Wild Life (30 page)

I was struck suddenly by something like shyness—it was not fear but an exquisite awareness of my smallness and oddness among these wild giants. I made myself smaller yet, crouching with Dolly and the twins, who were shy themselves and did not follow their mother but went on hiding with me and watching from the thickets of salmonberries. Cleo ran full tilt at the elder male—quite bowled him over—and I thought they were fighting or play fighting, though quickly I realized they were copulating—utterly indifferent to their audience, the younger male squatting only just barely out of their way and watching the mating with a look I can only describe as intelligent bemusement; and of course the children.

When they had separated (and after scrupulously cleaning or examining each other's nether parts with long gray tongues) Cleo brought the males round to “meet the family,” as it were. The older male has coarse hair, yellow-gray, about a broad dark face; and the younger male (I should think him George's age) is lean and muscular, with that look of intelligence, though missing one forelimb, which was evidently torn off in a battle or an accident and the stub healed in an ugly fashion just above the elbow. The twins crawled from my arms into their mother's arms and clung to her while the males tenderly examined and petted them—I was reminded of a human being warbling
and cooing to an infant, for the males kept up their peculiar soft whistling and clicking, which seemed intended to communicate tender feelings. Dolly was not long in her shyness (I wonder if she remembers them from past meetings), and shortly the twins had taken her lead: the entire family (for I should call them that) began a playful tussling and grooming and a chattery communication that was humanlike in its aspect, quite as if pouring out a pent-up year's worth of news and events; and I went on squatting apart from them all with a painful consciousness of my separation and loneliness.

After some little while, Cleo brought them round to me. These giants are frightening of stature, some ten feet in height and three or four hundred pounds, but having a calm demeanor from which I took comfort. Cleo (I believe) began to tell them everything she knew of my history, all the while stroking the arm of my corduroy coat with evident affection, and sometimes placing her huge hand upon my head. (She no longer makes an attempt to groom my hair, which is impossible of taming—I fear the hair being yanked out by the very roots—have learned to yelp like a puppy, which startles and stops her from her intended ministrations.) The males were interested in the strange orphan, but not so much as in the children, and soon had wandered back to the twins and Dolly. Cleo, having settled her great body on the ground beside me, did not immediately follow them but sat watching her family with an entirely human look of absorption and pleasure, and all the while her great hand resting upon my arm as if we were two companionable women, which gesture moved me deeply and reassured me of my place as her friend.

 

I have published one or two articles of the sort designed to get me in trouble with my neighbors and which are inevitably taken to be a defense of my own sordid history, or perhaps an exculpation of my husband: plain, unvarnished truths about the sex question and denouncing formal, monogamous marriage as hypocritical. Compulsory love, I have written, is not love—it must arise unfettered by state or church or by any law whatsoever; and when love ends, marriage ought also to end. I never have advocated lewd, open, and notorious adultery, but rather the right of cou
ples to love as they choose and to separate when love dies. It is a common understanding of Enlightened Women that releasing women from the need to marry would release them from economic and sexual slavery.

Of course, these are questions proposed and addressed by a rational mind, and my own practice could be said to be rational: I have quite deliberately chosen a celibate life for its warranty of continuing independence (though this entirely runs counter to the common man's belief that a “professional” literary woman is likely to be promiscuous, and without a doubt indecent).

But there is something darkly compelling in one's body, something that is of raw nature. When the Moon is full, a certain blood-gorged Beast rises from its lair and takes possession of me—I am forced to accept its sexual attentions, as any woman must when abducted by savages. In those hours of my imprisonment, feverish and wild, in a transport of delicious agony, I must write what the body dictates.

As an adherent of free love, I should not be ashamed to admit of prurient desires. But when I am released from the grip of the Savage I cannot look on his bestial dictation without a shudder of mortification. I keep the pages awhile, folded carefully within other pages, and reread certain passages in shameful secrecy—indeed, I edit and sharpen the prose as if the work were intended for a wider audience—as if I had not a fixed design to mislead. But eventually I always burn such sordid erotica and add the ashes to the pail, where they will one day make soap; which use seems to me ironically appropriate.

C. B. D.

November 1903

 

C. B. D. (unpublished)
(U
NTITLED
)

 

Trembling, though otherwise incapable of movement, she gazed upon the war chief's dark hands as they tenderly opened the buttons of her vest and drew back the thin, damp cloth to bare her shoulders. He had begun a low, mesmerizing chant, according to the seductive custom of his people, and she was utterly adrift and helpless, unable
to resist. At the dark flash of his eyes—the magnetic burn of his gaze upon her womanly nakedness—her breath quickened, her own eyes fluttering closed; and as he took the rosy protuberances of her breasts into his hands, her flesh rose irresistibly to meet his palms.

Today we have not strayed from the same spot—perhaps this is a favorite feeding ground?—and in the afternoon I went down below the lake to a relatively private sanctum behind tumbled blowdown, where I peeled to the skin, engaged in a few moments of brief, frantic splashing in the relatively warmer water of the “slough”—only barely warmer than ice—and immediately put on my filthy clothes again, alert for the males of the species, whose eyes are too nearly human. (Of course, afterward I was struck by the foolish contradiction of my modesty, for I should have trouble ever again lying down in a tent next to men; whereas lying in the darkness of the den beside those great beasts smelling of their maleness, I was entirely comforted and at peace and without a qualm.)

I have, of course, given them names and developed a theory as to the relationships between them all. The elder male is Freddy, and I should call him Cleo's husband, father of her twins, and presumably also of Dolly. The one-armed young male is too old to be sibling of the twins, so I suspect he is brother to Freddy or, alternatively, the younger brother of Cleo—in either case he is Uncle Max.

Today while watching the children and adults all playing together—a catch-and-hold game which resembled Tag, though with much mouth-fighting and tussling and pulling upon arms and legs, as well as fierce calls and pretend growling—I was struck by the thought that their state of wildness might not be irrevocable—might be amenable to change through enculturation—and then, having turned over this idea once or twice, my brain recoiled from it. A wild animal's life is without possessions, but also without humdrum toil and burden. I don't indulge the fantasy that here is my nation of See-Ah-Tiks, but the others are shielded from political skulduggery, at least, and free of certain familiar vices—lying, treachery, avarice, narcissism. Poor Cleo! Poor Freddy! Imagine them tamed and encouraged in the habits of human culture!

I have a romantic bias, though, and the Wild Man of medieval lore, once captured from his wilderness hideout and returned to civilization, was said to have made a better knight than ordinary persons, his wild upbringing giving him exceptional strength, ferocity, and hardiness, as well as innocence and an innate nobility. If it were possible to imagine Max in leather chaps and spurs astride a mammoth mustang—a knight of the West, free and undomesticated as any cowboy—I suppose I should have to reconsider the whole idea. But I would be harder pressed to think of Cleo in a human world, where a woman of strength and independence may only find herself called a Freak of Nature.

I wonder if we might more easily become like animals than animals become like humans. As a species, we human beings seem no longer fitted for life in the wilderness—have been weakened by centuries of civilized life—but there may yet be something inherent in our natures, some potentiality which wants only the right circumstances to return us to the raw edge of Wildness. Think of the Mountain Man of the early West, how quickly he o'erleaped those centuries of civilization and developed the necessary woodcraft, the physical and mental traits to live in his difficult surroundings. I feel this same potentiality in myself; feel I am daily learning to inhabit (body and mind) the wilderness in which I find myself. And as the Mountain Man was tutored and aided by the indigenous Indian, so I am led by the wild Mountain Giants.

They inhabit these forests so comfortably and inconspicuously—are enough like us to have shrewdly escaped our notice; but have not our territorial competitiveness or would long since have come out of hiding and waged war for the diminishing woods. Perhaps they are not lower animals after all, but an evolutionary advance—have grown beyond poor
Homo sapiens
and understand the world well enough that they have no need to construct a civilization upon it.

 

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“SONG OF MYSELF”

This morning a thin-bodied deer stepped into plain sight while we were still bedded, and began to feed intently as a cow in summer pasture. The others, I believe, are too large and lumbering to meet with success as deer hunters; I am too small and slow. We have, for the most part, a simple vegetarian diet, which is augmented by such insects and fish, frogs and snakes as fall into our hands. They will avidly eat carrion (I will eat it too—I am determined I shall not starve) but show little interest in stalking anything larger than a squirrel. They will watch deer, though, with a curious single-mindedness, and we all sat upon the grass gazing at her as she browsed. It was possible to pick out the individual hairs on her flank and the tufts of winter fur that hadn't been rubbed free. I could see the rise and fall of her delicate ribs, as well as the shadowed hollow at the base of her throat where a pulse shimmered. Once, she lifted her head and met Freddy's eye. He became completely still, and I discovered in that moment a sudden awareness of him as a predator, his body and mind shaped for killing. I was sure that he was furiously struggling with the problem of how to
stalk and kill her. Then the deer lowered her head and resumed feeding, and Freddy's attention fell away. Perhaps he was only caught, in that moment, by her loveliness, her grace, her perfect nature.

I realize how little I know of their inner lives. Books and scientific knowledge—those things I have always believed in—cannot tell me what the world looks like and smells like and sounds like to them. Oh! I should like to enter their consciousness. I have a strong yearning to visit their minds, know their thinking and feeling—have them look at me and see something like themselves.

 

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

 

The woman and the wild people with whom she was traveling slept below a bold, bare granite peak, its precipitous incline streaked with slides and breaks of jumbled rock; below the long talus slopes stretched a great waist-high field of snowberry and mountain grape into which an entire troop of small ponies could have disappeared without a trace—such shrubbery as makes desirable bedrooms for shy animals such as these. When the woman opened her eyes the sun was just coloring the peaks with a faint purplish glint—the mountain face still completely in shadow and the foredawn as crisp as a bright green apple—but there was a swath of pure radiance below, where the sun had clawed above the rock slope and a long field of grasses and wild-flowers lay soft in the new day.

The woman crept down through the velvety umbra of the mountain to the edge of the light, where the sun had already taken the chill off but left the long grasses shining for a while yet, heavy and bent with damp; and she shed every stitch of her ragged, filthy clothes and lay down upon the wet ground. It was something she had often seen the wild people do: lying down in the grass and rolling shoulder over shoulder with great sighs, chattery calls, and whistles, and afterward rising up, casting off the wet from their pelts with quick whole shudders, leaving the hair lying close to their bodies silky damp and shining and smelling briefly of licorice-fern or wild sweet-peas. She had supposed this act to be merely their own primitive bath; but as she laid her bare body along the dew-drenched earth and began rolling, rolling—sloughing off the worst of the filth, which was her only intent—she felt the whole of her skin become as a rose petal upon which the damp and rosy dawn lavished itself. As she rolled and rolled over the vetch- and pea- and clover-covered meadows (roots tangling far underground, and at eye level the working shoots and the mold of leaves living and dead, the trails of skinks and slugs, the creepings of millipedes and sowbugs), she became dizzy, gloriously besotted, crazy with joy. Where are the words to describe the inexplicable, transforming powers of morning dew upon one's naked belly and hips and thighs and breasts? Where are the poets to write of the good delights of rolling naked in the morning dew?