A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [119]
Once having begun to look, one has no choice but to see these incidents everywhere, for that is where they are.
The neighbors have a new puppy, an Anatolian shepherd the size of a small bear, who only in the last couple of days discovered my walks to the coyote tree, and followed me and the dogs. Today he discovered the chickens, and has delighted in trotting after them to see them scatter, and he discovered too the cats, delighting even more in giving them chase. As I type these words, a cat is up a tree. Time after time I went outside to say, "No. Go home." He ignored me. Sometimes I tried to be more reasonable: "You can stay here if you don't chase the chickens or cats." He still ignored me. Finally, after the cat went up the tree, I lost patience and roughly pushed him toward home. I stomped my foot, and was going to do it again until I realized how silly I must look. Not so much caring—who is the dog going to tell?—I stomped again. He finally left. Now he dozes on the neighbor's porch. I'm sure he'll be back. My point is that the fact that he did not acquiesce to my requests, or that he doesn't yet know much English (I must admit I know very little cat, dog, chicken, goose, duck, or songbird, though I hear them every day), does not mean that conversations between humans and nonhumans do not exist. After years of doubting, I'm finally growing to understand that my skepticism has all along revealed more about my own inability to perceive or even conceptualize fully mutual conversations— and more basically my inability to allow another to have desires distinctly different from my own—than it does about the nature of human-nonhuman relations.
As you've probably guessed, I've always had an affinity for bugs, and for as long as I can remember I've been especially fascinated by bees, ants, and other social insects. When during the spring semester of my sophomore year in college—the same semester I started high jumping—I saw an ad in the classifieds for a beehive, I called and bought it immediately.
Soon I found myself wandering down late evenings to the corner of the pasture, to sit next to the hive and listen to the bees' soft sounds as they moved and talked and sang inside their home. Sometimes I rapped gently to hear their buzzing rise in response, but most often I just sat. I put my face to the opening to smell the rich, moist, fecund scent of bees and wax and honey. To this day I know of no smells quicker to soothe.
I'd go down days, too, to watch the guards pace back and forth on the hive's front stoop; I'd watch as they checked every bee that entered to make sure she belonged. Drones—huge, clumsy, powerful males, never once known to do any work around the hive—would take off or land with a distinctive roar. Sometimes I would stand next to the hive and be surrounded by scores of bees who flew in large or small circles around my head, or zoomed far above to tumble back in what I soon learned are called play fights. I grew to understand that these were for the most part young bees leaving the hive for the first or second or third time, and circling, spinning, rolling for the joy of sunshine and flight and the rush of air over newly extended wings. Older bees—you can tell because young bees have more hair on their backs, which tends to wear off as they get older—usually paid me no mind, but flew around me as they would a telephone pole or any other obstacle to be avoided as they circled to their cruising altitude above the tops of nearby trees. Coming back home they dropped to land on the stoop, where guards greeted them. Many foragers, too tired from their sometimes several-mile journeys, would miss the entrance and crawl the last few inches home.
Grasshoppers always gathered in front of the hive. I never before knew that these insects ate flesh, but saw now