Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
One of the great delights for Jon having come most recently from life on the high plains was the abundance of birdlife on the new farm inside the edge of the foothills forest. What a great location for birds! Not only for the diversity of species, but because, surprisingly, there is a zone on the east side of the Rocky Mountains where birds more typical of the east intermingle with western and boreal species. Eastern kingbirds meet western, blue jays run into the occasionally Steller’s jay, red-shafted and yellow-shafted flickers mate up and every phase of the red-tailed hawk imaginable and some not can occur.
Blue jays. J.F. Lansdowne art
The most commonly seen birds on the farm are the corvids. Ravens and blue jays especially. Grey jays more common in winter, as well as magpies. Crows in the warmer months. Mountain bluebirds and tree and barn swallows nest in the nest boxes, though they seem to have declined in general in recent years along with the insect population. (If you are middle-aged and up and looking for a shock, pay attention to the grille of your car during the summer with your memory tuned to what it used to look like in terms of being a sort of fully-loaded insect-pizza set on its edge. Compared to a few decades ago, the number of insects to be seen on car grilles has declined by what, 95%? It sure appears so.)
Here is a list, in no particular order, of bird species and variants casually seen on the farm to date, keeping in mind we don’t specifically go out to list birds:
yellow-rumped warbler
yellow-warbler
bronze grackle
swamp sparrow
Swainson’s thrush
blue-winged teal
western tanager
goldfinch
hooded merganser
pine siskin
mourning dove
white-winged crossbill
kildeer
house wren
bufflehead
northern oriole
green-winged teal
great horned owl
eastern kingbird
cedar waxwing
solitary sandpiper
house finch
Canada (grey) jay
Cooper’s hawk
magpie
gyrfalcon
bohemian waxwing
downy woodpecker
turkey vulture
nighthawk
sora
golden-crowned kinglet
ruby-crowned kinglet
catbird
Hungarian (grey) partridge
bobolink
raven
bald eagle
goshawk
sharp-shinned hawk
red-tailed hawk (eastern, western, Krider’s and Harlan’s)
Swainson’s hawk
merlin (boreal and plains)
northern harrier
snipe
sandhill crane
mallard
Canada goose
great grey owl
barred owl
crow
trumpeter swan
whistling swan
junco (slate-coloured, Oregon and other variants)
tree sparrow
common redpoll
white-crowned sparrow
white-throated sparrow
red-breasted nuthatch
white-breasted nuthatch
hairy woodpecker
yellow-bellied sapsucker
pileated woodpecker
flicker (red and yellow shafted and everything in-between)
red-winged blackbird
brewer’s blackbird
brown-headed cowbird
great blue heron
mountain bluebird
robin
varied thrush
rose-breasted grosbeak
barn swallow
tree swallow
Eurasian collared dove
blue jay
starling
English sparrow
northern shrike
pigmy owl
saw-whet owl
This pigmy owl and others hung around several winters competing with northern shrikes for mice from Jon’s hand. (Jon’s hand is infested with mice.)
This is an incomplete list certainly. By far the greatest amount of birdlife to be seen on the place was the year Squirrel-Eating Jon dammed-up the wetland, as told in a previous post.
Evening grosbeak at the feeder. These gorgeous birds have been in steep decline. This one and his mate nested here several summers and brought young to the feeder.
Goshawks can be a daily occurrence in the winter, preying on pigeons that live and breed in the granary, and occasionally on chickens, although they usually leave those alone. (One time recently we looked out the window to see three adult examples of these deadly avian predators in pursuit of a single pigeon at the same time. That’s one exceptionally unlucky pigeon.) Great grey owls are the common large owl in the area and sometimes bring their young. They are completely uninterested in the fowl, unlike the Great-horned owl, blissfully infrequent on the farm. Horned owls are hell on poultry.
This young goshawk took one of our favorite chickens. It’s always the favorites that are first to go to the varmints.
Jon was delighted one year to find bobolink breeding in the hayfield. He hadn’t seen any since his boyhood in the east. The hay here tends to come off late, which is a good thing for birds like bobolink that like to nest in hayfields. It gives them time to get a clutch of young off on the wing before the machines can claim them.
Pintails and blue-winged teal. Francis Lee Jacques art.
Grey and black phases of the Eastern grey squirrel, above. Louis Agassiz Fuertes art.
Squirrel-Eating Jon killed his first squirrel with a slingshot in his single-digit years. The instinct was there, as was some skill, but the knowledge of what to with the animal in death was not. He left it in the woods. The modern hunter-narrative would say, “he let it go to waste” but when you think even a little bit deeply about this statement, it soon becomes obvious as anthropocentric nonsense. Just cos a human being doesn’t eat a game animal but rather leaves it in the woods, it hardly “goes to waste.” Rather, it is recycled back into myriad non-human life-forms as all things lying dead in nature do. The point of the hunter-narrative is actually to say that if you have no good purpose for killing, let that life go on in its current form. Certainly we here are behind this.
In his early double-digits, Squirrel-Eating began hunting squirrels in earnest, starting with a .177 calibre pellet gun his father, Don Draper, had bought for him for Christmas one year. These were the Eastern grey squirrels he hunted. They came in both grey and black phases, and sometimes even black with rufous tails. They were handsome and agile, and added much to the ambiance of the woods, except for when they uttered their warning call, which is one of the least appealing sounds there is.
Hunting squirrels in the remnant Carolinian Forest with a pellet gun was no easy feat. You had to get close and you had to shoot true, a head-shot in the case of this light arm. These were not your stimulus-numbed urban squirrels living in a state of oblivion. These were truly wild animals. Jon learned that the best way to kill some was to plant oneself at the base of a big black oak tree at the top of an oak ridge and to remain truly, utterly still. Or do the same thing near the banks of some little rill that cut a gully between ridges. Both situations were good spots. The squirrels came to the one for acorns and to the other for a drink.
The squirrel-woods of Jon’s boyhood and youth. Summer.
Jon spent many a frustrating time hunting squirrels with his pellet gun, but as his skills improved so did his success rate. These squirrels he would field-dress (gut) on the spot, then place in his game bag and continue hunting until he had enough for a nice dinner.
When Jon got into his teen years, his parents bought him a very good squirrel-gun. It was not a muzzle loader that nimrods of yore used to “bark” squirrels with. (A technique of shooting with the large lead ball common to such guns the branch at the point behind which the squirrel was hiding, and thus stunning it to ground.) Rather, it was a modern, elegant Remington 870 “Wingmaster” pump shotgun in 20 gauge with a full-choke barrel. He soon became fast and deadly with this gun, an arm he still possesses and considers the most perfect of all pump-action shotguns. (See the old ad, below. The bottom gun is exactly the one we are writing of.) With loads of seven-and-a-half shot, he could now shoot squirrels right out of the top of oak trees from across narrow ravines. It was almost too easy. But it was a quicker way to a full game-bag.
Jon killed what seems in retrospect like a lot of squirrels with this gun, but he never seemed to put a dent in their numbers. This was through no particular effort of his. He simply went out and killed and ate squirrels. A key point no doubt being that he was almost but not quite the only one out there engaging in this activity. By the time he came along, his peer group with a few thankful exceptions had long since devolved into doing other things with their time. Things like… well, who knows what they were doing. Probably better that we don’t. The few that did do what he did were all clan of his and hunted their own stretches of squirrel-woods, just as they ran their own traplines for muskrat, possum, coon and fox. The world seemed much larger then than it actually was anymore.
Because Squirrel-Eating shot a lot of squirrels, he also ate a lot of squirrels. His father Don Draper even shared in them at times, comparing the flavor to lamb, only stringier and smaller.
This was Squirrel-Eating’s favorite recipe back then:
1. When you get home, skin the squirrel and cut off the head and give these things to your dogs if you are fortunate enough to have dogs. (Maybe you even have squirrel-dogs.)
2. Skewer it onto a rotisserie, having started the barbeque for which the rotisserie is a key accessory.
3. Cook it until it seems done.
4. Eat it. Don’t swallow the little lead pellets that you get between your teeth – they will accumulate in your appendix like pebbles in a tiny sock and make you very sorry with lead poisoning. (A malaise is known as “Grey Squirrel’s Revenge.”) Instead of swallowing the pellets, spit them along with any broken-off tooth shards into a metal basin and enjoy the pinging sounds.
And don’t forget to give thanks to whatever Lord you think makes such things possible. This is perhaps the most important part. Be thankful. It seems reasonable to anticipate our squirrel-eating days being numbered.
That year, now lost in the mists of obscurity, when Squirrel Eating Jon and his woman A.D. moved to the new farm in order to resume farming, Jon had a cunning plan. It involved the willow wetland that scribed a graceful arc below the house, the breadth of a generous-sized river.
That first spring runoff, the water was moving well through the wetland, from neighboring farms to the north, through the place in question, and by means of a culvert under the causeway that formed a stretch of the lane that entered the homestead, on to the south. The pair had plans to reinstate the old kitchen garden on the place, the lower border of which was only 20 metres or so from the edge of the flow. The old vegetable grounds were worked up with a team of their Clydesdales. Squirrel-Eating made the executive decision to take some angle-iron driven in to hold a piece of 1″ plywood as a dam to the maw of the culvert. And so retain water to irrigate the garden with in order to grow vegetables that would be sold at summer market, a customary practice of theirs at the old farm. The quality of their early season produce had always produced gasps of wonder from the other producers on account of the improbable date.
The plan worked very well. Soon the water was sluicing right over the lane. One result of this was that the birdlife on the place that year has yet to be paralleled, over seventy species and variants casually documented. (A full list to follow in a future post.) A canoe could be paddled about down there, and in fact was. There were green and blue-winged teal, pintails, mallards (of course) and even buffleheads and hooded mergansers to be seen. Water soon backed up so far to the north that neighbors could no longer access their fields. For quite some time the cause of this sudden change in the status quo remained a mystery to them. They did finally figure it out, unfortunately. When the water was eventually released at their behest, some few were willing to admit that it had been a very good year for frogs.
The results of the initiative were visible from Google Earth. Take a look:
Most of this shot is taken up by the farm hayfields, dappled in cultivation that year. But running across the bottom can be seen the rural access road with the farm lane running vertically over the wetland and up around the corner into the homestead. (The house is under that big blue dot, which doesn’t exist in real-life as far as anyone knows.) The kitchen garden can be seen in a nook in the trees below right of the dot, the long pale rectangle being the newly erected greenhouse. Note at any rate how much darker the wetland is on the left side of the lane as opposed to the right. That’s water! (You can even see the canoe, that tiny white papilla at an angle to the top shoreline.)
As it turned out, soil conditions in the garden were not terribly conducive to growing the quality of veggies the pair were accustomed to growing, and the area along with the woods below the house was turned over to hogs, which grew very well. The wetland, only flowing in the spring months and with its thick cover of willows, is a very popular highway and bedding corridor for grizzlies and source of browse for moose. In the spring, the submerged vegetation is the first to green up and the Clydedales plunge their muzzles beneath the water with enthusiasm.
Wilderness or “the wild” is formally defined as “an uncultivated region, as of forest or desert, uninhabited or inhabited only by wild animals.” Something like this.
The farm is located on the top of a level plateau three miles inside the eastern edge of foothills forest. Or today rather, inside the patchwork mosaic of oat and hayfields and mixed woodlots familiar to anyone inhabiting ancestrally woodland regions supporting agriculture. Think New England, central Ontario, southern Quebec without the same diversity of hardwood trees. There are woodlots, lots of them – some of them sizeable – but it is not “the woods.” Seen from Google Earth there are somewhat more open areas than wooded. And it is certainly not “wilderness.”
It is even less what the mind’s eye sees as “grizzly country” – that set of now rare conditions on earth that takes wilderness to another level altogether. That set of conditions adequate to support the most formidable carnivore to walk the earth.
The livestock guardian dogs were busy that night. The farmers – Squirrel-Eating Jon and his woman A.D. (born After-Death of Christ) – can no longer sleep with windows open, as the dogs, who slumber much of the day, are giving tongue much of the night. The barking that signals their vigilance when something lurks is what enables the raising of livestock by the sinewy pair in a region supporting all the original fauna of European contact roaming free save the bison. (And there are plenty of those on farms in the area.) There is no insulation in the attic of the circa 1938 Norwegian-built house so the air remains fresh.
That night the urgency of the dogs’ barking suggested something beyond their usual conversation-with-the-night, more than the ubiquitous foxes and coyotes being about. As there had been recent rain to make the earth receptive, Squirrel-Eating interrupts morning chores to check the lane for trackways. This is what he finds:
Do you see it? If you weren’t paying close attention, your mind was on some future business for instance, you might drive right over these imprints without registering them. He has done it himself in fact. But he is paying more attention anymore being aware of the possibilities these days. A closer inspection reveals this, with a standard lenscap for scale:
This is the track of a grizzly, the great rough beast of legend. (There are also partial dog and coyote tracks.) It is immediately recognizable as such (and not the track of a black bear, also present in the area) by the flat arc of the toes (you can almost draw a straight line between the toe imprints and the imprint of the ball of the foot) and the distance out front of the toes of the clawtip impressions. It is not a particular large bear in this instance, a youngster perhaps, or a smaller female, but make no mistake, what you are looking at here is nothing short of a miracle, right up there with the continued presence of the Amish doing what they do and the advent of human beings ourselves. (Finally, an ape that at least in some instances, doesn’t look like one.)
So why are we looking at a miracle here? We are looking at a miracle because, if you had back in say 1920, just as the modern area was really getting into full orgy, asked some excellent person of bulging wisdom what the odds of there still being anything so obscene as grizzly being in existence by century’s end, their answer would be the same as it would if you were to ask them if anything so ‘backwards’ as the Amish would still be around living as they do by then: absolutely not.
Yet they are not only here, they visit the farm on a regular basis outside the winter season. And in the past decade their numbers in the area are estimated based on DNA sampling to have doubled. Like the Amish then, they are thriving. A modern miracle indeed.
Isn’t it incredible to find out at this late date that an icon of the wilderness can spend its active season in a landscape that is not wilderness at all when permitted to do so? It’s a hopeful situation and heads-up game inhabiting this landscape for bear and man. Much more on how they both manage this to come.
See the man at his zenith. An image here of profoundest vulnerability as much as it is one of classical resilience, given the context of crushing machines in which we find ourselves embedded, dependent. Accidental ape of sparse pelt and putty hue, why do such superior beasts accept you as master? He can’t answer this. He does what he can to hold up his end, or at least, he chooses to believe so. His intentions are good, some of them at least. Only in the moment is it enough.
It was a dry spring, that one. But the rains came the following day, and henceforth a thick, soft bed of Canadian peas. God must love horses, too.
A born Westerner in the deep Southeast of his land. Eden lost, long before his slimy eruption. Land of peaches and tobacco, of limestone ridges and pineclad sandplains, great fresh seas, longspotted constrictors and ill-deserving hordes. Precocious, he was everything he wished to be but almost nothing needed anymore by the age of 16. Earlier, even. Hunter, trapper, fisherman, woodsman, stockman, farmhand, outlander, Eater-of-Squirrels. Fait accompli. It should have been enough, and for most of our tenure, it was. He was a stranger in a worn-out land. He left for home.
The talk being all “the mountains this, the mountains that, oh the mountains!” But it was the high plains that were the best. The sere and sweeping outback, an abstract immensity beyond description. The mountains a letdown after all that buildup. Only to be appreciated once you got over it. But what can you do with it, all that bare vertical rock? You can’t eat it. You can look at it, and that is certainly not nothing, with a howling westerly shrouding the peaks in a nivean shawl. It’s the range of hills at their feet, rolling green on green on gray on blue on black that draw him. Still-hunter’s paradise. There is your visceral land, right at your doorstep. Familiar to ancestors. Multiple generations of adventure in a single vista. The Highlands.
A half a lifetime later only some of the details with him have changed. The patterns being set early in life, as in most of us – ancestrally, even – few possessing the power to override them. (Most people, if you knew them at 14, you know them at 50, save the details. Better hope your patterns serve you. And if they don’t? Was there anything you could have done? Not in this case, it seems.) So, hunter-of-stag, of snake; stockman, tracker, horseman (turner-of-wrenches only when absolutely necessary, may the day bring something more than that!) Agrarian. “Rural man.” No title, no career. Jack-of-some-trades. Fringe character, anachronism, peasant. Predictably.
A few things not so predictably. Grizzly bears surround him in-season, the bounty of the land a foreboding crop of tooth and claw. There, just below the house they enter their daybed. But mostly, nothing new here under the sun. Just endangered.
Writing here of that which concerns him. Bears, birds, dogs, horses, swine, livestock, snakes, wild game, guns, motorcycles and trains maybe. Salted with art, music, local history for context, other matters involving the human condition, perhaps. Physical culture. Heroes, villains, geniuses, idiots (you knew him too?!) Our current condition, the wages of sin. The day to day, his context. Notes from the endgame.
Affirmation then. Affirmation of what we already know and yearn for, when we’re paying attention.
What Rough Beast 