A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [76]
I often spent Sabbaths in the pasture, looking at ants and grasshoppers, or wading through the irrigation ditch catching crawdads and garter snakes. I would like to say my intentions were always benign, but they were not. Most times I was content to watch, but sometimes I mixed ants from different hills to watch them fight, or threw caterpillars in to watch the ants swarm. Often I caught grasshoppers to feed to the toads who lived in our window well.
Each spring brought new shoots of plants to nibble and taste, new tiny toads who danced in the grass, chest-deep water (icy cold from mountain glaciers) in the irrigation ditch, clumsy wasps on fresh spring wings, the reawakening of anthills, the return of robins and meadowlarks, the reemergence of my old friends the venerable window well toads.
Summer. Russian olives turned silver and cottonwoods dropped their fibrous snow. Flower followed flower, each one feeding bees and wasps and beetles for a week or two, then drying, losing petals, closing in on itself, and hardening to a seed-pod. Willow, dandelion, sweet clover, alfalfa. Thunderstorms day by day, then no moisture at all, until grasses yellowed to brittle stalks in the heat of August. The irrigation ditch drained to pools, puddles, mud, dust, and the crawdads went away—I never knew where—for another year.
Sundays during fall I took long lone tramps with rations of peeled raw potatoes and apple bits my mother had cut for me.
Always I looked at bugs: at ants and their hills, more frenetic now; at wasps turned desperate and ill-tempered by the shortening of days and almost certainly the knowledge of their own impending deaths. I loved to look at the hard double, treble, or quadruple barrels of mud dauber nests; it never occurred to me to break one open to see inside, instead I just ran my fingers along them. In boggy shadows, armies of spiders dashed from plant to plant in miniature forests of mint.
And winter. Sundays then were mostly spent inside, with books, or talking to my pet turtle. Sometimes I went out, to be with the horses or cows, insects no longer being available. I looked close at the bark on trees, knobby or smooth, and felt the trees' cold-stiffened limbs. Warm winter days I got down on my knees .to look at the still-living sheaths of last year's—and next years— grasses, and moved the gritty soil between tongue and foreteeth, tasting sharpness, sweetness, and the gifts of next year's life.
It is spring. Today I took two chicks out to the coyote tree. Both of them so young to die, four days old, or perhaps five. One of them hatched with a crossed beak and only half a head, and had struggled from the beginning. It learned how to eat, how to drink, and then how to die. The other, in all seeming respects normal, thrived three days, began to cry on the fourth, and died later that night.
I carried them in the warm spring noontime. I walked past nuthatches beginning to nest in the birdhouses I attached to stacks of dead beeboxes—I think I'll choose this one. No this one. But this one is so near to all these twigs. I walked into the rocky woods to the east, past the fine white feathers of a goose dead a couple of weeks and through a broad meadow jumbled with volcanic rock, buttercups, and camas. I arrived at the coyote tree, half-mast relic struggling to survive, her top lying jagged and still green in the slough near her base. I touched her trunk—How are you?— and placed the dead chicks among the feathers of past offerings. I said to each chick, quietly, Now you get to be wild. Go, little one, go. I touched the tree one more time and climbed back to the rocky meadow.
In addition to the flowers, yellow, purple, I saw also surveyor's stakes and the yellow of their flags. They're going to build here. Hundreds of houses and thousands of apartments. They. Developers, I guess you'd call them. I don't. Nor do I call them speculators {speculate: to meditate; to contemplate; to consider