The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry

Tags

death, dying, human consciousness, Nature, wildlife, Zen

The deer fleeing for its life turns to look at me with my mother’s eyes.  Dark fierce eyes, bitter-bright, locking onto mine.  Not letting go.  She’s not looking for help or pity or comfort.  Or escape.  She knows there’s no escape.  That dark gaze locked onto mine wants but one thing.  A witness to its passing, its inevitable and terrifying end.

I never actually saw the deer that night.  It was too dark.  I only heard its pounding hooves passing behind our home, its terrified scream splitting the night.  But I “see” it nonetheless.  For days, weeks, afterwards, even now, I see it. Screaming past me with my mother’s eyes. I’d watched her passing too. Her inevitable and terrifying end.

It came quickly.  Late June she was diagnosed with cancer.  By October she was gone.

I was her caretaker during those last brief months.  I watched her flesh waste away, her energy, her light step, her quick smile. Her interest in watching golf and tennis on TV, in reading mysteries, in knitting, in food, in friends, in family.  In me.  In her own life.  It all drained away in a few short months, in the time it takes to flee screaming from one side of the meadow to the other before crashing down that ravine.

And during all that time of her passing, her wide, terrified gaze locked on mine.  Or so it seems now.

In fact, her passing was surprisingly mild.  She refused treatment and entered hospice care.  She was 80 years old.  Her time had come.  She was ready.  Or so she said, and maybe even believed, at the beginning.  The medication kept her free of the worst pain for most of that time.  Until it didn’t.  Until there was no escaping the pain.

She watched herself deteriorate, and I watched with her.  It was like a thing we watched silently together, this draining away of her life.  It was a painful thing, but for the most part she was stoic, reserved, resigned.

And then one day as she was struggling across the room with her walker, moving in slow motion like the deer in my dream, she turned toward me and fixed her eyes on mine.

By then her loose skin hung from her bones, her sharp shoulders hunched, her wide mouth drooped, her once silver-white hair turned yellow and dull, and her dark eyes shone from sunken sockets. She turned toward me in her slow struggle across the room, fixing her intense bitter-bright eyes on mine and said, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

The worst thing. Dying. And I knew she was not looking for a response from me, nor sympathy, nor saving, nor comforting words.  My place was simply to bear witness to this “worst thing”, to the terror of her inevitable passing.  Death at her heels on that slow passage across the room.

She slipped into a coma soon afterwards.  And then she was gone.

No escape.  The unalterable, unutterable fact underwriting our existence.  We avert our eyes every which way as long as we can. Until we can’t.  Until the time comes to bear witness, to refuse to look away, to let the fact of another’s inevitable passing, or our own, stare us down, and lock our gaze.  No escape.  And all we can do is be there, fully present, in that moment, bearing witness.

There’s a story about a Zen monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch.  He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s jaws snapping at his head, while below him he sees another tiger half-climbing the cliff to snap at his feet.  No escape.  Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He lets go with one hand to swing toward the strawberry where he plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth.  “Oh, so delicious!” he sighs, savoring its sweetness.

Here’s another story.  True story.  Caught on video by a group of tourists on safari in Africa. You can watch it here on youtube. Here’s how it goes:

A herd of water buffalo approach a river where a pride of lions are resting.  The lions chase the buffalos, separating a calf from the herd, and dragging it away.  Only the struggling calf slips into the river.  The lions climb down the bank and begin pulling the calf ashore when a crocodile grabs hold of its leg and tries to drag it under.  The lions and crocodile play tug-of-war with the calf, until the lions win and pull it ashore. No escape.

Then something unimaginable happens. The fleeing buffalos suddenly stop running, reverse course, and head back, charging at the lions and chasing them away. The little calf, who moments before had been caught between the lion’s jaw and the crocodile’s teeth (no escape), gets to her feet, shakes her rump, and walks away with the herd, apparently unharmed.

What does it all mean?

These two stories roll around and around in my mind, the same way the screaming deer’s flight and my mother’s slow struggle across the room are rolled together in my memory.

What do they have in common, the monk and the baby buffalo?  One savoring life while death snaps at his heels, another’s life being saved from the grip of death.  The saving and savoring of life.  It’s a theme I turn to again and again in my writing.

Perhaps our escape from life’s inevitable and terrifying end, like the monk’s, is by embracing life’s sweetness, savoring all it has to offer, living life in the oh-so-delicious present moment.

Perhaps our escape is like the calf being plucked from the jaws of death by something too miraculous to even imagine.

Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

[This post is a sequel to my last, which you can read here. The photos were taken from an Amtrak train window on a trip to San Diego where I wrote most of this post]

Related articles

• Mountain Lion Kills Deer in Springs Family’s Front Yard (kktv.com)
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A Deer’s Scream – Beauty and Brutality at Home and in the Hills of Vietnam

Tags

beauty and brutality, death, Deer, deer scream, memoir, Nature, Vietnam, wildlife

The most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard came one night soon after we moved here.  A scream of pure terror that seemed to last forever.

It was too dark to see.  All we could hear was the sound of thundering hooves and a long endless scream passing from one end of the meadow behind our home to the other, then crashing down a ravine. There the sound suddenly stopped, as if a knife had sliced its throat.

Something running for its life had ended abruptly.

We had never heard of a deer screaming, but could not imagine what else it could have been to run so fast and so loud, so I searched online.

There various hunters confirmed that deer do indeed scream—not always, not often, but when they do, the sound is so terrifyingly awful it has haunted them ever since.  One property owner who had always welcomed hunters would not allow them on his land after hearing that scream.

So much of what I write here is about nature’s beauty, how it inspires, uplifts, and nourishes us.  But there’s another inescapable side to nature, darker and more brutal–nature “red of tooth and claw,” as Tennyson wrote.

I’ve seen that kind too in my own backyard–in the screaming deer running for its life, the mountain lion crouched in the tall grass devouring something unidentifiable, the rattlesnake that rose hissing and bared its fangs when I was weeding, the two coyotes taking turns digging at the gopher hole then swallowing it whole in two gulps.

Then there was the rattlesnake we slaughtered when it made its home in our backyard where our little dog plays.  The whole thing was a bloody nightmare, my husband going after it with a long pruning spear.  The snake lunging and hissing and retreating. Finally catching it up, cutting it in two, the headless body writhing, whipping its tail.

There’s also the traps we set to keep the rats out of our garage, the gophers out of our garden.  We kill to preserve life–the life of our dog, our flowers, our lawn–to protect our home. I can’t ever imagine killing a deer or rabbit or quail for food.  Yet our freezer is full of meat others bred and killed.

When we were sailing we joyously lived off the bounty of the sea, hunting, capturing, killing, and eating tuna and swordfish, scallops and lobsters.

How many silent screams went unheard in those halcyon days filled with great beauty and joy and thanksgiving.

As a boy my husband spent his days happily roaming through the hills of old Orcutt with his dog Scratch and his shotgun hunting rabbits and quail.

He hunted in the hills of Vietnam as a young marine too.

Never had he known such beauty as he did then tramping through those wild tropical jungles and lush valleys, he once told me.

He built shelters of sandbags high on a hill overlooking a distant valley quilted in rice paddies with the dark steep mountains laced in waterfalls rising behind them.

He trudged through streams with his 30-lb backpack and machine gun strapped to his back, spellbound by the tropical flowers draping the banks, the brilliant birds darting overhead.

It was surreal—such beauty and brutality all rolled into one. Like the fields behind our home where beautiful creatures die every day to feed other beautiful creatures.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

Perhaps just to bear witness to the beauty and brutality rolled into one all around us everywhere.  We can’t separate it out.  We have to swallow it whole.  There’s no other way.

For a long time after my husband returned from Vietnam he carried in his wallet a faded photo, a heap of dead bodies. When he showed his uncle, he shied away from him, horrified that he would take and keep such a thing.

But he had to he told me.  He couldn’t turn away.

He had to bear witness to the brutality of war.  Taking that photo was his refusal to turn away.  To swallow it whole.

[NOTE:  Part Two of this post can be found here:  A Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry.]

Waterholes in the Wild and the Backyard

Tags

backyard, Namibia, Nature, waterholes, wildlife

Waterholes, whether in the wild or the backyard, are natural gathering places for wildlife and people who like to watch them.

My brother organizes and leads small private tours into the wilds of Africa and Australia. Gathering at waterholes is one of their favorite past-times and the best way to view a large variety of the region’s wildlife. Namibia on the west coast of Africa is a popular destination where the barrenness of the desert landscape stands in stark contrast to the abundance of wildlife. At a single waterhole he will see herds of lions, elephants, rhinos, zebras, giraffes, and several varieties of antelopes drinking and bathing, all in proper pecking order.

Watching the variety of wildlife gather at our own backyard waterhole has become a favorite pastime for our family. We’ve seen squirrels, raccoons, rats, and rabbits, as well as a large variety of birds from hawks to hummingbirds sipping from the waterfall that flows between the spa and pool. Not to mention all the bees and grasshoppers and other tiny six-footed creatures that skim the surface of our pool for a drink.

Before we moved here the wild turkey had made our backyard pool its home. They flew in over the iron fence and waded in the water which at that time had been mostly drained. Even after we moved in they tried to establish the pool area as their domain, perching on the fence and swooping down over our heads, until the dog eventually convinced them to move on. Sometimes they still stare longingly at the water behind our fence. As do the deer whose trail passes nearby, lifting their long necks to peer over, noses in the air enjoying the sweet scent of water.

Two coyotes who hunt in the meadow behind our home like to sit in the tall grass on the hillside gazing down into our backyard, waiting for the squirrels and rabbits to sneak in for a drink, then chasing them down as they depart.

Just as in the wild our backyard waterhole has a pecking order. Among our feathered friends, the red-headed woodpeckers have claimed first rights to the waterfall. They will tolerate the blue jays who pay no attention to them anyway, and they largely ignore the hummingbirds, but the doves and finches and bush tits and any other birds who try to drink without their approval get chased away, returning only when the woodpeckers are otherwise occupied.

Once I rescued a small bird that had fallen into the pool, perhaps having been swept down the waterfall when trying to drink. I scooped it out with the pool skimmer and set it on the grass to dry off. A squirrel was pulled from our water trap where it had managed to pull itself to partial safety. Several rats were scooped from the pool post-mortem. And we have rescued hundreds of bees and grasshoppers with our skimmer, or hand-carried them to safety while we were swimming.

My favorite waterhole show was watching a pair of hawks that had flown in for a drink. But they weren’t quite sure how to do it. They walked back and forth along the edge of the pool gazing into the water and occasionally lowering a toe. But the stretch was too far. They’d strut back and forth and puff themselves up and squat and peck at each other, trying to figure it out, to no avail. Once in a while they approached the waterfall leading up toward the spa where the water was closer for drinking. But this appeared too tricky or too risky for them. Apparently the cascading water and uneven rocks presented a problem. As soon as they’d taken a few timid steps up, they backed away. After a long while they summoned enough courage to climb all the way to the top, and at last they were able to drink as well as bath in the shallow waters coursing down the rocks.

The tiny bush tits and timid doves never experienced any difficulty in drinking and bathing in the falls—only the mighty hawks.

Sometimes I’m tempted to leave our pool gate open, so the wild turkey and deer, coyotes and mountain lions, rabbits and squirrels, could all gather around our pool in proper pecking order, just as they do in the wild.

Wouldn’t that make an awesome photo!

[NOTE – My brother, Jeff Jones, is taking reservations for trips in 2013 and 2014.  He will have a website up soon, but until then, let me know if you’d like more information.]