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By Root 1217 0

driveway's gravel, all the ducks and geese were back in the coop, and silent. I waited inside a few moments, and they came out. I walked to the duck and picked him up easily. He rode smoothly, cradled between my right arm and chest. On the way to the chopping block I picked up the hatchet. I laid him down, and he stretched out his own neck. I swung the hatchet, not hard enough, alas, and reached back to swing again. He was wounded. His eyes caught mine, and I will never forget that look. They were soft, like we were lovers, and they said, "This hurts. Get it over with." I swung again, and he was dead.

As often happens when you kill a bird, his nervous system caught fire. His wings flapped explosively, as if now, for the first time, he was flying.

I carried him to a post and hung him by his feet so he would bleed while I heated water. I scalded him and removed his feathers, then eviscerated him. As promised, I carried his head, feet, and guts, along with his feathers, into the forest to the east, and placed it all at the base of a tall, shapely pine I now call the coyote tree.

I returned to the tree a couple of days later. The remains of the duck who had taught me about violence, sex, intimacy, and the acceptance of death were gone. Instead of the bare mound of feathers I had seen in the woods each other time the coyotes had eaten a bird, atop the feathers this time was a pile of coyote shit.

I smiled, because I could think of no better way for the coyotes to "sign" our agreement. There was the poop; they had closed the deal.

I was now, of course, thoroughly convinced that I was crazy.

Cultural Eyeglasses

"All through school and University I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps." E.F. Schumacher

ISOLATION DOES STRANGE THINGS to a persons mind. This is true for any social creature, human or otherwise. Monkeys taken from their mothers at birth, placed alone in stainless-steel chambers, and deprived of contact with other animals ("human and subhuman" alike, according to the researchers), develop irreversible mental illnesses. As one of the experts in this field, Harry Harlow, put it: "sufficiently severe and enduring social isolation reduces these animals to a social-emotional level in which the primary social responsiveness is fear."

Harlow and another scientist, Stephen Suomi, wondered if they could induce psychopathology in primates by removing baby monkeys from their natural mothers and placing them in cages with "cloth surrogate mothers who could become monsters." They created a cloth frame "monster mother" that would "eject high pressure compressed air" and "blow the animal's skin practically off its body." They created another "that would rock so violently that the baby's head and teeth would rattle," and finally, a "porcupine mother" that on command would "eject sharp brass spikes over all the ventral surface of its body." In the former cases, the baby simply clung tighter, because, as the scientists reported, "a frightened infant clings tightly to its mother at all costs," and in the latter case the monkey waited until the spikes retreated, then returned to cling to what it perceived to be its mother.

Harlow and Suomi finally discovered that the best monster mothers they could devise were simply the products of their own experiments: the monkeys they had raised in isolation. These monkeys—depressed, made permanently psychopathological by artificially removing them from the social embeddedness in which they had evolved—were too fearful to interact normally with other monkeys, and were incapable of normal sexual relations. Undeterred, the scientists impregnated