I can call up their appearances, and for most, their specters, yet after all these years my memories of them are glittering and sharp, as if each in turn bore a reminder of a planetary innocence inconceivable now. Still, they come forth, but fewer than before.
I can name them in their numbers and measure how settled I grew in their presence, how tied in to what felt like a more real existence than the one I mostly lived. It seems appropriate to gather the list of my lucky counts of the living I once saw while sitting in the shade watching birds fly in to feed. I want to record what I have been privileged to have seen.
Salamanders, when I was a boy lifting rocks in damp ground no one wanted near railroad tracks, and carp, long as my forearm in the shallow water of rivers where we swam, and above, herons who always seemed old, who beat through the air at ease with their enormous wings.
The great white shark at Marconi Beach on Cape Cod whose dorsal fin we tracked for two minutes. The porpoise I dove after in the surf at Avalon and whose barrel-size bulk finally warned me off. Whales who rose and vanished before I could take in what I had witnessed.
Out West, coyotes by the bunch, 11 wolves, 2 ungainly grizzly bears who galloped away from us like boys playing horsey in an uneven, rolling gait.
A bull moose way taller than me who charged two of us on a narrow trail near a Montana wetlands, and slipping behind a tree, he thumped past, and we felt the air sluiced out of the space where we had been standing.
Fox everywhere, the sly beast I most love, but one especially who slid his head between grasses and watched me for minutes sit still as a benign sniper watching him.
The black bear in the rain who wanted our packs and who coughed and chopped his spittled jaws until we dropped them and walked backward away. The one who popped up from ferns on a sunny ridge a few feet from me and was so shocked he fled and only once turned to stand and look back at what had startled him.
Turtles, whose shapes I have so memorized that 50 yards away going 50 I can tell rock from shell and prepare to stop and save. A survivor, an enormous Snapper, inching from pond to stream who I had to lift with two hands by the edges of the shell while it tried to turn its head and get to my arms.
Sheaves of snakes, of corn and garter and long blacks that sometimes coiled to fight back as I looked at them. Bundles of rattlers along the Black Forest Trail, shelved in slate outcroppings, making a racket beside the trail. One six footer I pushed off a mountain road with a very long branch while it arced at me again and again. One copperhead who I found feet away from my face on a steep pitch in the Appalachian’s.
Deer beyond counting and squirrels, groundhogs, including one old boar, maybe a 15 pounder, who Christopher, a neighborhood red coated retriever struck so fast and picked up and shook so hard I could hear bones snapping. Two weasels, one martin, marmots squeaking their warnings from rock falls above timberline all over the Rockies.
Birds forever, my eyes always looking up for their grace. Raptors diving, gliding, taking other birds, mice, snakes, fish. Immense clusters of sea birds skimming ocean waves migrating south. Eagles. A Golden at about 11,000 feet in Colorado skimming up a thermal and over a ridge line and suddenly finding us so close, its head like a helmeted gladiator.
Crows and ravens and vultures.
Owls — screech, great horned and barn and 1 snowy owl in a Pennsylvania snowstorm in the Poconos taking off from a dead tree, a dreamscape from my 16th or 17th year. I remember seeing it from our raucous car flush with other idiot boys. I saw it fly and disappear into the storm. I alone saw it, and I never said a word.
P.S. Elk in herds, and antelope and wild horses in Wyoming and bison herding us up onto a boulder in Yellowstone, javelina on the street in Sedona, big horn sheep suspended like magicians from vertical cliffs. Bats in bedrooms, bats in meadows, bats in an abandoned church in Letterkenny in Ireland where we fell exhausted into our sleeping bags after a day on the road, poor racoons and possum and skunks who never seem fast enough to outpace our murderous automobiles.
