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4 | (continued) I think I might have seen the baby raccoons in that same yard a month or so after seeing their mother cross the river; I was walking Boss’s dogs, having a chat with his neighbor Dan, when the dogs vectored in on three little raccoons about to climb a tree not six feet away. Neither a louder nor a more threatening confrontation have I ever seen, what with Dan and I yelling at the dogs, the dogs at the peak of their theatrical ferocity and the tiny raccoons letting everybody know that they were not about to become lunch for a couple of mangy, butterball mutts the like of these. None of the participants, thank God, was hurt. There were even more fascinating creatures nearby though, animals once unknown in these parts: coyotes. They made their nocturnal forays along the railroad right-of-way once or twice a week. It was in their case that I truly regretted not being a wildlife film-maker, with a sound crew at my disposal, since there are few sounds more eerie and anciently spine-tingling than the massed, high-pitched barking of a pack of coyotes stretched out for maybe fifty yards, on the run in the middle of a dark night. What the coyotes fed on, I don’t know. Rodents, mostly, I assume. They could kill a deer if they wished, to be sure, though how they could hope to approach so wary a prey with such a barbarian assault, I can’t imagine. Doubtless they shift into dead silence when they hunt. The locals call coyotes “bush wolves.” But despite their indifference to the common name, there are some who seem amazingly aware of the animals’ habits. The postmistress swore that if you called to them as they passed in the night, they would infallibly answer back. And one burly tradesman I met at the post office knew well the bunch I heard on the tracks now and then; he casually referred to them as “The Uxbridge Pack,” and showed no surprise at my having heard them ranging so far south—Uxbridge proper is 26 kilometers northeast of where I was camped.
On a cool night in the fall, I was reading, growing sleepy, about to turn out the light, when I felt a small, cold object suddenly touch my bare arm. If it had happened months earlier, I would have jumped out of my skin, but by then I was getting truly blasé about odd creatures doing unexpected things, and I turned to see what it was: a perfectly beautiful little thing, moist and gleaming, yet impeccably clean, a living jewel of the forest—the first salamander I’ve ever seen in the flesh. I know nothing about their lives, but if you consider the simple fact that it must have known I was another animal, warm to the touch, moving about, the simple trust shown in its gesture is difficult not to admire, in whatever childish way we feel such things. Brief as it was, it remains one of the most pleasant memories of my life—the silent visitation of a tiny being from an ancient world, an elf of living porcelain, so delicate, innocent and pristine, so unlike my tiresome kind…. Only at this moment do I realize that animals may even have figured in the farmers’ shift from corn to soybeans, though I didn’t see the evidence for this until late in the fall, after the ground plants had shed their leaves. Every time I walked the tractor lane, into or out of the woods, I would see a few small corncobs scattered here and there among the leaf-litter. Then when I started gathering wood for the fire, I began to see many more cobs, hundreds of them, everywhere, half-buried, many seasons old, none of them full-grown. Over that entire little forest, these young cobs, had they been allowed to mature, would have represented several tons of marketable corn. I can’t explain it now, but for some reason I blamed the squirrels for these depredations, though the squirrel population per acre in those woods was less than a fourth of what you’d see on a well-treed Toronto street. So I really never knew which species was responsible, in truth I had no idea whatsoever, but one day the subject came up in a conversation with the kindly brother, and I took my first reaction as established fact—I accused the squirrels outright. They stood duly arraigned. The evidence was prima facie. The accused did not attend the hearing; the Crown Prosecutor spoke in camera with the judge. His Honour took the statement of the Crown as if it were the verdict of a jury. The squirrel population was convicted, in the worst travesty of justice seen in those parts for many a year. The only thing that prevented a lynching was the age of the crimes and the inconvenient demise of most of the perpetrators. Yet His Honor showed, in his silence and expression of grim regret, that he was nevertheless angry and bitter over the losses he had sustained, time past or no time past. Corn is corn. His crop was his life. Simple as that. No two ways about it. I left wishing I could learn to keep my mouth shut. Never been able to look a squirrel in the eye since. |
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