too familiar to me. It has the internal logic of a nightmare.
I am held in a small, brutally lit, thin-walled room, the low buzz of the fluorescent tube
s above my head. One man asks me to detail my “activities,” which would be frightening if the other man hadn’t seemed so utterly bored as to be cleaning the dirt under his fingernail with his thumbnail. My head pounds, eyes burning. It is hot and dry in this dingy little room. My activities. They largely consist of lying silently on my stomach, cold on the dry snow in a husked silence. Time tripwired. They tell me I am here illegally. They have no record of a permit; I cannot take this data out of their country. I close my eyes. I forgot about the permit. I’ve been given money to look for signs of the effects of industrial activity on the reindeer and their habitat. Land use changes are the greatest threat to wild reindeer. There is so little funding for this study that I considered sleeping in the truck, which I have done before. Avoiding losing daylight hours setting up a tent. But here it is far too cold.
They empty out my bag, full of cassettes. Their fingers pull at the reels of shiny brown magnetic ribbon that form tangled heaps on the table. Later Ondine will laugh and say, Well that was a bust. The university will not find it funny. But right now I think of staying up all night, analyzing all the sounds because I need to know what they mean by morning. Weeks of research. I feel like crying. But I don’t. It is exactly what they might expect a woman biologist to do.
In the field there is so much white my eyes see things that are not here. The same way someone shipwrecked who stares at the sea long enough will start to see a sail rise above the horizon. The cold is bitter but preferable, they tell me, to the swarms of mosquitoes so thick in the summer that they duct-tape the cracks of the windows. So thick that you swallow insects when you talk.
The scrub fir forests are misshapen from weather, flecked with lichen. I have started to anticipate where the reindeer will be. They are quiet animals but the herds become vocal when there are new calves. The females grunt softly while the males sometimes roar loudly or emit a rasping, guttural noise. I am deposited here each day via a wooden sledge hitched to a herder’s snowmobile. The reindeer herder wears fur boots that stick out like paws from underneath his Gore-Tex pants. Reindeer hair is a good insulator, he says, it being hollow.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 9