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Children Other Wild Animals 1st Edition Brian Doyle
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Brian Doyle
ISBN(s): 9780870717543, 0870717545
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.48 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
Children & Other Wild Animals

’
 Other Books by Brian Doyle

fiction
The Plover
Mink River
Cat’s Foot
Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories

poems
A Shimmer of Something
Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices
Epiphanies & Elegies

nonfiction
The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an
Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir
in the Whole Wild World
The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

essay collections
The Thorny Grace of It
Grace Notes
Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies
Spirited Men
Saints Passionate & Peculiar
Credo
Two Voices (with Jim Doyle)
 Children & Other Wild Animals

Notes on badgers, otters, sons, hawks, daughters, dogs,

bears, air, bobcats, fishers, mascots, Charles Darwin,
newts, sturgeon, roasting squirrels, parrots, elk, foxes,
tigers, and various other zoological matters

Brian Doyle

Edited & with a Foreword by Cort Conley

Drawings by Mary Miller Doyle

Oregon State University Press

Corvallis
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and dura-
bility of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources and the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Excerpt from “Never to Have Loved a Child” from Dusty Angels

by Michael Blumenthal (BOA Editions, 1999). Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doyle, Brian.
[Essays. Selections]
Children and other wild animals : notes on badgers, otters, sons,
hawks, daughters, dogs, bears, air, bobcats, fishers, mascots, charles
darwin, newts, sturgeon, roasting squirrels, parrots, elk, foxes, tigers
and various other zoological matters / Brian Doyle.
       pages cm
Summary: “Novelist and essayist Brian Doyle describes encounters
with astounding beings of every sort and shape in this collection of
short vignettes. The book gathers previously unpublished work along
with selections that have been published in Orion, The Sun, and The
American Scholar, among others.”
— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-87071-754-3 (paperback)
1. Title.
PR9199.3.D617A6 2014
814’.54—dc23
                                                            2014031809

© 2014 Brian Doyle

All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by
Oregon State University Press
Printed in the United States of America

Oregon State University Press

121 The Valley Library
Corvallis OR 97331-4501
541-737-3166 • fax 541-737-3170
www.osupress.oregonstate.edu
To my brother Thomas More Patrick Doyle, with love.
No one knows more about fish and birds than that guy.
 Contents

Foreword 1

I. Brief Disquisitions on Sturgeon, Foxes, Badgers,

Trout, Mascots, Fishers, Bears, Squirrels, Dogs,
Bobcats, Parrots, & the Bovine Population, Among
Others of Our Astounding Neighbors

A Newt Note 7
In Otter Words 9
Imagining Foxes 11
Fishering 13
Walking the Pup 15
Twenty Things the Dog Ate 18
A Note on Mascots 21
The Unspoken Language of the Eyes 24
The Bishop’s Parrot 27
The Creature Beyond the Mountains 29
The Elkometer 43
This Particular Badger 46
Cyrus 49
Joyas Volardores 51
Raptorous 55
Reading the Birds 58
II. Brief Inquiries & Observances of the Wilder Animals We
Call Children for Lack of a Better Generic Label for Those
Most Headlong of Mammals; with Sidelong Glances at
Human Beings & the Seething Roaring
Natural World in Which We Swim

The Slather 71
Tigers 73
The Hymn of Him 76
Lost Dog Creek 79
The Anchoviad 81
Mammalian Observation Project: Subject J 84
Things My Kids Have Said That
They Do Not Know I Know They Said 86
Best Napper of the Year 89
The Brilliant Floor 93
The Killer of Jays 96
Maschinenpistole 99
My Salt Farm 102
How to Start Your Kitchen Garden 105
Melting a Car 108
Unfishing 111
The Greatest Nature Essay Ever 114
What the Air Carries 117
Charlie Darwin’s Garden 126
 My Land 129
In the Hills of Willamina 132
The Best Soccer Player in the World … 134
A Note on Cricket 137
My Hero? 139
The Thaw 141
The Hawk 143
Moose Poop 146
That Chickadee Must be from Chicago 148
A Moment 150
Sandy 153
Hypoxia 156
What Does the Earth Ask of Us 158

Notes 163
 Foreword

A light year ago, or so it seems, my then-ten-year-old daugh-

ter regularly ensnared me in spirited wrangles about whether
any detectable difference exists between animals and human
beings—human beings being mammals, after all. I fumbled to
defend my keystone species (Homo sapiens = wise man, no?)
against her animal bias.
Conscience? I suggested. Art? A soul, perhaps?—only
to discover that “animal” derives from the Latin anima, for
soul, and that most of the world’s religions and oldest cultures
espouse, rather devoutly, a belief in an animal spirit or soul; at
minimum, a partnership between animals and human animals,
all being part of creation.
My daughter, unconvinced, straightaway became a vegan,
and soon enough went in hot pursuit of a PhD in biology; ever
after I have thought, What do I know about regard, equal and
mutual, among all creatures?
Happily, however, Brian Doyle knows a good deal more
about this regard, as the reader will readily learn; he is also a
ringmaster of the familiar essay, “the most naked and direct
and honest and playful and piercing form of all,” as he says,
“the closest to the speaking voice and the loose wandering
penetrating free-associating story-junkie mind.”
So if you picked up this book because its wry title and ani-
mated cover photo of the kid in a witness-protection program
struck you as beguiling or provocative, congratulations—you
are about to unearth a writer who is both mother lode and
father lode, a lost-treasure mine in the literary landscape of the
American West.

1
BRIAN DOYLE

Doyle is a home-schooled naturalist who combines penetrat-

ing observation with kookaburra laughter every other page.
Yet a general mansuetude flows through it all: his wild-world
insights and sensibilities—unlike, for example, poet Robinson
Jeffers’ “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a
hawk”—embrace the sane and the humane. He knows beaver
and otter, elk and wolf and sturgeon. Blue jay and chickadee.
Children of all ages and species. Still, he ranks none above
the others and condescends to none; all are to be witnessed,
celebrated, and sung as the vibrant verbs and shards they are.
His essays, taken all together, are finally about astonishment
available in every moment and place; like the first time you saw
neon tetra in a pet mart, such electric miracles in such a reeky
cellblock.
Moreover, not to put too fine a point on it, as researchers
discover that the songs, sounds, and rituals—the “language”—
of birds, fish, and mammals actually rival in complexity human
communication, then the link between child and dog grows
ever more cousinly. Recent understandings, for instance, tell
us that moths have memory; that ravens play like otters; that
young rats like to be tickled; that chimps and cheetahs and
elephants grieve. Like us. Just like us.
As for children, Doyle has turned fatherhood into an as-
sisted triple play, a hat trick. And only a parent, I’m convinced,
could have written these essays, informed by what he calls
“the wild stimulus of our children.” Children—parenthood
in particular—are the brightest threads running through these
pieces. As he says, “This is Being a Parent, and it’s essentially
impossible to explain or train for, and it makes you gaunt and
gray, and the only tools that really help are patience and love
and sleep, but o the joy.” Elsewhere, he adds, “we used to be

2
 Children & Other Wild Animals

them, and we remember, dimly, what it was like to be small and

frightened and confused.”
In one of his more memorable poems, “Never to Have
Loved a Child,” Michael Blumenthal put it this way:

Never to have loved a child

may be never to see again our pre-
disillusionary selves, those faces
gazing upward into the light, how innocent
and beautiful and enraged they once were,
and what has become of them now.

This remarkable aggregation of essays is, of course, an-

other child of Doyle’s range, his memories (from napping as
a kindergartner to the minefield cartwheels of a teenager), and
his relentless observations. Lucky man, because as a fellow ac-
complished word-herder says, “stories only happen to people
who can tell them.” Tell them he surely can. His pencil never
fails us.
For my part, after reading Children & Other Wild Animals,
I came away thinking of Emily Dickinson lowering her basket
from her second-story window with treats for children, and
her last words: “Let us love better, children, it’s most that’s left
to do.”

—Cort Conley

Cort Conley is the literature director for the Idaho Commis-

sion on the Arts.

3
 I.

Brief Disquisitions on Sturgeon, Foxes, Badgers,

Trout, Mascots, Fishers, Bears, Squirrels, Dogs,
Bobcats, Parrots, & the Bovine Population,
Among Others of Our Astounding Neighbors
 A Newt Note

One time, years ago, I was shuffling with my children

through the vast wet moist dripping enormous thicketed
webbed muddy epic forest on the Oregon coast, which is a for-
est from a million years ago, the forest that hatched the biggest
creatures that ever lived on this bruised blessed earth, all due
respect to California and its redwood trees but our cedars and
firs made them redwoods look like toothpicks, and my kids
and I were in a biggest-creature mood, because we had found
slugs way longer than bananas, and footprints of elk that must
have been gobbling steroids, and a friend had just told us of
finding a bear print the size of a dinner plate, and all of us had
seen whales in the sea that very morning, and all of us had seen
pelicans too which look like flying pup tents, and how do they
know to all hit cruise control at the same time, does the leader
give a hand signal? as my son said, and one of us had seen
the two ginormous young eagles who lived somewhere in this
forest, so when we found the biggest stump in the history of the
world, as my daughter called it, we were not exactly surprised,
it was basically totally understandable that suddenly there
would be a stump so enormous that it was like someone had
dropped a dance floor into the forest, that’s the sort of thing
that happens in this forest, and my kids of course immediately
leapt up on it and started shaking their groove thangs, and
dancing themselves silly, and I was snorting with laughter until
one kid, the goofiest, why we did not name this kid Goofy
when we had the chance in those first few dewy minutes of
life I will never know, well, this kid of course shimmed over to
the edge and fell off head over teakettle, vanishing into a mat
of fern nearly as tall as me, but the reason I tell you this story

7
BRIAN DOYLE

is that while we were all down in the moist velvet dark of the
roots of the ferns, trying to be solicitious about Goofy and see
if he was busted anywhere serious but also trying not to laugh
and whisper the word doofus, one of us found a newt! o my
god! Dad! check it out!
Of course the newt, rattled at the attention, peed on the kid
who held it, and of course that led to screeching and hilarity,
and of course on the way home we saw damselflies mating,
which also led to screeching and hilarity, but the point of this
story isn’t pee or lust, however excellent a story about pee
or lust would be. It’s that one day when my kids and I were
shuffling through the vast wet moist forest, we saw so many
wonders and miracles that not one of us ever forgot any of
the wonders and miracles we saw, and we saw tiny shreds and
shards of the ones that are there, and what kind of greedy
criminal thug thieves would we be as a people and a species if
we didn’t spend every iota of our cash and creativity to protect
and preserve a world in which kids wander around gaping in
wonder and hoping nothing else rubbery and astonishing will
pee on them? You know what I mean?

8
 In Otter Words

One day I am sitting in my old body at my old desk reading

young essays, these are essays sent to me by holy children of
various sizes, and I can feel the joy sloshing and rising in me as
their words pour in, and finally I get topped off by the phrase
in otter words, a child has scrawled this in the brightest green
ink you ever saw, in otter words, the holy parts are circled, she
writes. I think maybe the top of my head is going to fly off from
happiness, and what remains of my organized mature mind
sprints away giggling and mooing with pleasure. You know
how it’s said that human beings are the only beings who can
contemplate two opposing ideas at once? It’s even better than
that—we can entertain lots of joyous ideas at the same time, it
turns out. Such as, o my god, otter words, that’s enough right
there for hours of happy speculation, am I right? I mean, what
are the otter words for trout and rain and minnows and ice
and fur that has been warmed by the sun to just the right sheen
and shimmer? I bet there are otter words for that, and for
clumsy fishermen, and for osprey, and for mud of exactly the
right consistency for sliding in, and for dying chinook salmon
like ancient riddled kings, and old red drift boats, and young
mergansers, and huge herons, and the basso murmur of mossy
boulders grumbling at the bottom of the river, and the tinny
querulous voices of crawdads, and the speed-freak chitter of
chickadees, and the fat feet of tiny kids, and the little pebbly
houses of caddisflies, and the rain of salmonflies in season like
tiny orange helicopters. And the holy parts! which are circled,
we knew that was true, the holy parts are underlined and il-
luminated and highlighted, aren’t they, and circled with a huge
honking blessed magic marker, isn’t that so? Sometimes I feel

9
BRIAN DOYLE

like the eyes in my heart close quietly without me paying much

attention, and I muddle and mutter along thinking I am savor-
ing and celebrating, and then wham a kid, it’s always a kid,
says something so piercing and wild and funny and unusual
that wham my heart opens again like a door flung open by, say,
an otter, and wham, I am completely and utterly overwhelmed
and thrilled by the shocking brilliant uniform that kestrels wear,
and moved beyond words by the roiling sea in a woman’s eyes,
and I get the shivering willies hearing my dad’s gentle snortling
laugh on the phone, and my god have you ever seen a blue jay
up close and personal, what a cheerful arrogant street criminal
it is, all blue brass and natty swagger, isn’t that so? And most
of all, best of all, better than every other joy and thrill, even
the very best beer, which is a very excellent thing, are kids.
Sure, they learn to lie, and sure, they are just not as into dental
hygiene as you wish they were, and my god they skin their
knees nine times a day, and do things like smear peanut butter
on their abraded knees just to see what it feels like, and shake
flour on the dog! so that when he shakes off the flour at one
million revolutions per minute there will be a flour cloud in
the kitchen the size of Utah!, isn’t that cool, Dad?, but more
than anything else in the world it is kids who make us see that
the holy parts are circled. You know and I know this is true.
We forget. I think maybe we should write it down somewhere,
like on the wall by the coffeepot, or in steamy words on the
bathroom mirror, so we will see it every day, and remember it
more, and be refreshed to the bottom of our bony bottoms. If
necessary use otter words.

10
 Imagining Foxes

One time, many years ago, when the world and I were
young, I spent a day in a tiny cedar forest with my sister and
brother. This was in the marshlands of an island the first people
there called Paumonok. This little cedar forest was twelve city
blocks long by two blocks wide, for a total of 84 acres, and
there was a roaring highway at the northern end, and a seri-
ously busy artery road at the southern end, but when you were
in Tackapausha Preserve you were, no kidding, deep in the
woods, and you couldn’t hear cars and sirens and radios no
matter how hard you tried. We tried hard, my kid brother and
I, we sat silently for probably the longest time we ever had, up
to that point, but our sister was right, and we were deep in the
wild.
We saw woodpeckers and an owl and lots of warblers—this
was spring, and there were more warblers than there were taxi-
cabs on Fifth Avenue. We saw what we thought was a possum
but which may have been a squirrel with a glandular problem.
We saw muskrats in the two little ponds. We saw a humming-
bird, or one of us said he saw a hummingbird, but this was the
brother who claimed that saints and angels talked to him in
the attic, so I am not sure we saw a hummingbird, technically.
We did not see deer, although we did see mats of grass which
sure looked like places where deer would nap like uncles after
big meals, sprawled on their sides with their vests unbuttoned,
snoring like heroes. We saw holes among the roots of the white
cedars which were so clearly the dens of animals like foxes and
weasels and badgers that one of us looked for mail addressed
to them outside their doors. We saw scratch marks in the bark
of trees that one of us was sure were made by bears although

11
BRIAN DOYLE

our sister said she was not sure there were bears registered in
the Seaford School District, not to mention badgers either.
We saw many other amazing small things that are not
small, and we wandered so thoroughly and so energetically all
afternoon, that my kid brother and I slept all the way home
in the back seat of the car with our mouths hanging open like
trout or puppies, sleeping so soundly that we both drooled on
the naugahyde seat and our sister had to mop up after us with
the beach towel she always carried in the trunk for just such
droolery, but my point here is not what we saw, or even the
excellence of gentle patient generous older sisters; it’s about
what we did not see. We did not see a fox. I can assure you we
did not see a fox. I could trot out my brother and sister today
to testify that we did not see a fox. With all my mature and
adult and reasonable and sensible old heart I bet there were
zero foxes then resident in Tackapausha Preserve, between
Sunrise Highway and Merrick Road, in the county of Nassau,
in the great state of New York. But I tell you we smelled Old
Reynard, his scent of old blood and new honey, and we heard
his sharp cough and bark, and if you looked just right you
could see his wry paw prints in the dust by his den, and if
we never take our kids to the little strips of forests, the tiny
shards of beaches, the ragged forgotten corner thickets with
beer bottles glinting in the duff, they’ll never even imagine a
fox, and what kind of world is that, where kids don’t imagine
foxes? We spend so much time mourning and battling for a
world where kids can see foxes that we forget you don’t have
to see foxes. You have to imagine them, though. If you stop
imagining them then they are all dead, and what kind of world
is that, where all the foxes are dead?

12
 Fishering

In the woods here in Oregon there is a creature that eats

squirrels like candy, can kill a pursuing dog in less than a
second, and is in the habit of deftly flipping over porcupines
and scooping out the meat as if the prickle-pig was a huge and
startled breakfast melon. This riveting creature is the fisher,
a member of the mustelid family that includes weasels, otter,
mink, badgers, ferrets, marten, and (at the biggest and most
ferocious end of the family) wolverine. Sometimes called the
pekan or fisher-cat, the fisher can be three feet long (with tail)
and weigh as much as twelve pounds. Despite its stunning
speed and agility, it is best known not as an extraordinary
athlete of the thick woods and snowfields but as the bearer of
a coat so dense and lustrous that it has been sought eagerly by
trappers for thousands of years; which is one reason the fisher
is so scarce pretty much everywhere it used to live.
Biologist friends of mine tell me there are only two “sig-
nificant” populations of fisher in Oregon—one in the Siskiyou
Mountains in the southwest, called the Klamath population,
and the other in the Cascade Mountains south of Crater Lake,
called the Cascade population. All of the rare sightings of fisher
in Oregon in recent years have been in these two areas. In the
northwest coastal woods where I occasionally wander, biolo-
gists tell me firmly, there are no fishers and there have been
none for more than fifty years.
I am a guy who wanders around looking for nothing in
particular, which is to say everything; in this frame of mind I
have seen many things, in many venues urban and suburban
and rural, and while ambling in the woods I have seen marten
kits and three-legged elk and secret beds of watercress and the

13
BRIAN DOYLE

subtle dens of foxes. I have found thickets of wild grapevines,

and secret jungles of salmonberries, and stands of huckleber-
ries so remote and so delicious that it is a moral dilemma for
me as to whether or not I should leave a map behind for my
children when the time comes for me to add to the compost of
the world.
Suffice it to say that I have been much graced in these woods,
but to see a fisher was not a gift I expected. Yet recently I found
loose quills on the path and then the late owner of the quills,
with his or her conqueror atop the carcass staring at me.
I do not know if the fisher had ever seen a human being
before; it evinced none of the usual sensible caution of the wild
creature confronted with homo violencia, and it showed no
inclination whatsoever to retreat from its prize. We stared at
each other for a long moment and then I sat down, thinking
that a reduction of my height and a gesture of repose might
send the signal that I was not dangerous and had no particular
interest in porcupine meat. Plus I remembered that a fisher can
slash a throat in less than a second.
Long minutes passed. The fisher fed, cautiously. I heard
thrushes and wrens. There were no photographs or recordings
and when the fisher decided to evanesce I did not make casts of
its tracks or claim the former porcupine as evidence of fisher-
ness. I just watched and listened and now I tell you. I don’t have
any heavy message to share. I was only a witness: where there
are no fishers there was a fisher. It was a stunning creature,
alert, attentive, accomplished, unafraid. I think maybe there
is much where we think there is nothing. Where there are no
fishers there was a fisher. Remember that.

14
 Walking the Pup

First we go by the place where one time there was a squashed

squirrel she rolled in, because you never know, there might be
something newly dead to roll in, and then we go way around
the bush where she got stung by a bee, and then we go by
the new house with the shrill tiny psychopathic dog whom we
studiously ignore, which drives it insane, which makes us unac-
countably happy, and then we go past the dark house where
the brooding evil cat lives who looks eerily like Marge Schott,
former owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, the wild
hair and bad language and cigarette reek and everything, and
the cat snarls at us as usual, and the pup makes that yearning
sound in her throat that means please let me eat the cat and
I say someday, my pretty in the Wicked Witch voice, and we
keep moving on down the road.
We go past the place where sometimes the jays hang out
like a little blue biker gang, and past the blackberry brambles
where one time there was a rabbit! and the pup took off like a
racehorse! and I thought it was spinal surgery for me for sure!,
and we come to the busy street where I always make her pause
and idle and look both ways, even if there are no cars, and I
say quietly dog, there will come a day when you will thank
me for this lesson, and she hoists her ears to indicate that she
is pretending that I have said something interesting, and we
resume our voyage.
Up the street there is the drain where you can always hear
water rushing madly down to the river even on the driest hot-
test days, and we stop and listen for a while, because burbling
hurrying headlong water is a cool sound, and then we go by the

15
BRIAN DOYLE

big telephone pole where all dogs leave messages, and then we
go by the tree where one time we saw a sharp-shinned hawk
almost catch a crow, that was a great day, and then we go
behind the bagel store and sniff around for old bagels, and
then we go by the coffee shop where the owner leaves a bowl
of water for dogs wandering by, and then we check behind
the pizza shop just in case, and then we head home through
the tiny park that used to be an orchard, where now there are
always baseballs and tennis balls and crows and cookies and
sneakers and worms and crickets and other good things to eat,
and then we stop at the creek for a guzzle, and usually right
about there one of us pees like a racehorse, and then we come
back downhill through the woods where the hope springs eter-
nal in both of us that there might be a deer or an elk or a bear.
One time when we were walking through those woods I
told her that me personally myself I thought it would be pretty
cool to someday encounter a wolverine in these woods, but
that this seemed unlikely, as there just aren’t as many wolverine
around as there used to be, although it seems to me that you
can never be totally sure you won’t meet a wolverine, because
just last year as scientists were saying with absolute conviction
that wolverine were absolutely incontrovertibly extinct here,
a woman ran over a wolverine on the highway, which seems
like pretty much a confirmed sighting of a wolverine to me.
Although the thing is that while the papers were then filled
with learned commentary about mustelid populations and
restoration of native species and all, I kept thinking about the
woman limping her dented car home and her husband asks
what happened to the car? and she answers I hit a wolverine,
which is a phrase you hardly ever hear.

16
 Children & Other Wild Animals

While I was telling her this story the pup looked at me like
maybe I was saying something interesting, but I have since
concluded that what she was thinking is that a dead wolverine
would be something really cool to roll in, which I guess it would
be, if you like that sort of thing, which I do not, though I will
defend your right to roll in deceased members of the mustelid
family, this being a free country and all, which is cooler even
than rolling in what used to be a wolverine, you know what I
mean?

17
 Twenty Things the Dog Ate

1. Ancient squashed dried round flat shard of beaver

Sweet mother of the mewling baby Jesus! You wouldn’t think
a creature that likes to watch Peter O’Toole movies would
be such an omnivorous gobbling machine, but he has eaten
everything from wasps to the back half of a raccoon. But let us
not ignore the beaver. Speculation is that beaver was washed
up onto road when the overflowing lake blew its dam, was
squashed by a truck, and then got flattened ten thousand times
more, and then summer dried it out hard and flat as a manhole
cover, and the dog somehow pried it up, leaving only beaver
oil on the road, and ate it. Sure, he barfed later. Wouldn’t you?

2. Young sparrow
I kid you not. Sparrow falls from nest in the pine by the fence,
flutters down ungainly to unmerciful earth, dog leaps off porch
like large hairy mutant arrow, gawps bird in half an instant.
Man on porch roars drop it! Dog emits bird with a choking
coughing sound, as if disgusted by a misplaced apostrophe.
Bird staggers for a moment and then flutters awkwardly up to
fencepost. I wouldn’t have believed this if I had not seen it with
my own holy eyeballs. Wonder how fledgling bird explained
that adventure to mom.

3. Crayons
I don’t even want to think about this ever again. Crayola. The
big box—sixty-four crayons, all colors. Sure, he barfed later.
Sure he did. Wouldn’t you?

18
 Children & Other Wild Animals

4. Yellowjacket wasps
Every summer. Even though he gets stung again and again
in the nether reaches of his mouth and throat, and jumps up
whirling around in such a manner that we laugh so hard we
have to pee. He cannot resist snapping them out of the air as
if they were bright bits of candy, and then whirling around
making high plaintive sounds like a country singer on laughing
gas. I have to pee.

5. Jellyfish on the shore of the vast and impacific Pacific

Why would you ever do such a thing? What could possibly look
less appetizing than an oozing quivering deceased jellyfish? Yet
he does. Sure, he barfs.

6. to 19. Some non-organic highlights

Pencil nubs. Lacrosse balls. The cricket ball a friend sent me
from Australia. Pennies. Postcards. Sports sections. Bathrobe
belts. Kindling sticks. Kazoos. Most of a paperback copy of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Most of a cell-phone
charger. Pen caps. Toothbrushes. One of two tiny sneakers that
belonged to a child one month old, although to be fair there it
wasn’t like the kid was actually using the sneakers.

20. An entire red squirrel, called a chickaree in these parts

I think the squirrel was suicidal. If you were a squirrel the size
of a banana, and you could evade a dog with the athletic gifts
and predatory instinct of Michael Jordan, would you venture
down to the grass for any reason whatsoever, knowing that the
dog could change you from present to past tense in less than
a second? Would you? Me neither. But the squirrel did. The

19
BRIAN DOYLE

skull appeared magically in the grass two days later. The Dog
declined to eat the skull a second time, probably for religious
reasons. After a while a crow carried it off, probably for religious
reasons. One of the great things about our country, I think, is
the range of religions here, each one odder than all the rest.

20
 A Note on Mascots

The first sports team I remember loving as a child, in the dim

dewy days when I was two or three years old and just waking
up to things that were not milk and mama and dirt and dogs,
was the Fighting Irish of the University of Notre Dame, who
were on television every day, it seemed, in our bustling brick
Irish Catholic house; and then, inasmuch as I was hatched and
coddled near Manhattan, there were Metropolitans and Knick-
erbockers and Rangers and Islanders; and then, as I shuffled
shyly into high school, there were, for the first time, snarling
and roaring mammalian mascots, notably the Cougars of my
own alma mater, which was plopped in marshlands where I
doubt a cougar had been seen for three hundred years; but
right about then I started paying attention to how we fetishize
animals as symbols for our athletic adventures, and I have
become only more attentive since, for I have spent nearly
thirty years now working for colleges and universities, and
you could earn a degree in zoology just by reading the college
sports news, where roar and fly and sprint and lope and canter
and gallop and prowl animals from anteater to wasp—among
them, interestingly, armadillos, bees, boll weevils, herons, owls,
koalas, turtles, moose, penguins, gulls, sea lions, and squirrels,
none of which seem especially intimidating or prepossessing,
although I know a man in North Carolina who once lost a
fistfight with a heron, and certainly many of us have run away
from angry bees and moose, and surely there are some among
us who could relate stories of furious boll weevils, but perhaps
this is not the time, although anyone who has a story like that
should see me right after class.

21
BRIAN DOYLE

There are vast numbers of canids (coyotes, foxes, huskies,

salukis, wolves), felids (lions, tigers, panthers, lynx, bobcats),
ruminants (bulls, chargers, broncs, broncos, and bronchoes,
though no bronchials), mustelids (badgers, wolverine, otters),
and denizens of the deep (dolphins, gators, sharks, sailfish, and
“seawolves,” or orca). There are two colleges which have an
aggrieved camel as their mascot. There are schools represented
by snakes and tomcats. There is a school whose symbol is a
frog and one whose mascot is a large clam and one whose
mascot famously is a slug. There is a school whose mascot
is the black fly. There are the Fighting Turtles of the College
of Insurance in New York. There are schools represented by
lemmings and scorpions and spiders. There are the Fighting
Stormy Petrels of Oglethorpe University in Georgia. There is a
school represented by an animal that has never yet been seen
in the Americas, the bearcat of Asia, although perhaps that
is meant to be a wolverine, which did once inhabit southern
Ohio, and may still live in Cincinnati, which has tough neigh-
borhoods. The most popular mascot appears to be the eagle,
especially if you count the fifteen schools represented by golden
eagles, which brings us to a round total of eighty-two schools
symbolized by a bird Benjamin Franklin considered “a bird of
bad moral character, too lazy to fish for himself … like those
among men who live by sharping & robbing he is generally
poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward …” But
the two schools that Franklin helped establish are nicknamed
the Quakers and the Diplomats, so we can safely ignore Ben
on this matter.
And this is not even to delve into the mysterious world of
fantastical fauna—blue bears and blue tigers, crimson hawks,
trolls, dragons and firebirds, griffins and griffons and gryphons,
delta devils and jersey devils (there are a lot of devils, which says

22
 Children & Other Wild Animals

something interesting), jayhawks and kohawks and duhawks,

green eagles and phoenixes, thunderhawks and thunderwolves,
the mind reels, and then there is the whole subset of nicknamery
that has to do with botany, as evidenced most memorably by
the Fighting Violets of New York University, on which image
we had better pull this whole essay to the side of the road and
sit silently for a moment.
Beyond all the obvious reasons we choose animals as
symbols for our sporting teams—their incredible energy and
muscle, grace and strength, intelligence and verve, our ancient
conviction of their power and magic, ancient associations as
clan signs and tribal totems, even more ancient shivers perhaps
of fear at animals who hunted and ate us, not to mention the
way their images look cool on letterhead and sweatshirts and
pennants and fundraising appeals—there is something else,
something so deep and revelatory about human beings that I
think we do not admit it because it is too sad. I think we love
animals as images because we miss them in the flesh, and I think
we love them as images because they matter to us spiritually in
ways we cannot hope to articulate. The vast majority of us will
never see a cougar or a wolverine, not to mention a boll weevil,
but even wearing one on a shirt, or shouting the miracle of its
name in a stadium, or grinning to see its rippling beauty on
the window of a car, gives us a tiny subtle crucial electric jolt
in the heart, connects us somehow to what we used to be with
animals, which was thrilled and terrified. We’ve lost the salt of
that feeling forever, but even a hint of it matters immensely to
us as animals too. Maybe that’s what we miss the most—the
feeling that they are our cousins, and not clans of creatures
who once filled the earth and now are shreds of memory, mere
symbols, beings who used to be.

23
 The Unspoken Language of the Eyes

A man named Nicholas tells me that yes, he did find a

stunned bobcat on the road as he came home from work, this
was near the Lucky River here in Oregon, and something made
me stop, he says, I thought, my gawd that’s a wildcat! and
it’s not like you see a bobcat sprawled in the road every day,
you know, so I stop to see if it’s dead, but I see he’s breathing
but unconscious, so I pick him up. He weighed about what
a toddler weighs. He was amazingly beautiful. You wouldn’t
believe the intense softness of his fur. And the colors of his
fur … I don’t have the right words for the colors. I put him
on the floorboard in the front, on the passenger side. I have a
Honda Prelude. He was bleeding from the eyes and nose and
mouth. In my head and perhaps out loud I spoke to him a bit,
and I am absolutely sure he heard me, at some level. He was
unconscious but aware, you know what I mean? I was being
respectful, telling him what I was doing, that I was getting him
help, asking politely that he not rip my face off if he woke up
startled to find himself in a Honda Prelude. We drove about
twenty minutes. I got all the way into town and was looking
for the vet, when he woke up. He sort of stretched and then
snapped to his feet, growling. I pulled over. We were on Fourth
Street. I raised my right hand slowly and started talking. We
kept our eyes on each other. I kept my hand up. I just wanted
us to sink into a calm space, you know? People keep asking
what I said to him but I just talked in a calm even tone. I don’t
remember quite what I said. People think it’s comical, a man
talking to a bobcat, or insane, I mean a bobcat is a serious
carnivore with razors for claws, but there was an awareness

24
 Children & Other Wild Animals

between us, an intense presence, a recognition of intention,

that is very hard to explain and was the most extraordinary
thing. It was dark by now but there was enough light in the
car to see by. He had green eyes. I kept talking in a calm even
voice and we kept staring at each other. There were some mo-
ments of silence also. I cannot explain how genuine and sincere
this was. It was a life very present with another life for a little
while. There was a mutual understanding of no harm. We sat
there for a while and then I slowly brought my hand down and
put the emergency brake on. I kept on talking and we kept our
attention on each other. He had white tufts of fur on his ears.
After a while I opened my door and slowly got out of the car.
He remained calm. I walked around the car. We kept our eyes
on each other. Eventually all the rest of it happened, Jeff from
the Chintimini Wildlife Rehabilitation Center got him out of
the car with a noose, as gently as he could, and the cat was not
happy about the noose, there’s fur and feces all over the car,
but he’s fine now, he had two broken teeth which were fixed
and he’s recovering and will be released back into the woods
next week. He’s three years old. The paper here ran a story,
which was picked up by the wire services, and a television crew
came and all that, but no one told the story right. The real
story is the unspoken language of the eyes. The real story is
the intensity of awareness between two creatures. Some people
don’t get it. Like one guy who said the bobcat would look
great on his wall. He doesn’t get it. This is a stunning creature.
For a few minutes there we were totally aware of each other,
complete and utter attention, with an unspoken understanding
of no harm, and some kind of what you might call, if you were
thrashing around for words that don’t fit very well but they’re
the only words you can find, a sort of spiritual connection.

25
BRIAN DOYLE

That was … I don’t have the right words. Amazing, riveting,

moving, genuine. Could you try to tell this story in a way that
focuses on what was the most amazing thing, that intensity of
presence? That’s the story.

26
 The Bishop’s Parrot

Bishop Charles O’Reilly, the first Catholic bishop of Baker,

Oregon, was occasionally astride a horse, and Bishop Leo Fahey,
also of Baker, was often astride a horse, and Bishop Thomas
Connolly, also of Baker, was always on a horse, except when
he was telling stories like the one about a bishop and a cougar
and an owl in a cave, but my favorite story about bishops and
animals, except for the story of Archbishop Edward Howard,
of Portland, wrestling a sturgeon in his native Iowa, is the
story of the late Bishop Paul Waldschmidt, of Portland, and his
beloved parrot Kuzuku, of whom there are many stories, like
the one of Kuzuku outlining ideas for sermons to the bishop,
who liked to tell that story himself, to the general astonishment
of the faithful. There are even more stories about the Bishop
than there are about Kuzuku; for example the story of then-
merely-Father Paul, in seminary in Maryland, being required
to make a trip into the wilderness, for some lost spiritual or
character-building reason, and Father Paul, being something of
a gourmand even then, setting off with buckets of champagne
and huge steaks strapped to the sides of burly mules, while
he rode astride a horse the size of Utah; interestingly the only
story that I know in which he appears with a horse.
But we were talking of the parrot, which was famously
ill-tempered with people other than the bishop, which is the
reverse of the bishop’s approach to life, Paul being the soul of
cheerful courtesy to all and sundry, even those who mistook
him for a gardener at the university where he was president
before his elevation to the bishop’s chair, an understandable
mistake, considering that you could often find Paul in a vast
pair of overalls, grubbing in his beloved rock garden high above
the river, in the hours when he was not saving the university

27
BRIAN DOYLE

from extinction, or happily eating sausages and drinking beer

with his students, not a habit many presidents maintain today,
which is too bad.
But of mutual projects other than sermons between parrot
and bishop we know little, which is a shame. Could it not be
that they were writing a novel together? Perhaps they were
both past masters of chess, or the spinning of silk into prayer
scarves? Could it be that they read the works of Washington Ir-
ving to each other at night, taking great pleasure in the slightly
stilted prose? Or perhaps they both detested Ayn Rand and
took a devious glee in explicating her essentially fascist stance,
her wooden characters, and her worship of the ego as the only
divinity? Or perhaps they were serious students of the ancient
Roman Republic and meticulous scholars of the machinations
of the Caesars as that Republic morphed sadly into mere dicta-
torships, each bloodier than the last, until finally they were no
more, and what arose as a brave amalgam of hill villages over
the Tiber faded into the dusty pages of books?
This could be; but Kuzuku no longer speaks since the death
of the bishop, and it may be that the loss of his friend is a
daily shock to him, a hole that will not heal. It may be that
parrots have bigger hearts than we know. It may be that every
creature alive is wilder with love than we know. It may be that
the genius of that for which we have no words, that which set
the stars to burn, was to give us hearts wilder than we ever
imagined. It may be that an aged parrot, living silently with
tiny nuns who carry him on their shoulders to the chapel every
evening to pray, dreams nightly of a world made utterly wild
with love; perhaps that is what he and the bishop dreamed
together, in their evenings by the fire; perhaps that is what we
will dream now, here at the end of the world we did not love
enough, the world still wild for us.

28
 The Creature Beyond the Mountains

There are fish in the rivers of Cascadia that are bigger and
heavier than your car. To haul the biggest ones out of the
Columbia River fishermen once used horses and oxen. These
creatures are so enormous and so protected by bony armor and
so averse to biting or eating people that no one picks on them,
so they grow to be more than a hundred years old, maybe two
hundred years old; no one knows. Sometimes in winter they
gather in immense roiling balls in the river, maybe for heat,
maybe for town meetings, maybe for wild sex; no one knows.
A ball of more than sixty thousand of them last year rolled
up against the bottom of a dam in the Columbia, causing a
nervous United States Army Corps of Engineers to send a small
submarine down to check on the dam. They eat fish, clams,
rocks, fishing reels, shoes, snails, beer bottles, lamprey, eggs,
insects, fishing lures, cannonballs, cats, ducks, crabs, basket-
balls, squirrels, and many younger members of their species;
essentially they eat whatever they want. People have fished
for them using whole chickens as bait, with hooks the size of
your hand. They like to follow motorboats, for reasons no one
knows. As with human beings, the males wish to spawn in
their early teens, but the females wait until their twenties. The
females then produce epic rafts of eggs, three or four million at
a time, from ovaries than can weigh more than two hundred
pounds. On average three of those eggs will grow to be mature
fish. Some of the fish that have been caught have been fifteen
feet long and weighed fifteen hundred pounds. There are docu-
mented stories and photographs of fish more than twenty feet
long and two thousand pounds. A fish that long would be as
tall as three Shaquille O’Neals and heavier than six. There is

29
BRIAN DOYLE

a persistent legend in southwest Washington State that some-

where in a lake or pond near Mount Saint Helens is the biggest
fish of this kind that anyone has ever seen or heard about or
imagined, a fish so big that when it surfaces occasionally it is
mistaken for a whale, but this is the same region of the wild
and wondrous world where Sasquatch is thought to most likely
live, so you wonder.
The being of which we speak is Acipenser transmontanus,
the sturgeon beyond the mountains, popularly called the white
sturgeon, although it is not white, but as gray as the moist
lands in which it lives, the temperate rain forest west of the
Pacific mountains and east of the not-very-pacific ocean. From
northern Mexico to southern Alaska it cruises in the nether
reaches of rivers, battling only the sea lions that in recent years
have taken up residence in the coastal rivers of the west to
dine on salmon and young sturgeon, but I am sure there will
come a day when I will pick up my newspaper and read about
a precipitous decline in sea lion pups, and I will remember that
a new lion pup is not much bigger than a chicken or a cat or a
basketball, and I will conclude that Acipenser transmontanus
has exacted vengeance on sea lions by discovering yet another
cool new thing to eat, after a hundred million years of discover-
ing new things to eat at the bottom of vast huge rivers. Taking
the long view, you have to admire the individual sturgeons,
very probably adolescent males, who over the years were the
first to eat such things as cats and cannon balls. Perhaps it
was accidental, they were on regular hoover patrol and were
just slurping up whatever wasn’t finning away fast and furi-
ous, but perhaps not, perhaps it was a brave leap, and among
the sturgeon of today there are legends of the first heroes who
inhaled volleyballs and badgers. It could be.

30
 Children & Other Wild Animals

’
At the Sturgeon Viewing and Interpretive Center, at the
Bonneville Fish Hatchery, in Cascade Locks, Oregon, where
Tanner Creek empties into the Columbia River, near the im-
mense Bonneville Dam, there are three enormous sturgeon in
a large open pond. Two of them, each about eight feet long
and weighing about an eighth of a ton, have not as yet been
given names by human beings. The third is Herman, the most
famous sturgeon in Oregon. Herman is about eleven feet long
and weighs perhaps six hundred pounds. No one knows how
old he is. He might be ninety years old. There are references to
Herman the Sturgeon in hatchery records beginning in 1925.
It is thought that there have been several Hermans, some ex-
hibited annually at the Oregon State Fair. This Herman, who
is probably not the 1925 Herman, arrived at Bonneville twelve
years ago, a mere nine feet and four hundred pounds, then.
Many thousands of people come to see Herman every year,
as they visit the hatchery’s spawning rooms, holding ponds,
rearing ponds, and egg incubation building, all of which are
for salmon and steelhead; the three sturgeon here, and the pool
of massive rainbow trout, are show ponies only, sturgeon and
trout not being as close to extinction as salmon and steelhead.
This hatchery alone raises a million coho salmon, eight million
chinook, and three hundred thousand steelhead every year, for
release into various Oregon rivers. There are fish everywhere
at the hatchery, leaping and milling and swirling and startling
visitors, and it is remarkable and amazing and moving to see
so many miracles at once, so many mysterious beings, so many
individual adventures, so much excellent flaky accompaniment
to pinot noir, and to think where they will go and what they
will see, some of them headed into the deepest thickets of the
ocean, others into the bellies of animals of every size and shape,

31
BRIAN DOYLE

but pretty much every human visitor is here also to see Herman,
and I station myself in a dark corner of the center one afternoon
and view the human beings who come to view Herman.
There are nuns. There are schoolchildren. There is a man
wearing a cat on his shoulder. There is a woman wearing not
much more than a smile. There is a woman wearing white plas-
tic thigh boots and a baseball jacket. There is a deputy mayor.
There is a long-haul truck driver smoking a cigar that smells
like something died in his truck in Ohio. There are teenagers
holding hands. There is a man dressed head to toe in Seattle
Seahawks fan gear, including sneakers on which he has written
the number 8, for the star quarterback. There is a man with a
cane and a woman with a walker. There is a girl in a wheelchair.
There are tour groups, family outings, and a man wearing tux-
edo trousers and gleaming black shoes and a motorcycle gang
jacket. People eat and drink and joke and curse and smoke
and spit and gape and dawdle and laugh and several ask me
where’s Herman? I say I am a mere onlooker as well and my
experience is that he will hove into view after a while. Some
people don’t wait. Some people express annoyance with the
hatchery management and the lack of organization as regards
Herman’s appearance. Others mistake Herman’s eight-foot-
long companions for Herman. Others wait silently for Herman
to hove into view.
The most memorable viewing for me that day was a young
man with a small boy who appeared to be his son. The father
looked like he was about nineteen, with the wispy first mus-
tache and chin-armpit of a teenager. The boy, wearing a red
cowboy hat, seemed to be about three years old. The father
tried to line the boy up for a photograph, tried to get the kid to
stand still until Herman hove into view, but the boy skittered
here and there like a rabbit, the father alternately wheedling

32
 Children & Other Wild Animals

and barking at him, and finally the boy stood still, but facing
the wrong direction, with his nose pressed against the glass,
and the father sighed and brought his camera down to his waist
at exactly the moment that Herman slowly filled the window
like a zeppelin. The boy leapt away from the window and his
hat fell off. No one said a word. Herman kept sliding past
for a long time. Finally his tail exited stage left and the boy
said, awed, clear as a bell, holy shit, Dad! The father didn’t say
anything and they stood there another couple of minutes, both
of them speechless, staring at where Herman used to be, and
then they walked up the stairs holding hands.
On the way home to Portland, as I kept an eye out for os-
prey along the banks of the Columbia, I thought of that boy’s
face as Herman slid endlessly past the window. It’s hilarious
what he said, it’s a great story, I’ll tell it happily for years, but
what lingers now for me is his utter naked amazement. He saw
ancientness up close and personal. He saw a being he never
dreamed was alive on this planet, a being he never imagined, a
being beyond vast, a being that rendered him speechless with
awe until he could articulate a raw blunt astonishment that
you have to admire for its salty honesty. He saw wonder, face
to face. Maybe wonder is the way for us with animals in the
years to come. Maybe wonder is the way past the last million
years of combat and into the next million years of something
other than combat. Maybe the look on that kid’s face is the
face of the future.
’
The woman who married me, a slight mysterious riveting
being not half as tall as Herman, grabs me by the beard in the
kitchen one day and says What is up with you and sturgeon,
why are you so fascinated with sturgeon? And I spend days
afterwards trying to answer these questions for myself.

33
BRIAN DOYLE

Part of it is bigness. The fact that there are wild creatures

way bigger and heavier than cars right there in the river, in a
city of two million, is astounding, and it is also astounding
that everyone totally takes this for granted, whereas I would
very much like to stop people in the street about this matter,
and blast-text OMG!!!, and set up a continual river bottom
video feed into all grade schools so kids everywhere in my state
will quietly mutter holy shit, Dad, and establish the website
MassiveSturgeonVisitation.com, so when a creature the size of
a kindergarten bus slides to the surface suddenly in front of
a Cub Scout dabbing for crab in the Columbia, he, the Cub
Scout, can post an alert as soon as he changes his underwear.
And the bigness of sturgeon here is mysteriously stitched, for
me, into the character and zest and possibility of Cascadia;
there are huge things here, trees and fish and mountains and
rivers and personalities and energies and ideas, and somehow
the pairing of power and peace in the piscatorial is a hint of the
possible in people.
Part of it is harmlessness; they don’t eat us, no matter how
often we eat them. Adult sturgeon do not even have teeth,
having dropped their weapons after gnashing through adoles-
cence. We have a fairly straightforward relationship with most
animals: we kill the ones who eat us, and we eat the rest. Most
of the ones who eat us are bigger than we are—crocodiles, ti-
gers, sharks, bears—but there are some animals that are bigger
than we are that don’t eat us, and at those we gape, and grope
for some other emotion beyond paranoia and palate and pet.
Whales, for example. We yearn for something with enormous
gentle animals, something more than mammalian fellowship.
We want some new friendship, some sort of intimate feeling,
for which we don’t have good words yet.

34
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 Transcriber’s Notes
Several minor punctuation errors have been fixed.
Page vi: changed “Fusi San” to “Fuji-San”.
Page vii: changed “Murdock” to “Murdoch”.
Page 44: changed “Rhone” to “Rhône”.
Page 50: changed “distined” to “destined”.
Page 107: changed “vendure” to “verdure”.
Page 142: changed “destoy” to “destroy”.
Page 144: moved the second Gibraltar illustration to the appropriate chapter.
Page 148: “Oxeraa” left in place; modern spelling is Öxará.
Page 152: changed “obsure” to “obscure”.
Pages 160 and 168: Both Tindafjall and Tindfjall have been retained as printed
in the original publication.
Page 166: changed “aneriod” to “aneroid”.
Page 205: changed “verdue” to “verdure”.
Page 208: changed “guage” to “gauge”.
Page 216: The open quotation mark before “There was a roaring ... has been
left unmatched as published.
Page 255: “Etna may be is” retained per original publication.
Page 269: changed “Gramnaticus” to “Grammaticus”.
Page 271: changed “quiescient” to “quiescent”.
Page 358: changed “preclude” to “prelude”.
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