Wild Life (27 page)

 

The goddess made a man taller and more powerful than Gilgamesh—a wild beast of a man, unconquerable, which was shaped from clay. The goddess spit upon the clay to keep it soft as she shaped the man. He was unkempt and savage in his looks—two horns sprang from his head. She left him asleep in the forest and when he woke he didn't know where he was. He ate fruits and drank water, befriended wild creatures, and learned to eat grass and the petals of flowers.

T
HE
E
PIC OF
G
ILGAMESH

Through the trees and from hiding, I have watched the others fishing. Sometimes they muddy the bottoms of small pools at the edges of the stream by stamping or using a stick, and as the fish rise to the surface seeking the clear water, they catch and throw them into the shore-brush with their humanish open palms. Or they muddy the end of a deep pool where it empties to a shallow, pebbly rapids—then go to the upper end and stamp, which sends the fish in panic down into the mud-cloud, where some will be stupid and dash through the dark water into the current, where they can be caught in the shingly shallows; which I have tried myself but too slow (weak) and my hands too slow
or too small. Desperate to catch fish, so today for a line I raveled a thread from my underwear, and a clumsy hook carven from a sliver of wood, and for bait, the worms and grubs which lie beneath any rotten log. (This is how Teddy and I fished as children!) One slow-witted trout of small dimensions came to my poor tackle, which I ate within moments of landing, discarding only entrails while munching bones and skin all with industrious appetite, though other people not having been in these circumstances will doubtless think me savage. The meat was chewy, not slippery in the mouth as I had feared, and salty, which I welcomed.

 

C. B. D. (1906)
F
ROM
“D
ARK
T
HINGS
”
IN
A D
ESOLATION, AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

 

In the flood season several years before, the creek had changed its course, tumbling its long field of boulders into the new channel and allowing to grow in the old stream bed muskegs of cattails and bulrushes, skunk cabbages, arrowhead weeds. The child found this stillish sidetrack, its fetid plant life and extravagance of insects, more exotic and more inviting than the creek running quick through its lunar waste of bare and tumbled rocks. She lifted and stirred the fleshy leaves of skunk cabbages, whose inflorescences attracted carrion beetles, and captured the insects with her hands, then placed them delicately beneath a long piece of cedar bark and stomped upon the bark, which made a crackling noise against the beetles' stiff black carapaces. She turned over discarded leaves and bark until she found the hiding place of a salamander in the mud underneath. They looked each other in the eye for a moment. Then with a sharp stick she opened a hole in the salamander's body and, after examining the result, released the creature to the ground. It became perfectly still, invisible against the mud save for the thread of orange intestine trailing from the puncture. But in a moment it twitched and disappeared into a jumbled field of rocks. The track it left on the mud was thin and wavery as a thread, and the child imagined it was a secret rune—telling the way to faeries' land.

In the duff under an ancient spruce she found the hiding place of a banana slug, its albino skin ghostly and translucent like a spill of white candle wax against the brown humus. When she had sat down on the ground and unlaced her left shoe, she stood again and deliberately pressed her bare sole down onto the slug, which oozed and was cold.

The child, who in other circumstances, other environments, might have demonstrated that she was coming to terms with a civilized environment, had become, in this environment, a savage child of nature, directed by instinct rather than volition and devoid of all those acquired tastes and patterns of behavior which are part of our adjustment to civilization. After cocking up her thin little leg to spy out the pulp and slime on the bottom of her foot, she took some onto her finger and delicately tasted of it, and afterward became bold enough to eat worms and pill bugs, which she turned up in the rotted corpses of old trees.

She waded carefully in the stagnant pools, setting her feet down among the sharp sticks and wood knots, the stinging nettles, the left-behind stones, the one shoe and one bare foot imprinting in the black clay a dim sequence of unequal pugmarks which would later spring back and vanish, as unmade as the child herself.

They have left the stream. Though I feared to follow, my greater fear is to be left alone—the company of beasts or of phantoms preferred to solitude—so went after them up a rocky chute to the top of the ridge, which was accomplished only at great cost to my strength—stockings long ago worn to nothing and my poor bare feet flayed and bruised and bleeding. I could not keep up, but they seemed to slow and slow further, browsing uphill in their easy fashion, and I must wonder if they are deliberately leaving for my discovery the desiccated fruits of highbush cranberry still clinging to bare winter twigs, as well as old hips of wild rose, which are sour but strengthening.

They must know I am here: the trees upon the high ground are thin and scant, growing out of the very rock, and so we wandered along the ridgeline in sight of one another, though each intent upon our foraging, and pretending not to notice the other; or I am alone after all, pretending not to notice the creatures sprung from my wild imagination. But they pull the branches of bushes toward them and strip the leaves with their teeth; their lips curl back flexibly around the twig as they eat, and I have been near enough to see (or dream) that their teeth are yellowish and small and even. Here is what I think: they are real—must be real—and I have begun to wonder if Harriet might yet be alive, perhaps taken into the company of such creatures as these, or following in their trail as I do.

Though walking upright and having a humanish form, I believe they must be (if not phantoms) neither Indians nor the hairy wildmen of loggers' tales but great animals of a species as yet unknown to Science—apes or erect bears of immense size. There are four: the elder female (if they were bears I should call her the sow), perhaps eight feet in height and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, built very stocky with open, flat-nosed features, and her hairless dugs very pendant; a juvenile female (this I presume to be the sow's young calf from last year or the year before), half again smaller but still a child giant of four and a half feet or more, and having soft cinnamon-colored hair; and two younger male calves, twins I should call them, still suckling at the sow's teats and evidently but a few months old, though they are about the size of a two-year-old child. All in this family walk with a distinctive long-legged gait, the knees bending upon each footfall.

I do not seem to frighten them, even when coming within a dozen yards. Or I am the one not frightened, as my mind has been cut loose from its moorings and now follows its usual course, adrift in a wild beast fable: they are Mountain Giants from the hidden caves of the See-Ah-Tiks, and I am the intrepid Girl Explorer, Helena Reed.

 

My mother came from a family of mad book-lovers, and the greatest gift I have from her is the passion for reading, which is a cheap and consoling entertainment, bringing knowledge of the world and experi
ence of the widest kind, as well as moral illumination and, of course, adventure. The backbone and foundation of my mother's bookshelf was Emerson and Montaigne, but her taste ran out to the further extremities:
Grimm's Fairy Tales,
Dickens,
Scottish Chiefs, Ivanhoe, Days of Bruce,
Victor Hugo. I remember especially a little book called
Paul and Virginia
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, which was a romantic story of two nature children, and which I read over and over until the pages were worn thin. And I read Poe when young, which scared me ill because I believed in it—the fantastic seeming perfectly natural to a child and simply the way things were.

During the years I lived with my aunt, everyone in our circle of acquaintance was literate as a matter of course, and my aunt and her radical friends were the beginning of my real education, which is to say they offered their own ideas for reliable reading (Irving, Lowell, Hawthorne, Woodberry Carlyle, Arnold, et al.) and passed me pamphlets and articles which addressed the great questions of the day. My aunt has a pure and classical literary taste, none better. She presented me with
Pilgrim's Progress
and saw me through a dozen books of
the Iliad.
She was fond of fiction more than anything, but her tastes were of the old school—no poetry worth reading since Byron, no novels since Scott.

It was the New York Public Library which was my University. No one within those walls ever told me what to read or not to read—it was all there to be consumed, as and when one wished—and I had the necessary curiosity to seek out the things I most wanted to know. I followed my interest in biology and anthropology to Huxley, Spencer, and the scandalous Darwin; learned enough of history (Lubbock's
Origins of Civilization,
Rawlinson's
Five Great Empires)
to discover its amusing limitations; from White's
Warfare of Religion and Science
learned the cultural importance of religion as well as the absurdities and contradictions of the world's repeated attempts in this line; and from Gray's three-volume
Nature's Miracles,
enough of astronomy and electricity, radium, and so forth to get a clear idea of the whirling wonder of the universe. I don't suppose I could have passed a college examination from such independent studies, but there is something to be said for studying from a strong desire to know.

As for novels, I became an admirer of Miss C. Bronte for keeping her sentimentality firmly bridled, and of J. Austen for her great and good common sense, but I never have bothered to read the modern, petty little sto
ries of continual melancholy, in which men are mewling about the futility of action and women are wringing their hands. I should always prefer to read about sound, active, healthy women, and not always the wearisome sameness of spoiled marriages, and spinsters who should have married and did not. I should always prefer to read tales in which men (and women, though they are rare) have stout hearts and hands instead of nervous conditions and inherited feebleness; tales in which the author finds it sufficient to give his boys and girls a fault or a weakness, and a precarious situation, and turn them loose to win through.

My own strongest inclination as a reader has been toward the romance: that is, toward Kipling and Scott, Stevenson and Dumas. I am an admirer of Stanley Weyman and of Anthony Hope. Of the women, of course, the Two Georges. (When an American woman writes a decent story of adventure, without too much sentimental love in it and without the eternal feminine virtues—why must women always be modest, pure, civil, and reticent?—then I will begin to hope for something great from them.)

I have not mentioned the lowbrow scientific romances, ghost stories, and beast fables, to which I have always gravitated rather more than toward the “high,” especially literary, kind of fiction. I shouldn't have to apologize or explain my affection for the bizarre and the fantastic, but I will mention that such tales have always had to overcome a certain disreputability before I could applaud them: my preference is for the writer whose language is gorgeous, whose characters are real as life, and whose stories take my poor little assumptions and give them back to me transformed; I prefer, then, Verne and Griffith, Poe's short tales and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein,
over the dreadful penny dreadfuls. There is, of course, an element of shame in listening to tales of the unreal—similar to paying to see a two-headed child—but the extraordinary has an allure of its own that can transcend intellectual considerations.

C. B. D.

August 1902

My stool today greenish and soft and small, but the first in—how long? Though I am continually cold and often wet and though more or less continually hungry—craving both sweetness (Melba's doughnuts) and salt (Stuband's smoked hams and bacons)—I find I am somewhat in better strength and not entirely starving, from eating shoots and leaves and roots as well as bark and so forth throughout the day, and imagine I could go on in this fashion for an indefinite time—until I am rescued—especially as the summer arrives and certain berries and nuts begin to ripen, as well as Indian camas.

I am weak in my mind, though, and close to tears much of the time. Today was thinking of Gracie Spear and her cheerful whistling, and without quite realizing it I began to pipe “Crossing the Bar.” The beasts' own call is a sort of whistle, tuneful in some of its aspects, which I have begun to recognize and follow as they whistle to locate one another in the deep forest, and my wordless melody brought the two youngest through the trees, though when they saw it was the Other they scurried for the protection of the sow, who was browsing only fifty feet from me. This was a startling vision—being so much like my own little boys, who are incurably shy of strangers—and I fell immediately to sobbing for my children, fatherless and now motherless; and I suppose some tears for myself, being the one lost, and living like John the Baptist among the wild beasts of the wilderness. (I have striking weaknesses and must try to defeat them.)

The sow turned her head and gave me a stare—attentive to the safety of the infant cubs, I am sure, but perhaps also curious as to the sound of human weeping, which I should imagine she has never heard before. This being the first straight look I had received from one of the creatures, it quite dashed my tears and hiccoughs—frightened me into silence—and after a moment I lowered my own eyes as one
does when unarmed and confronted by a wild beast. However, I should say of her stare that it was not so much threatening as inquiring—a very humanish look—and it was some time before she shifted her own gaze and returned to the serious business of gathering miner's lettuce into her huge grayish maw. During the moment her eyes were upon me, I felt oddly as if we were two women: in another woman (even though a stranger) I should have taken such a look to be a silent, sympathetic invitation to confide one's troubles. Such is the deficient state of my mind. But I think of Montaigne: “What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it.”