Without consciously seeking them out, in chance meeting by meeting, wild animals have remade my life.
They have bestowed upon me better sight, meaning that they have taught me to ‘see’ more acutely and on a wider plane. They have caused me to pay attention to movement, colors, the sky, scat, rubs, trails, behavior. They have broadened and deepened my empathy, made me a believer in a transcendence that has nothing to do with organized religion and everything to do with stillness, with humility, and with an appreciation for grace and beauty that is separate from the creations of human beings. Each day’s press of bad news about their obliterated habitats and our relentless pursuit of the money we might make from their dead bodies gives me reason to treasure my fleeting contacts with them even more.
In solitude more often than not, they have shown themselves to me*, as if I had been chosen — a grandiose, foolish choice of words, I know, but the power of their company is such that it carries this sense of the ordained. Our lines intersected in an arbitrary manner, in an absence of design, but their power is such that it seems to demand religious language and a desire to see a spirit under the fur or feathers or skin that is as transcendent as our desire to leave our own heavy, mortal bodies.
In petroglyphs, in cave paintings, in bone and stone and ivory and clay carvings, in a form ancient as our species’ facility for language and stories, we have identified with them, hunted them, stood in awe of them, wanted to be them. We have always sought to call them forth into our presence.
Wild animals have a perfect integrity. They cannot lie. We can believe in what we see and know of their species. They may be adept at camouflage and at confusing their spoor and marks, but they lack our trait of ingrained malice. They possess a nature with layers of complexity but treachery is not one of them.
They are the ‘un-us’, the counteractive to the human trait of cynicism, and in that way symbolic of a purity of life and feeling we most want now, when they have begun to disappear.
