A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [66]
During the massacre at Sand Creek ("I can hit the son of a bitch. Let me try him") two women and their children were able to escape, but they soon realized that they were lost. They took refuge in a cave too shallow to hold off the cold. Late at night a large wolf entered the cave, and lay next to them. At first they were frightened, but at least they were warm. The next day the wolf walked with them, resting when they rested. Finally one of the women said, "O Wolf, try to do something for us. We and our children are nearly starved." The wolf led them to a freshly killed buffalo. They ate. Walking with them for the next few weeks, the wolf found food for them when they were hungry, and protected them from both humans and nonhumans. At last he led them to their people, the Cheyenne, and after receiving food, he disappeared.
Things don't have to be the way they are.
The story I've recounted is merely an anecdote told by a nonscientific people. Who are the witnesses? They are irrational people making nonscientific observations.
If we decide the story is a metaphor, we need not call them liars, but we also need not reconsider our worldview. The women and children took on the qualities they observed in wolves, huddling together in a shallow cave, perhaps even finding an old wolfskin to wrap around themselves to stay warm. They stalked buffalo, and found a fresh kill. Maybe they even chased away wolves. They avoided white men as the wolves, too, had learned to avoid them, and eventually found their way home. Our perception of physical reality must be based on solid scientific evidence, not fairy tales.
I once asked a scientist friend of mine what it would take to convince her that interspecies communication is real. She said, "If an animal were to act against its nature after you asked it to, I'd reconsider."
Leaving aside the question of what defines an animal's nature, I asked, "Like a pack of coyotes not eating chickens?"
"Not good enough."
I suppose that was a polite way of saying she didn't believe me. I told her how the Chipewyan Indian children frequently found wolf dens in order to play with the pups, and told her that we don't even have to take the Indians' word for it: the eighteenth-century explorer Samual Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada, described it: "I never knew a Northern Indian [to] hurt one of them; on the contrary, they always put them carefully into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young wolves with vermillion, or red ochre."
She didn't say anything, so I pulled a book off the shelf and told her about an incident at a wildlife refuge in New Jersey. A population explosion of whitetail deer prompted managers to allow hunting there. Many people opposed the hunt, so some areas of the refuge remained off-limits. "A funny thing happened," stated a manager, "and I would not have believed it had I not seen it happen. For a couple of days prior to the hunt, we spotted numerous deer leaving the area to be hunted, swimming the Passaic River into the area that was closed to hunting. It was as though someone had tipped them off. And hunting season hadn't even begun." I told my friend that every experienced hunter I know often witnesses this same thing: bucks feed openly in fields a few days before the season opens, then disappear before the shooting begins.
She continued to look at me, her face blank, and I could tell she was losing patience. I pushed ahead, and told her about the Gaddy Goose Refuge. In the mid-1930s, a North Carolina farmer named Lockhart Gaddy began feeding Canada geese at his farm. Soon, there were so many that tourists began to visit. The geese felt safe: at neighboring farms they wouldn't allow anyone within a quarter-mile of them, but at Gaddys they allowed tourists to touch them.