Eating Stone (20 page)

Jackie adopted Elliot when he was a hatchling. Half Mojave and half Sonoran, he came from an accidental cross; the two varieties are geographically separate. His wild mother turned up at a house in an Arizona suburb and had to stay because the suburb grew so quickly, she couldn't leave. Tortoises move slowly. In the time it might have taken her to reach the edge of the lot, con-
struction crews could have thrown up six three-bedroom split-levels, a golf course, and a Wal-Mart. How could she have found the open desert again?

Twenty-five years later, she was bred with another adopted tortoise. One day, her people found baby tortoises scrabbling all over the cover on the swimming pool. Jackie ended up with one of them.

“I drove him home. He was in a little box. He was the size of an Oreo. I cried all the way, wondering how I would keep him alive.”

Wild desert tortoises are strictly protected; the Mojave population is federally listed as a threatened species. Tortoises captured before the restrictions were in place—over the years, they were plucked off the desert by the hundreds—live a long time, so they and their offspring are still in a cycle of adoption. Jackie has a number for her Elliot so that she won't be charged for illegal possession of a protected chelonian.

In summer, some of Jackie's turtles live on the fat of her garden. Her box turtle rams her tomato plants so the fruit falls off. Later, tomato seedlings sprout up wherever he poops. Bushes give Elliot shade in his fun yard, but he ate the last one she planted.

We sneak over to Elliot's burrow as if we were giants and our insomniac miniature grandmother was finally getting a good night's sleep. Deeper in the burrow lies Elliot's “hot rock.” Made of polyresin, with a long cord that plugs into a nearby wall socket, the fake rock stays warm under a layer of dirt and straw. All winter, Elliot puts his belly on his hot rock. This is the Colorado Plateau, not the milder Sonoran or the Mojave. The hot rock is clay red, like the sandstone around us.

Jackie carefully parts the mound of straw until she finds an edge of gray shell and a round mini-elephant leg. She feels movement and knows he is alive. He is much bigger than a cookie. To disturb him too much would provoke a pugnacious hiss and the
loss of precious calories. “He has lost a lot of weight,” Jackie whispers.

Jackie rescued Sid, her box turtle, from Phoenix, where he was left in a box in the sun and ended up with a fried shell. At the moment, he is in semihibernation in his home by the television. Sid is her rental turtle.

“Kids love him and want him,” she explains, “so I give them strict instructions and let them take him home. Then the kids get bored. Maybe Sid gets bored, too. Sid gets overfed. So Sid comes back.”

The season begins to turn, and with its turn we are ready to shift our weight, too. The turkey vultures will soon fly back into town from their distant winter quarters, as they do each March, often on the same date each year, give or take a day or two. Our hands harden with calluses from garden work, readying the beds for seed. Soon there will be so much green to soothe our winter eyes, we will forget that we live in a land of stone.

Jackie pulls a few leaves of romaine lettuce out of her refrigerator and feeds them to Cleopatra, her sulcata, or African spur-thighed tortoise, named for the spiny protrusions on her legs. Her yellow-brown carapace is about the size of an inflated sneaker. Full grown (she is barely two years old), she will be twenty-four inches long, nearly as big as a Galápagos turtle.

Because sulcatas do not hibernate, Cleopatra lives in Jackie's living room in the winter. She will eventually move south to a warmer place so she can spend her twenty-five years outside. Sulcatas are common enough to be pets. In Africa, they are raised for their meat and are herded by young boys with sticks.

When Cleopatra sees her lettuce, she sticks out her wrinkly head and stabs, pulls, and crunches with sharp jaws. A muscular tongue pulls the food back so she can swallow it. She is like a blonde at a diner after a long night of wild dancing. I watch and wonder how one herds turtles. In less than a minute, the leaf edge is lacy with turtle bites.

One day, a friend brings us a duck for dinner, a large male mallard with an iridescent emerald head, white neck ring, and a gray-brown chest below a splash of russet. When I gently press my fingers into the mallard's chest, they sink more than an inch through feathers and down before they reach the skin. This is the thickness that pushed against the water of the winter river, insulating the bird's heart.

Mark removes the breast meat with surgical precision. The burgundy flesh comes off thin, delicate ribs. I lay the remains against the far fence for the coyotes, cradling the body in a thatch of dry salt grass. The emerald head flops to one side. The big yellow feet cross demurely. On the tan-and-olive groundscape, the duck stands out like a hill of precious jewels.

By morning, the duck has vanished into coyote possession. Perhaps they wondered why a perfectly good breastless duck was leaning against the fence in the middle of a ranch pasture. Not a feather remained. The coyotes had taken it elsewhere to eat.

When I leave home one morning for a trip to sheep country, two coyotes—the duck-eaters?—cross the driveway as I pull out. They stop and look at the house, don't think much of it, then move on. Their undercoats are winter-thick and reddish, their tails bushy and tipped in black.

Two coyotes in the yard and fresh duck in our bellies, meat made from river plants and proteins: This is a rare food chain for anyone in the lower forty-eight, we factory-chicken hunters, we stalkers in supermarket aisles. Even the coyotes consider trailer-park poodles an easier meal than mobile, living ducks.

No one wants to slit the throat of a hog or clobber weaner calves for dinner. Not many of us want to look into the eyes of animals that are not our pets. A friend says she will stare at an alligator only if it's her purse. I apologize to my cantaloupes when I pick and eat them from the garden. But I, too, am a killer.

In a dream, I sit at a feast, fork poised, linen napkin tucked under my chin, and I eat Stalin, the last red-shafted flicker on earth. He lies belly-up on a plate, his stiff stick feet aimed at the ceiling fixtures, a Russian olive in his mouth.

One way to know for sure that a baby is a human being and not a “noisy pet,” someone once said, is by name making, the fundamental human trait of arranging sensory perceptions into thoughts and connecting them with narrative and memory. Very young children name and map the natural world before they organize an abstract one. They build what neurobiologists call a “nave biology,” a domain of knowledge about living things. With animals as helpers, the developing brain orders perception and reality, significance and desire.

Sometimes I remember that animal state, that imagination of such splendid purity. Grown-ups, of course, were pitifully blind to it. “Quit calling us by our names,” my brothers and I scolded my mother. “We're not your children; we're cheetahs. This oatmeal in our bowls is cheetah food” She told us to clean our rooms. Suddenly, we were sloths.

Very early, I inflicted my entire worldview on my teddy bear. Its fur wore thin from being tied to my tricycle and dragged about. It had bite marks in its face. I gave all of my stuffed animals complicated and dramatic lives.

Books, pictures, and zoos fed young minds isolated from the true wild, but for us, as for all children, the animals were nevertheless intensely vivid. Zebras loped through my dreams even though I had never seen a real one. Bombay's elephants slipped their chains and ran home, smashing banyan trees—nothing could dispel my notion that the biggest of animals were the most innocent. At the zoo, the hippos’ cavernous pink yawns transfixed me. The birds there bashed their heads against the wire netting
that kept them from flying off. A sign read
LOST CHILDREN WILL BE TAKEN TO THE LION HOUSE
.

My older brother filled his sketch pad with race cars and fighter jets dropping bombs in pellet sprays over a stick figure labeled my sister, who lay sideways with X's for eyes and a pool of red crayon blood dripping out of the corner of her mouth.

On my paper I drew whales, penguins, moose, otters, monkeys, wolves. My kangaroo pictures were upside down. My bears ate avocados. I could not draw them from life, but I learned something by working their lines and shapes on paper, something beyond the caricatures and cartoons.

As long as a century ago, the keepers of insane asylums knew the value of calming their inmates with pets and gardens. My parents calmed their four little inmates with the usual menagerie of dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbits, goldfish, and parakeets. A maximum size rule, by parental decree, kept us from keeping tapirs in our bedrooms.

In the outdoors, beyond the lives of our pets, we witnessed the lives of animals most adapted to a rural neighborhood: foxes, squirrels, badgers, frogs, turtles, mice, sparrows, buzzards, ducks, worms, snails, dragonflies. Road trips brought glimpses of mule deer, pronghorn antelope, elk, and buffalo in national parks. In California's Sierra Nevada, we found mountain lion tracks and bobcat scat. Black bears pawed through an open-pit garbage dump, eating orange rinds and moldy pinto beans, pooping blobs of plastic.

One of the wildest animals we saw outside of the zoo lived on the floor of my great-uncle's study in his house in Sussex, England. My family lived in London at the time and we went from the city to his house on weekends. Although the house was so immense that children routinely disappeared in its wings and hallways, never to be found, we knew where the beast lived.

Between world wars, my great-uncle had shot and killed a Bengal tiger in India. A black-and-white photograph in a scrap-book showed him kneeling in the grass with his rifle, my great-aunt beside him, the dead cat spread below them.

The tiger, minus his innards, now spread across much of the study floor in flying-squirrel position. Backed by soft dark felt, the skin was stretched flat and clawless. The giant stuffed head rose in full dimension, with whiskers, green glass eyes, and a snarling mouth frozen open to reveal ivory fangs and a pink polyresin tongue and throat.

On one Christmas holiday in Sussex, we were snowed in and could not drive back to London. The pack of cousins grew unruly, so my great-aunt told the cook to give us cookie sheets and roasting pans. We took these to a hill near the house and used them as sleds. Afterward, we cleaned up and went to the study, where the family and guests gathered for cocktails before dinner.

People stood on the tiger's orange-and-black pelt and tried not to trip over the big head. The adults sipped warm gin. They restrained my cousins, brothers, and me from rolling around on the tiger in our dressy clothes. The tiger was trophy; it was memory. It was a rug.

The next day, when the study was empty of all but a couple of napping dalmatians, I visited the tiger. The details of its demise were never quite clear, but I had the impression that my great-uncle's Great White Hunter aspirations had halted in the moment captured by the photograph.

He was born into an era and culture that sent young Englishmen to colonial outposts to kill exotic big game as a rite of passage. A tiger hunt, he said, was “something one did.” (Given such rites, world tiger numbers plunged dramatically. Three of eight subspecies went extinct.)

I lay down on the rug, using the tiger's head as a pillow. The back of my head rested on the broad shelf between his ears. I
stretched out my arms and legs to match the tiger's limbs, but my fingertips and toes fell far short of the paws. Panthera tigris tigris was huge. I stroked the crazy black stripes. The dalmatians added crazy black and white dots.

On my belly with chin in hands, at eye level with the canine teeth and frozen stare, I imitated a snarl shaped into ferocity by the taxidermist. In the photograph, the dead tiger seemed but lank folds of stripes with a limp head. The rug had no smell. I had no idea how the tiger's flesh and muscles and bones had once moved.

Of wild animals’ true biology, young children have instinct more than knowledge. Their commitment to animal images comes as a devout and ironclad faith. They mean it when they beg you to drop them off in Antarctica to live with penguins. Animals give us voice. They map a world we want to live in. Without them, we are homeless.

Aside from pets and tiger pelts, before agribusiness and Animal Planet, what array of living proteins surrounded us?

As California ranchers, several generations of my family lived alongside cattle, sheep, and other livestock. They cleared out the grizzly bears and wolves. They grazed their sheep in alpine meadows, where bighorn sheep likely suffered the consequences of the incursion.

Shearing crews came from nearby settlements of Yokuts Indians. Hired cowboys came from Mexican labor pools or from town bars, sobered up and got on their horses to drive cattle to backcountry pastures and line camps, where they slept with their heads against saddle leather and carved their initials in aspen trees. Every day, everyone, men, women, children, had contact with horses. Everyone knew how to butcher chickens and goats. The women could kill rattlesnakes, gut trout.

From an older generation still among us come the mantras of ranch and farm life, of households with barnyards and everyone there to watch sex, birth, and death. Kids were not inside reading Babar and Zephir or watching Marlin Perkins suck frogs on TV. Children, too, saw the butchering and smelled the blood. Animals were utilitarian and very much present. Placentas steamed on the straw after calving. Stillborn lambs were taken to a grassy foothill for coyote bait. There were tradesmen called “knackers,” who bought and slaughtered worn-out horses and sold their flesh for dog food.

“Go out there and whack the heads off those roosters,” a neighbor told me when I lived in Montana as a graduate student.

For fresh eggs, I had raised a mixed brood of chicks. I fed them mash and kitchen scraps. I painted the words the sky is falling
!
over the small door of their planked wood coop. I liked to watch the chickens race like bats out of hell into the dark opening under the blue letters, though it was the dusk and cold, not chicken paranoia, that chased them in for the night's roost.