October 2
There was a run I did last year along the rim of three lakes during which a golden eagle flew directly over my head the entire time. He never forged ahead or lagged behind, & when I would stop to regard him he would perch on the bough of a spruce & regard me back & then wing along when I would run again.
& last winter it happened several times that along my runs in the snow I’d properly packed I would stop short twenty feet from a wolf, & we would stand there for a moment & look at one another, eye to yellow eye, & then we would continue along, the wolf into the copse of willow, & I along my path.
One of those winter runs I heard a plaintive bleating from across the way & looked in time to see three wolves bringing down a young caribou. I saw their dark forms silhouetted there against the pale snow in the hushed light of the morning, just inside the tree line, writhing in a violent torsion.
& I have come upon grizzlies that were magnanimous or apathetic or scared shitless, any one. Twenty feet from a full adult who didn’t care at all that I was that close. & then two hundred feet away from a sub-adult who sprinted down a mountain to avoid me.
I read that when a crow electrocuted itself on a power line in Fairbanks & its lifeless body fell to the earth below, it was a matter of minutes before hundreds of other crows gathered around & seemed to literally observe a minute of funereal silence prior to again dispersing to the four winds. All of them encircling that one expired bird, a kind of quiet black cloud. I’ve heard magpies are the same way. That they mourn. A behavior characteristic of the corvidae.
The wolf researcher up here who died last year wrote a bit about how wolves reacted to grief. He observed several members of a lupine family walk off into solitude after a pack member’s death in order to pine & keen independently overnight before returning to the others. They had no other occasion to isolate themselves in that heartbreak before or after.
Earlier this year, during the first intimations of spring, I had a dream that I came upon seven owls hovering over a dwarf alder, luminescent, emanating a warm light. When I awakened in the morning I stepped outside & where I stood, an owl looked down at me from the tree above & let out a gentle hoot. How I felt the spine in me.
& then dogs, always dogs, in their honest joy.
Maybe just to say the nature of these things takes over in time, supplanting another kind of human reason, & how grateful I am for that most days. I know so much about a world that doesn’t exist, not really, & so little about the one that does. It’s been a slow education.
& last winter it happened several times that along my runs in the snow I’d properly packed I would stop short twenty feet from a wolf, & we would stand there for a moment & look at one another, eye to yellow eye, & then we would continue along, the wolf into the copse of willow, & I along my path.
One of those winter runs I heard a plaintive bleating from across the way & looked in time to see three wolves bringing down a young caribou. I saw their dark forms silhouetted there against the pale snow in the hushed light of the morning, just inside the tree line, writhing in a violent torsion.
& I have come upon grizzlies that were magnanimous or apathetic or scared shitless, any one. Twenty feet from a full adult who didn’t care at all that I was that close. & then two hundred feet away from a sub-adult who sprinted down a mountain to avoid me.
I read that when a crow electrocuted itself on a power line in Fairbanks & its lifeless body fell to the earth below, it was a matter of minutes before hundreds of other crows gathered around & seemed to literally observe a minute of funereal silence prior to again dispersing to the four winds. All of them encircling that one expired bird, a kind of quiet black cloud. I’ve heard magpies are the same way. That they mourn. A behavior characteristic of the corvidae.
The wolf researcher up here who died last year wrote a bit about how wolves reacted to grief. He observed several members of a lupine family walk off into solitude after a pack member’s death in order to pine & keen independently overnight before returning to the others. They had no other occasion to isolate themselves in that heartbreak before or after.
Earlier this year, during the first intimations of spring, I had a dream that I came upon seven owls hovering over a dwarf alder, luminescent, emanating a warm light. When I awakened in the morning I stepped outside & where I stood, an owl looked down at me from the tree above & let out a gentle hoot. How I felt the spine in me.
& then dogs, always dogs, in their honest joy.
Maybe just to say the nature of these things takes over in time, supplanting another kind of human reason, & how grateful I am for that most days. I know so much about a world that doesn’t exist, not really, & so little about the one that does. It’s been a slow education.
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