This Side of Wild Read online

  • CHAPTER FIVE •

  On the Need for a Murder of Ravens to Maintain Control of Just About Everything; and Laughing Dinosaurs

  Living in nature is so strange. . . .

  Memories take on life, a valid life, that is more vital, more real than the actual event. It is, in some sense, much like scurvy, an illness brought about by a lack of vitamin C, common to sailors in navies of old who could not carry enough fresh food on long sailing voyages. One of the prime symptoms of scurvy, of advanced scurvy—along with complete tooth loss and eventual madness and death—was that old wounds or ancient surgeries would open up and become fresh, with all the attendant pain and horror. A combat wound, well healed, such as a leg blown off by cannon fire, would become new, open, horrible, even after decades of healing.

  And so with memories from nature. An accident—say from a moose attack or the like—perhaps because there is more time to dwell upon it, does not lessen, but in some ways grows, fills out. It would be a true nightmare except that at the same time good, sweet memories are given even more strength, more reality.

  I can remember with incredible detail my grandmother baking me an apple pie and sitting with me with two glasses of chilled whole milk on a day when I stepped on a rusty sixteen-penny nail sticking through an old board at the back of the barn. The nail is almost gone from my mind, but the pie, with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top, hot from the oven, the cold milk, my grandmother’s soothing, melodic voice telling me in Norwegian that I—that it—would all be fine has filled the memory with such pleasantness, such joy that there is no room for the misery. . . .

  And the same rule seems to apply to all “natural” memories. I have written much about the woods, being in the woods, being in nature, as it was for me a very real kind of sanctuary—a safe place. A truly safe place. A beautiful place. And yet . . .

  And yet.

  I have been attacked by moose, charged by bear, run down by feral dog packs, struck by rattlesnakes, bump-attacked by sharks . . . even put on top of my car by an angry weasel not much bigger than my thumb. (I thought, later, that he might have rabies, but at the time I merely jumped in fear.)

  It’s just that those things don’t seem to have the weight, the measureless beauty of countless sunsets and dawns, the simple grace and clear glory of nature. And besides, often it is the bad things that turn out to be the best. I fell off a dogsled down a frozen waterfall and landed on sharp ice on a kneecap. It was so agonizing, I thought, seriously, that my heart would stop. But I found that my whole dog team loved and worried about me so much, they curved downstream and worked back up to me to surround me as I lay clutching my lacerated knee, whimpering and pushing their warm bodies against me. I remember the love, the dog love, much more than the shattered knee. . . .

  And it was one of the ugliest of things that brought ravens into my life and made them my medicine bird.

  • • •

  It is perhaps true that nobody should trap wild animals. I have done so—as a young boy, and then, when destroyed financially and forced to go back to the woods, as an adult for a couple of years. I wasted nothing, fed the meat to my dogs or ate it myself, tanned or sold the pelts, did everything legal by state and federal law, worked within the ecology to help keep a correct balance in nature, and yet . . .

  And yet. If there is such a thing as hell, I think I will be consigned there for trapping. The animals had no choice in it, and even if the state tells you beaver must be thinned because they are ruining highways, or coyotes must be taken as they are wiping out sheep ranchers, the animals still do not understand or know these things—how they, how we work. They simply know they are alive one day and dead the next—for no apparent reason. And so I think that even if there is a reason, it may be wrong.

  Still, there is something worse than just trapping, and that is to trap without sense or judgment or responsibility, and shame that it may be, such things happen.

  It is how I met ravens.

  I was trapping in northern Minnesota and somebody had crossed my line and set steel leg-hold traps (I used only snares) with bait—which was illegal—and hung the meat bait on a wire directly up and over the trap, forcing an animal to stand in the trap to reach the bait (also illegal); plus they were fairly large traps. I was running my team up a small frozen creek when I came around a corner and saw a raven caught in a number-four steel trap. Drawn by the bait, he had stepped full on the trip pad, and the jaws had caught his foot before he could react and escape.

  By one toe.

  Just the end of it, barely.

  And he was absolutely furious. I mean, there is anger and frustrated anger or anger mixed with fear or anger mixed with only slightly diluted rabid madness, and he was all of them, way past all of them. He was huge, like a big, black, squawking, enraged and murderous turkey, and if he’d had a gun, or a knife, or access to a nuclear device, I would have been gone instantly. A flock of ravens is called a “murder,” and now I could see why.

  The dog team was barreling up the creek and was drawn in by his commotion, and I barely got the sled stopped and tied off to a tree before they got to him. They would have torn him to pieces, but he didn’t care. He jerked at the chain and tried to get loose, not to get away from the dogs but to get at them—I mean, it was complete insanity.

  “A minute,” I said. “Let me get you out of there. It will just take a minute. . . .” I had seen crows and one other raven in traps but never with this kind of rage. And the noise he was making! It was beyond even rudimentary, infantry, truck-driver jailhouse swearing—I know he condemned me to eight or nine slow deaths.

  I stood on the two trap springs and released the jaws, and he pecked at my legs, slamming his beak against my thick winter pants. When he got loose, he flew up at my face before I could cover it, tried for my eyes and then—I swear—whipped over backward and took a shot at Cookie, my lead dog. Surprised, rather than rip him up, she ducked, and he swerved back at me, barely missed my eyes again, then wheeled up into a tree.

  Where he sat.

  Swearing.

  I gathered gear, left the trap triggered and hanging from a branch, and made my way back up the creek. He followed, swearing each time I stopped with a language that clearly indicated he had many different words available for enraged cursing.

  Finally, at the end of the day, when I camped, he moved off and I did not see him again. Or I should say I did not see him again, but many times—past counting—in places where you would least expect it, often under duress or when things were either going bad or about to go bad, there would be a raven. Often silent, sometimes swearing, always pointedly looking at me, neck feathers ruffled, wings half out, beak extended.

  An example: I had sailed down from Alaska to California in my small boat, and for a good night’s sleep I had anchored in a cove south of Monterey called San Simeon, near where they built the Hearst Castle just north of Morro Bay. I slept a solid night into midmorning and was having a cup of tea in the new sun when I looked up, and just over the boat, straight up, glided an osprey looking for a fish. He was beautiful and wonderfully graceful. Just as I wondered if I could get a picture of him up there in the sun, a raven came rushing in from the side and attacked him.

  This is not rare. All birds hate raptors and crows, and ravens attack them constantly. But this osprey was clever, and though the raven grabbed a wing feather, it twisted loose before the raven could peck his eyes (the common attack—to cause blindness) and the osprey flew off, gaining altitude, and the raven dropped the feather and flew away as well.

  I watched as the feather drifted and circled and circled and drifted down until it landed on my boat not a foot from where I was standing.

  It was beautiful, clearly lined and barred, and I picked it up, felt that it was an omen of grace and flight and tied it to the mast down inside the boat.

  A beautiful, innocent encounter, you might say.

  And so I thought.

  But remember the raven. . . .
/>   Fully eight months later, I was in a boatyard farther south in California, getting my bottom paint renewed, and there was a state or county peace officer in the same boatyard. We started talking, and I invited him aboard my boat for a cup of tea. We talked longer there about the sad state of the oceans, when suddenly he stopped and looked at the feather on the mast.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  I told him, in detail, because I liked the story and there was such beauty in it.

  “That’s a raptor feather. . . .”

  “I know. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “It’s five years in a federal prison and a twenty-five- thousand-dollar fine. . . .”

  Wow, I thought, some feather.

  He confiscated it and did not arrest me—for which I am eternally grateful—and I sailed on into my life. Perhaps a week later, while thinking of the incident again, I remembered something that had slipped my mind.

  The raven.

  He had pulled the wing feather out of the osprey. And he had dropped it. And it landed on me. And I know, I know what seems obvious—that it was probably an accident. But I was the one who could have done five years in a federal prison, not the raven. And if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s me; I’m the duck, not the raven. I would be the duck doing time.

  Proof of this possibly evil, or at least cantankerous connection, would come just a year later.

  Everything, it seems, moves in a circle. Life keeps whipping around and around, and on my last go-around, the Iditarod raised its furry canine head. I knew, or thought I knew, that I hadn’t finished with it yet. I was wrong, of course, and old, and brittle, and not a little stupid, but I would have to break legs and arms and wrists and have another tooth kicked out before I began to believe in my own ability to commit errors. So I borrowed all the money I could, bought forty-six dogs and a couple of sleds and an old house back in the woods in Alaska a hundred plus miles north of Anchorage, and settled in to train for and run the Iditarod for the third time. (I finished it in 1983 and almost finished it again in 1985.) My body was then sixty-five years old, but my brain—in a scientific achievement of incredible adeptness—had stopped at the age of thirty-eight or so, and with wonderful abilities of delusion convinced me that this would all work. What’s even more amazing is that I am now sitting here, writing this at the age of seventy-three, and what passes for my brain is still working at me to go back and try it again. Hmmm.

  It is like a symphony musician who stops playing a piece on a hanging note and he cannot rest until he finishes the note.

  So I went back again, put the dogs on the glacier in Juneau, and moved farther north to build a kennel, which was when I ran into the grizzly bear, then went to the pound and got Corky the poodle to watch my back. He is sitting behind me now. Although he is very old, losing vision and hearing, he’s still watching, still in his mind only thirty-eight or so (in people years), fully capable of taking out a grizzly. In his mind.

  So we worked all that summer, put in a kennel, bought six old freezers for dog food, brought the dogs back from the glacier in late fall, began feeding meat, and then the company came.

  Full circle, remember?

  The ravens.

  Leo, my friend and dog handler—who is taking care of the dogs now as I work in the Lower 48 on some business problems—was originally from the city, and it was a jolt to move into the bush. As it would be for anybody.

  When the ravens first came, it was one or two birds. They sat in the trees around the kennel simply observing—taking notes—which they shared with one another using bill clicking as a form of semi-telegraphic communication. We had acquired four all-terrain vehicles—two small ones and two slightly larger—which we pulled with teams on woodland trails before there was snow for sleds. It worked the dogs harder than the light aluminum and plastic sleds and so we started them right off on a strong meat diet: beef hearts, which we purchased in sixty-pound boxes and cut into small one-inch chunks when we fed.

  And the two scout ravens (as we found them to be) saw this meat. While they are largely omnivorous, anything as rich and full of energy as straight heart meat could not be ignored, and after a week the two birds left.

  And returned the next day with twenty-eight friends.

  We suddenly had thirty ravens, and they set out immediately to rearrange our situation so it would be their situation, much as the birds and bees had done in the highway rest areas.

  First they had to train the dogs. Forty or so sled dogs, stone carnivores, each in his own insulated house with a twelve-foot chain, capable of lightning-fast reflexes and lunges, require a lot of training, and the ravens set out immediately with a distinct method.

  Three ravens would hang around a specific dog, teasing him by getting closer and then jumping back, working at him most of a day, tease and jump, tease and jump, until, finally, the dog would get sick of it and began to ignore the ravens.

  Then would come feeding time—twice a day. Each dog got a large bowl with beef heart and commercial dog food mixed with warm water. They loved it, hit it like wolves, and the ravens would have to move off, start over and retrain them. Initially it was slow work, but the dogs had been preconditioned by the daily training, and two ravens would come at the bowl from the side, drawing the dog away while a third hit the food and dragged off a piece of meat. They would do this again and again until at last, at long last (and the ravens were wonderfully patient), the dog would sit back, relax, and simply let the ravens pick through and take out the best parts before letting the dog have his go. We, the humans, were being trained as well in that we added special bits of meat for the ravens so the dogs wouldn’t go hungry. I once saw a kennel in Canada where they fed more than a hundred puppies twice a day in large, rubberized circular dish troughs, and when it came time to feed, the puppies—trained to a T—ran screaming in circles around the dishes until the ravens (perhaps fifty of them) had carefully, and slowly, picked through the food for themselves before letting the pups in.

  Having trained us and our dogs—it took about two weeks to complete—the ravens set about altering, or trying to alter, the rest of our regimen to fit their needs.

  They hated the four small all-terrain vehicles. Either due to the noise of the motors or (and I think this was the real reason) because we were constantly harnessing the dogs and hooking them to the four-wheelers and taking off on long runs, where we would stop and feed them in the bush. That took the dogs away from the ravens (their true masters) during feeding time.

  So I went out one morning and the ignition keys for two of the four-wheelers were gone. The other two sets were still in the ignitions, but the first two were missing.

  Just like that. I saw Leo on the other side of the kennel, and knowing that he was from a semi-urban environment in the Lower 48 and perhaps was worried about theft (all but impossible in the bush where we lived), I called: “We don’t have to pull the keys on the four-wheelers.”

  “I haven’t touched them. . . .”

  And even as I watched, a large raven landed on one of the four-wheelers, reached up, and deftly pulled the ignition key out of its slot and threw it on the ground, hopped to the remaining machine, pulled the key, threw it down, and then flew away.

  They knew. They had watched us with the four-wheelers and knew that we used the key to start them, to run them, and by pulling the key would keep us from running dogs with them, from taking away the food on long runs.

  I wondered then, for the first real time, how much of our intelligence, or supposed intellect, which made us feel superior and full of manifest destiny—how much of that was and is purely self-delusional—and I knew. Knew so surely that it brought a cold feeling to the back of my neck—a cold, self-delusional little breeze back there.

  All?

  Is it all just us deceiving ourselves?

  So we found the keys on the ground and wire-tied them back into the machines so the ravens couldn’t pull them out, t
hwarting them just this once, just now an insult to them, so that they had one more thing to say, one more thought.

  The next morning, just daylight, I went out into the kennel to sip tea and be with the dogs before feeding time. The morning sounds were so soft, so gentle and relaxing.

  And there, on the ground in front of one of the best lead dogs, lay something new—half an orange, cut and juiced.

  Just sitting there.

  And when I looked around the kennel, I could see more of them, dozens, scores of them, scattered in front of the dogs. Leo came out of his cabin then, and I asked him if he’d been eating oranges and juicing them and throwing the peels into the kennel; I knew better, but I asked anyway.

  “I don’t eat oranges. . . .”

  Of course he didn’t. I knew better. And as I stood there, overhead came a wave of eight or ten ravens, flying in from the east, where, a mile away, a family with children lived, and I knew I would find that they ate oranges that had been juiced and they threw their peelings on a compost pile and the ravens were picking them up and flying a mile back and bombing the kennel with them.

  An answer.

  An answer to the wired-in ignition keys. Garbage on our heads. Humor?

  A prank?

  And I picked up an orange peel and knew that no matter what we did, the ravens would be there, would always be there, at least one step ahead of us.

  And that brought perhaps a new bit of knowledge to come from the ravens: They, and all birds, are said to have descended from the dinosaurs. Extrapolating backward and knowing that the dinosaurs had literally millions of years to evolve, grow, and perfect what they were, isn’t it probable that if a raven could make jokes, could make pranks, could drop orange peelings on my head:

  Couldn’t dinosaurs laugh?

  INTERROGATUM: THREE THINGS TO LEARN

  1. When a lawn mower goes over a lawn with tall dandelions in it and cuts them down, the stalks never grow back up above the height of the mower blade. How do they know it and how do they tell the plant to stay below this certain height, as if measured?