Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

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  The Counselors know what is to be known. Red Ginger, blonde Kimmy, and beautiful black Sue: they know the vices of Pal, and how to keep Trigger from putting her head down and drinking for ten minutes from every creek. They

  Horse Camp A 145

  strike the great shoulders smartly, "Aw, get over, you big lunk!" They know how to swim underwater, how to sing in harmony, how to get seconds, and when a shoe is loose. They know where they are. They know where the rest of Horse Camp is. "Home Creek runs into Little River here," Kimmy says, drawing lines in the soft dust with a redwood twig that breaks. "Senior Girls here, Senior Boys across there, Junior Birdmen about here." -- "Who needs 'em?" says Sue, yawning. "Come on, who's going to help me walk the mares?"

  They were all around the campfire on Quartz Meadow after the long first day of the First Overnight The counselors were still singing, but very soft, so soft you almost couldn't hear them, lying in the sleeping bag listening to One Spot stamp and Trigger snort and the shifting at the pickets, standing in the fine, cool alpine grass listening to the soft voices and the sleepers shifting and later one coyote down the mountain singing all alone.

  'Nothing wrong with you. Get up!" said Meredy, and slapped her hip. Turning her long delicate head to him with a deprecating gaze, Philly got to her feet. She stood a moment, shuddering the reddish silk of her flank as if to dislodge flies, tested her left foreleg with caution, and then walked on, step by step. Step by step, watching Norah went with her. Inside her body there was still a deep trembling. As she passed him, the handler just nodded. 'You're all right," he meant She was all right

  Freedom, the freedom to run, freedom is to run. Freedom is galloping. What else can it be? Only other ways to run, imitations of galloping across great highlands with the wind. Oh Philly sweet Philly my love!

  If Ev and Trigger couldn't keep up she'd slow down and come round in a

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  while, after a while, over there, across the long long field of grass, once she had learned this by heart and knew it forever, the purity, the pure joy.

  "Right leg Nor," said Meredy. And passed on to Cass and Tammy.

  You have to start with the right fore. Everything else is all. right Freedom depends on this, that you start with the right fore, that long leg well balanced on its elegant pastern, that you set down that tiptoe middle-fingernail so hard and round, and spurn the dirt. Highstepping, trot past old Meredy, who always hides his smile

  Shoulder to shoulder, she and £v, in the long neat of afternoon, in a trance of light, across the home creek in the dry wild oats and cow parsley of the Long Pasture. "I was afraid before I came here," thinks Norah, Incredulous, remembering childhood. She leans her head against Ev's firm and silken side. The sting of small flies awakens, the swish of long tails sends to sleep. Down by the creek in a patch of coarse grass Philly grazes and dozes. Sue comes striding by, winks wordless, beautiful as a burning coal, lazy and purposeful, bound for the shade of the willows. Is it worth getting up to go down to get your feet in the cool water? Next year Sal will be too old for a camper, but can come back as a counselor, come back here. Norah will come back a second-year camper, Sal a counselor. They will be here. This is what freedom is, what goes on, the sun in summer, the wild grass, coming back each year.

  Coming back from the Long Pack Trip to Stevens Mountain weary and dirty, thirsty and in bliss, coming down from the high places, in line, Sue jogging just in front of her and Ev half asleep behind her, some sound or motion caught and turned Norah's head to look across the alpine

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  field. On the far side under dark firs a line of horses, mounted and with packs -- "Look!"

  Ev snorted, Sue flicked her ears and stopped. Norah halted in line behind her, stretching her neck to see. She saw her sister going first in the distant line, the small head proudly borne. She was walking lightfoot and easy, fresh, just starting up to the high passes of the mountain. On her back a young man sat erect, his fine, fair head turned a little aside, to the forest. One hand was on his thigh, the other on the reins, guiding her. Norah called out and then broke from the line, going to Sal, calling out to her. "No, no, no, no!" she called. Behind her Ev and then Sue called to her, "Nor! Nor!"

  Sal did not hear or heed. Going straight ahead, the color of ivory, distant in the clear, dry light, she stepped into the shadow of the trees. The others and their riders followed, jogging one after the other till the last was gone.

  Norah had stopped in the middle of the meadow, and stood in grass in sunlight Flies hummed.

  She tossed her head, turned, and trotted back to the line. She went along it from one to the next, teasing, chivying, Kimmy yelling at her to get back in line, till Sue broke out of line to chase her and she ran, and then Ev began to run, whinnying shrill, and then Cass, and Philly, and all the rest, the whole bunch, cantering first and then running flat out, running wild, racing, heading for Horse Camp and the Long Pasture, for Meredy and the long evening standing in the fenced field, in the sweet dry grass, in the fetlock-shallow water of the home creek

  (1986)

  Four Cat Poems

  / have a dream farm which I visit at need, to go around stocking the bams, yards, and pastures. The first livestock I bring in is usually a Jersey cow and three or four sheep-Jacobs, maybe. A donkey or two. A couple of riding horses -- now the farm enlarges and grows woods, hills, long trails... And, if only somebody wanted to work them, you can't just have them standing around, but oh, a pair of Shires! to see forged

  for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

  Sometimes a llama. Several llamas. Rabbits. Or a whole acre, fenced carefully, of guinea pigs.

  Dogs, of course. Yard dogs. Large dogs. Nothing small that yaps. Large, lean, lazy deerhounds. Have to pull ticks off long soft ears while hound looks mournful. A standard poodle, most kind and courteous being. A big red chow dog Tao dog But listen, you dogs, if you don't treat the cats right, you're out. Understand?

  All cats are balloons. All cats are petunias. All cats are mangold-wurzels. All cats are yin enough. All cats guide me.

  M

  tfj&fjiBm

  151

  Tabby Lorenzo

  The small cat smells of bitter rue and autumn night His ears are scarred.

  His dark footpads are like hard flowers.

  On my knee he rests entirely trusting and entirely strange, a messenger to all indoors from the gardens of danger.

  Black Leonard in Negative Space

  All that surrounds the cat is not the cat, is all that is not the cat, is all, is everything, except the animal. It will rejoin without a seam

  when he is dead. To know that no-space is to know what he does not, that time is space for love and pain. He does not need to know it

  (1984)

  Four Cat Poems -153 A Conversation with a Silence What kept you out so late my love?

  I was running, I was running in the dark.

  Dawn and raining when you came home.

  The trees are clouds and roads to me. I run the sweet dirt-darkness in the rain and up where leafy chirping sleep-warmths nestle their blood for me. I meet my enemies below: the White One, the Singer.

  What does your brother watch from the window?

  Ghosts in the other garden.

  I don't see ghosts. I go farther

  along the cloud-roads

  to kill where darkness branches in the rain.

  (1986)

  (1978)

  154ABUFFALO GALS

  For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson A black and white cat

  on May grass waves his tail, suns his beHy among wallflowers.

  I am reading a Chinese poet

  called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.

  The cat is aware of the writing of swallows on the white sky.

  We are both old and doing what pleases us in the garden. Now I am writing

  and the cat

  is sleeping.

  Whos
e poem is this?

  IX

  (1982)

  "SchrOdinger's Cat" and "The Author of the Acacia Seeds"

  "SchrOdinger's Cat" isn't exactly an animal story, except in this respect: The cat, which for Erwin Schro'dinger was a parable-cat, a figment-cat, the amusing embodiment of a daring hypothesis, enters the story as an actual, biagraphico-historical cat (his name was Laurel, and his visit during the writing of the story is described exactly as [during the time that] it occurred), and so changes the thought-experiment, and its results, profoundly. So it is a story about animal presence -- and absence.

  So the real presence of an animal in a laboratory -- that is, an animal perceived by the experimenting scientist not as an object, nor as a subject in the sense of the word 'subject of the experi-menf (as in Nazi experiments in pain on human 'subjects'), but as a subject in the philosophical/grammatical sense of a sentient existence of the same order as the scientist's existence -- so such presence and perception in a laboratory where experiments are performed upon animals would profoundly change the nature, and probably the results, of the experiments.

  'The Author of the Acacia Seeds" records the entirely fictional results of such 'subjectivism' carried rather farther than seems probable. It grew in part out of the arguments over the experiments in language acquisition by great apes (in which, of course, if the ape is not approached as a grammatical subject, failure of the experiment is guaranteed). Some linguists deny the capacity of apes to talk in quite the same spirit in which their intellectual forebears denied the capacity of women to think If these great men are threatened by Koko the gorilla speaking a little ASL, how would they feel reading a lab report written by the rat?

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  158 JT BUFFALO GALS Schrddingsr's

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  Schrcxiinger's Cat

  AS THINGS APPEAR TO BE COMING TO SOME sort of climax I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast

  On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite

  hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together, and by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, "Well what's wrong with a person trying to express themselves?" The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. "My wife has great legs."

  A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow torn with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers about their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.

  Where?

  Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing but almost anything is worth telling In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam's Disease. It is incurable except by total decapitation. I even like to dream when

  asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just lying there. Now here I am, lying here. Hard at it

  Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and cheeping like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves: rather like fine chicken- wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled.

  So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving This grief is with me still. I fear it is part of me, like foot or loin or eye, or may even be myself: for I seem to have no other self, nothing further, nothing that lies outside the borders of grief.

  Yet I don't know what I grieve for my wife? my husband? my children, or myself? I can't remember. Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note and the harmonic rings along the mandolin-strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes. Some note keeps playing that makes me want to cry; but what for? I am not certain.

  The yellow cat, who may have belonged to the couple that broke up, is dreaming His paws twitch now and then, and once he makes a small, suppressed remark with his mouth shut I wonder what a cat dreams of, and to whom he was speaking just then. Cats seldom waste words. They are quiet beasts. They keep their counsel, they reflect They reflect all day, and at night their eyes reflect Overbred Siamese cats maybe as noisy as little dogs, and then people say, "They're talking" but the noise is farther from speech than is the deep silence of the hound or the tabby. All this cat can say is meow, but maybe in his silences he will suggest to me what it is that I have lost, what I am grieving for. I have a feeling that he knows. That's why he came here. Cats look out for Number One.

  It was getting awfully hot. I mean, you could touch less

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  and less. The stove-burners, for instance; now I know that stove-burners always used to get hot, that was their final cause, they existed in order to get hot But they began to get hot without having been turned on. Electric units or gas rings, there they'd be when you came into the kitchen for breakfast, all four of them glaring away, the air above them shaking like clear jelly with the heatwaves. It did no good to turn them off, because they weren't on in the first place. Besides, the knobs and dials were also hot, uncomfortable to the touch.

  Some people tried hard to cool them off. The favorite technique was to turn them on. It worked sometimes, but you could not count on it Others investigated the phenomenon, tried to get at the root of it, the cause. They were probably the most frightened ones, but man is most human at his most frightened. In the face of the hot stove-burners they acted with exemplary coolness. They studied, they observed. They were like the fellow in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, who has clapped his hands over his face in horror as the devils drag him down to Hell -- but only over one eye. the other eye is busy looking. It's all he can do, but he does it He observes. Indeed, one wonders if Hell would exist, if he did not look at it However, neither he, nor the people I am talking about, had enough time to do much about it And then finally of course there were the people who did not try to do or think anything about it at all.

  When the water came out of the cold-water taps hot one morning, however, even people who had blamed it all on the Democrats began to feel a more profound unease. Before long forks and pencils and wrenches were too hot to handle without gloves; and cars were really terrible.

  It was like opening the door of an oven going full blast, to open the door of your car. And by then, other people almost scorched your fingers off. A kiss was like a branding iron. Your child's hair flowed along your hand like fire.

  SchrOdingpr's CatA. 161

  Here, as I said, it is cooler; and, as a matter of fact, this animal is cool. A real cool cat No wonder it's pleasant to pet his fur. Also he moves slowly, at least for the most part, which is all the slowness one can reasonably expect of a cat He hasn't that frenetic quality most creatures acquired-all they did was ZAP and gone. They lacked presence. I suppose birds always tended to be that way, but even the hummingbird used to halt for a second in the very center of his metabolic frenzy, and hang still as a hub, present, above the fuchsias -- then gone again, but you knew something was there besides the blurring brightness. But it got so that even robins and pigeons, the heavy impudent birds, were a blur; and as for swallows, they cracked the sound barrier. You knew of swallows only by the small, curved sonic booms that looped about the eaves of old nouses in the evening

  Worms shot like subway trains through the dirt of gardens, among the writhing roots of roses.

  You could scarcely lay a hand on children, by then: too fast to catch, too hot to hold. They grew up before your eyes.

  But then, maybe that's always been true.

  I was interrupted by the cat, who woke and said meow once, then jumped down from my lap and leaned against my legs di
ligently. This is a cat who knows how to get fed. He also knows how to jump. There was a lazy fluidity to his leap, as if gravity affected him less than it does other creatures. As a matter of fact there were some localized cases, just before I left, of the failure of gravity; but this quality in the cat's leap was something quite else. I am not yet in such a state of confusion that I can be alarmed by grace. Indeed, I found it reassuring. While I was opening a can of sardines, a person arrived. Hearing the knock, I thought it might be the mailman. I

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  miss mail very much, so I hurried to the door and said, "Is it the mail?" A voice replied, 'Yah!" I opened the door. He came in, almost pushing me aside in his haste. He dumped down an enormous knapsack he had been crying straightened up, massaged his shoulders, and said, "Wow!"

  "How did you get here?"

  He stared at me and repeated, "How?"

  At this my thoughts concerning human and animal speech recurred to me, and I decided that this was probably not a man, but a small dog. (Large dogs seldom go yah, wow, how, unless it is appropriate to do so.)

  "Come on, fella," I coaxed him. "Come, come on, that's a boy, good doggie!" I opened a can of pork and beans for him at once, for he looked half starved. He ate voraciously, gulping and lapping. When it was gone he said "Wow!" several times. I was just about to scratch him behind the ears when he stiffened, his hackles bristling, and growled deep in his throat He had noticed the cat

  The cat had noticed him some time before, without interest, and was now sitting on a copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier washing sardine oil off its whiskers. "Wow!" the dog whom I had thought of calling Rover, barked.

  "Wow! Do you know what that is? That's Schro'dinger's Cat!"

  "No it's not; not any more; it's my cat," I said, unreasonably offended.