A Language older than Words Page 4

  I knew I disagreed, but it took me a while to articulate my reason. Finally I said that whether we are electrifying a kitten or petting a cat, if the purpose is specifically to collect data we're still objectifying the cat. "What if," I said, "I pet her because I like to, and because I know she likes it? I can still pay attention, and I can still learn from the relationship. That's what happens with my other friends. Why not with the cat, too? But the point is pursuing a relationship, not gathering information."

  She hesitated, looping strands of hair around her index finger, as she often does when she contemplates something, and then she said, "I guess that would change the whole notion of what knowledge is, and how we get it."

  I nodded. The cat, for her part, reached up on her hind legs to push her head against my friends arm. Absentmindedly, my friend stroked the cats back.

  The other conversation was shorter, but then trees can be rather taciturn. I was walking the dirt road that leads to my mailbox, which intersects with a paved road. I noticed an old pine tree just on the corner, as I had noticed it many times previous, and I thought, "That tree is doing very well."

  Immediately I heard a response that did not pass through my ear but went directly to the part of my brain that receives sounds. I heard a completion of my sentence that changed its meaning altogether: "For not being in a community." I looked around, and though there were other trees nearby, this was not a full tree community. The tree's nearest neighbors included the mailboxes and a telephone pole coated with faded creosote. I began to think about this lack of community, and from there began to think of all the times I had moved, from Nebraska to Maine and back to Nebraska, then Montana, to Colorado for college, Nevada, California, months spent living in my truck, back to Nevada, Idaho, Washington. I thought about the people I had left behind, my grandmother, my brothers, one sister and then another, friends. The irrigation ditch behind my old house. The aspen trees outside the front window, the Russian olives, the immense anthills in the pasture. These were my associations, not what I heard the tree "say." That's the crucial difference. The tree merely expressed one phrase. Everything else came afterward. Try it yourself. Listen to someone, and pay attention to where your thoughts take you. It actually feels different to hear than to think.

  I told Jeannette about these two conversations. We talked some more, about the river, about her activism and my own, about what it will take for humans to survive. As we talked, a mosquito buzzed around her lace, then stopped to perch on her arm. She waved it away.

  I told her about the dogs, and how they had stopped eating eggs as soon as I asked. "I can’tvue believe how easy this is."

  "Yeah. That's what we've been trying to tell you now for five hundred years."

  On November 29, 1864, approximately seven hundred soldiers, under the command of Colonel John Chivington, approached a Cheyenne encampment near Sand Creek, in Colorado. The dawn's early light revealed to the soldiers about a hundred lodges scattered below.

  Chivington knew that in an attempt to demonstrate that they were no threat, the Indians of this village had voluntarily turned in all but their hunting weapons to the Federal government. He knew that the Indians were considered by the military to be prisoners of war. He knew further that nearly all of the Cheyenne men were away hunting buffalo. His response to all of this: "I long to be wading in gore."

  As was true of Descartes centuries before him, Chivington was no lone lunatic, but had an entire culture for company. This highly respected man—a former Methodist minister, still an elder in good standing at his church, recently a candidate for Congress—had already stated in a speech that his policy toward Indians was that we should "kill and scalp them all, little and big." It would be comforting to think that such a murderous impulse would stamp the man an outcast. We would be wrong. The Rocky Mountain News, the paper of record for the region, had ten times during the previous year used editorials to urge "extermination against the red devils," stating that the Indians "are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth." The paper worked closely with the governor, who proclaimed it was the right and obligation of the citizens and the military of the region to "pursue, kill, and destroy" all Indians. Chivington and his troops did not act alone.

  Two white men who happened to be visiting the camp spied the soldiers, and tied a tanned buffalo hide to a pole, then waved it above their heads as a signal that this was a friendly village. Black Kettle, the Cheyenne's principle leader, raised first a white flag and, fearing the worst, a United States flag (given to him by Abraham Lincoln) in a desperate attempt to convince the soldiers not to attack.

  There is an awful inevitability about what happened next. Soldiers opened fire. Indians fled. Chivington ordered his artillery to shoot into the panicked mass of women and children. Troops charged, cutting down every nonwhite in their path. Women scratched at the creek's sandy bank, trying to scoop out shelters for themselves and their children. As one soldier later reported, "There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side."

  Picture the scene: a happy Chivington wades in gore. Mutilated Indians lie still in the cold November morning. In the distance, you can see a group of Cheyenne women and children trying to escape on foot. Far behind them, a group of soldiers charges on horseback. A movement in the dry creek bed to your left catches your eye. In the middle distance you see a child. As a soldier later recalled: "There was one child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire—he missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'Let me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped."

  Now picture another scene, this of the soldiers riding home, victorious. You know that they scalped every body they could find, even digging up those which by accident had been buried with their heads full of hair. You sec so many scalps that, as The Rocky Mountain News will soon report, "Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east." You know also that the soldiers cut off fingers and ears to get at the jewelry of the dead. But now you look closer, and closer still, and you see that the soldiers "cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows, and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks."

  Now picture, if you will, a third and final scene. Congress orders an investigation into what Chivington calls "one of the most bloody Indian battles ever fought," and what Theodore Roosevelt later calls "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier." The investigating committee calls a meeting with the governor and with Chivington, to be held at the Denver Opera House. Open to the public, the meeting is well-attended. You are in the back. You smell sweat, smoke, and you cannot be sure, but you think liquor. During the meeting someone asks whether, as a solution to the obvious Indian problem, it would be better to civilize or exterminate them. The crowd explodes. As a senator later wrote, "there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield—a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the opera house—'EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!'"

  Chivington did not act alone.

  Chivington was neither reprimanded nor otherwise punished, and parlayed his fame into fortune as an after-dinner speaker. Th
e University of Colorado named a dormitory after his second-in-command.

  That these Indians were killed was in no way surprising. They were never considered human. The women were "squaws" and the men "bucks." The children? They counted even less. They should be killed because, as Chivington was fond of saying, "Nits make lice."

  My father never beat anyone who didn't deserve it. My brothers were often beaten because the horse tank was only two-thirds and not completely full, or because they received sub-par grades, which meant anything below an A. As teenagers, my sisters were awakened for a beating because the dishes were not clean enough. I remember that one sister was beaten because a litter of puppies fell into our swimming pool and drowned: instead of fishing them out, she called a brother to do it; she was beaten for not doing it herself, and also because the puppies were worth money. The bombastic stupidity of his reasoning was irrelevant to what he was going to do. On feeling an urge to beat someone, he found an excuse to do it. In another sense, however, his nonsensical reasons were the point, perhaps more than the physical violence itself. Had he provided valid reasons for his violence—were such to exist—we victims could have maintained a semblance of control by fulfilling his requests. Joe could improve his grades; my mother (and presumably my sister and myself) could be better lovers; my sisters could make damn sure the dishes were always spotless. On the other hand, had he not given any reasons we could more readily have seen his violence for what it was: utterly senseless. Yet by fabricating nonsensical reasons for his actions, he was able to rationalize them to himself, and was able to get us to play an active role in our own victimization. We would meet demand after demand. The demands were insatiable, and ever changing. Today, it was spelling, tomorrow, dead puppies, the day after, dirty dishes. He shifted, we shifted. It was simply an impossible situation.

  Taking a Life

  "Today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely. I did what I did knowing that my own little life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion, suddenly and definitely.” Jack Forbes

  BY NOW YOU’VE PROBABLY spotted a contradiction in my story. I suppose there's a chance you can accept the possibility of deals made with coyotes and dogs, and maybe you can even allow that stars helped me out when I was a child. But what about the chickens and ducks whose lives were bartered away in my bargain with the coyotes? Carried away by coyotes, or carried by me to a chopping block, how would that make a difference to them? They seem to be getting shafted either way.

  I do not know how they felt about dying. But I know what I have experienced. I know that there have been times when killing a bird has been traumatic and messy—much more so for him or her than for me. Some birds have fought me, and to this day I am haunted by the screams of one rooster who had been silent until the moment I placed his head on the chopping block.

  But there have been times the death—the killing—has not seemed so awful. I have had brief glimpses of death, and killing, as something that is not always frightening. It can be accepted and even celebrated, with respect, and in full cognizance of the loss, as a requisite part of a beautiful dance which necessarily ends in death for all of us. It is the bird's death now, and my death later, that allows the dance to continue.

  I remember one death in particular. It was the first after I made the deal with the coyotes. I had about a dozen ducks, and too many drakes. At one male to a half-dozen females the hens often approach the drakes, then plop down and raise their tails to be mounted. At a ratio of one-to-one the sex is neither willing nor gentle. Drakes fight each other, but the hens get the worst of it. Hens are frequently chased by drakes until they are cornered, mounted, and then mounted again. Favored hens have no feathers on the backs of their necks from being grasped so often in the bills of drakes. At these ratios, no one seems happy.

  I had to do something about that. At the same time, I was running out of food. Because I eat meat I feel it's my responsibility to acknowledge the death it requires. Besides, I don't want to support the practice of factory farming. So I raise birds, I buy part of a cow from a local rancher, I fish, and I've also gone hunting, although the only thing I ever "got" was lost.

  I was splitting wood early one afternoon, and noticed the drakes were especially aggressive. Having gained confidence from two previous successful instances of interspecies communication I said aloud, "If one of you is rough with a female again in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to kill you and eat you." I was not chastisising birds. There were simply too many drakes, and one had to die. I am fully aware as I type these words, as I was fully aware then, that I was displacing responsibility for my own choice to kill a duck "on the next offender."

  About fifteen seconds later a drake tore into a female. He was one of my favorites. There were other ducks who were normally rougher, some male muscovies (a breed of duck) especially, and a part of me hoped that one of them would have been the odd duck out. Of course another part had hoped that none of them would be aggressive, which would have allowed me once again to displace responsibility, this time for not killing any of them. This reluctance to kill is the reason I had not yet kept my end of the bargain with the coyotes.

  I turned to the duck and said, "You're the one." Next I set aside my ax to fetch the hatchet. Normally when I pick up the hatchet the birds will run toward me, because I use it mainly to split nuts for them, break open melons, and pulverize huge globs of dough from the pasta factory. But this time the duck I was going to kill, a beautiful, large, white Pekin, ran past me into the coop. At the time I put the birds in at night (I no longer do that), and they were generally loathe to enter it during the day.

  I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.

  Retreating to my library, I thought about all that had happened, and I remembered something I'd read in Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men: "One of the central questions about predators and their prey is why one animal is killed and not another. Why is one chosen and another, seemingly in every way as suitable, ignored? No one knows."

  He continues, "The most beguiling moment in the hunt is the first moment of encounter. Wolves and prey may remain absolutely still while staring at each other. Immediately afterward, a moose may simply turn and walk away ... or the wolves may turn and run; or the wolves may charge and kill the animal in less than a minute. ... I think what transpires in those moments of staring is an exchange of information between predator and prey that either triggers a chase or defuses the hunt right there. I call this the conversation of death. ..."

  I checked outside, and the duck was still in the coop. I returned to the book, to read of wolves signaling prey, and prey signaling back: "The moose trots toward them and the wolves leave. The pronghorn throws up his white rump as a sign to follow. A wounded cow stands up to be seen. And the prey behave strangely. Caribou rarely use their antlers against the wolf. An ailing moose, who, as far as we know, could send wolves on their way simply by standing his ground, does what is most likely to draw an attack, what he is least capable of carrying off: he runs."

  Lopez calls this conversation "a ceremonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility."

  The duck was still hiding out in the coop. I would wait until he was ready.

  He never came out that afternoon, and I didn't shut him or any of the others in that night. The next morning I arose late. He was out and about. When he saw me he waddled back to the coop. I decided to go inside, too.

  While I ate breakfast I thought about death, and the conversation of death. This set off another series of associations that were broadly about violence, and the way in which so often we conflate violence and sex, especially in popular culture. Horror movies,
for example, may seem prurient in that they frequently show a whole lot of unnecessary tits and ass, but the underlying message is violent. In these dime-a-dozen flicks, if two people have sex, you can usually count on one of them (most often the

  woman) buying it soon after, often in a fashion with strong phallic overtones. Because both sex and violence in these films are too often random, gratuitous, and devoid of deep emotional significance for the participants and the audience alike, the acts are desacralized, robbed of their inherent meaning.

  Not only horror movies follow this equation.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that the problem is not that sex mid violence are conflated in these films, and in the culture at large. In fact they share something: both are deeply relational in that they inherently create or magnify at least some degree of relatedness. I would say that the predator-prey relationship is even more fundamental, and in a sense even more intimate, than a sexual relationship. But by deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence. This goes a long way toward explaining the prevalence of rape scenes in horror movies, art films, and blockbusters alike, the woman pushing at her attacker's chest, until, by the end of the scene she has her arms wrapped around him, pulling him close to her. By enacting this transition, the filmmakers convert an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality. The ubiquity of rape in real life attests to the desire of many members of our culture to attempt this same transition.

  But violence does not equal aggression, and our sex need not follow our mistaken model of violence. There are, after all, different kinds of violence. There is the necessary violence of survival, the killing of one's food, whether that food is lettuce, onion, duck, or deer. Then there are senseless forms of violence so often perpetrated by our culture: child abuse, rape, military or economic genocide, factory farms, industrial forestry, commercial fishing. But violence also can be like sex: a sacramental, beautiful, and sometimes bittersweet interaction.