Of Animals and Me
OF BEAST AND MAN
We are told by philosophers that we must overcome our unconscious instincts in order to become truly human. But when we look into each other’s eyes and feel a life time of love stretching before us, surely that is instinctual? From the reflex that inspires sucking in a new born child, to the dying reach to clasp a hand, we are led and held and protected by holy instincts. And nature too honours instincts. I used to live west of Sydney in the Blue Mountains right on the lip of the Leura escarpment looking out over the deep valleys to the Korowal Mountain standing solitarily in the mist. Among my ducks, quails, doves, pigeons, geese and Normandy chickens, bantams, Chinese silky hens, guinea fowls, I particularly loved 2 guinea pigs given to me by the eternally young George Addison. Now everyone knows that George is the world’s best vegetable gardener. So when he said not to cage them and allow them to run about but, as there is nothing much in the native flora to eat, I was to provide plenty of vegetables, I was their servant. George’s place is a vegetable jungle. I once climbed a ladder to see the vegetables growing in boxes of compost on his roof! So daily I was to go for long walks to dig up dandelions and sacrifice my family’s greens for two rodents whose appetite belied their size. I dug a pit, lined it with bricks and poured a concrete lid with an entrance that would keep foxes out. Soon, very soon, very very soon the female was pregnant. When the time came to deliver, she stood upright in a clearing. She leaned over to help the first baby out. It was born running and scurried rapidly three meters to a bush. The mother turned, and as she stood upright, the second baby was born with its legs moving fast to touch the ground as the umbilicus stretched and snapped and the baby ran 4 meters to hide under a stone. The mother guinea pig while giving birth turned a full circle and her babies were scattered under cover on a large circumference. No hawk had swooped. Then the mother found the first and taking it by the back of the neck brought it to its safe burrow. One by one they were brought to safety. I gently lifted the concrete lid to look. The exhausted mother was sleeping in a grass nest as her wriggling babies drank from her. Nature had designed that birth to spread the babies in a wide circle of cover to protect the future from predators. They had survived. That night I thought: All is well on the earth and God is in his heavens.
THE KNOWLEDGE OF ATHENA’S MYSTERIES
It was the height of summer and the night was hot and dry and I was restless and too tired to sleep so I got out of my messy bed to sit in the cool of the veranda in the dark. Above the black forms of the trees the sky was immense and the stars seemed close. Simple and complex thoughts. Awe. Tiny flashes as meteorites made fine lines, and vanished. When my eyes grew used to the dark I could see the little moving shapes of life all around... A moth was on the upright post, its wings open and the feathery patterns on its blue wings was a mouse’s face. Just as the sky had traces of shooting stars, so too mice and marsupial mice ran from plant to plant and vanished... Then a silent grey form passed across the velvet sky. An owl. Its wings didn’t flap. They merely tilted a little as the raptor circled... Then the wings were lifted slightly and it fell in a glide, feet stretched down between the veranda posts onto the marble table top. It had silently landed in front of me. It happened so suddenly, and there it was. Frightenedly large and grey-white, looking at me, eye to eye. And what eyes! Unblinking staring into my essence. Then the head turned and the feather-horned back of the head was to me, but the head kept on turning slowly like a demon-possessed person in a horror film waiting for exorcism, and still it turned a complete circle until it faced me with its round eyes again. For a long time we looked at each other. For a long time... Then the head cork screwed round, back to its original position in an instant, and again stared unblinking. I coughed. I was the weaker one. So it nodded. The owl turned, bobbed its head up and down, and I felt the wind of its quiet wings and it curved away and vanished. I was shaking. I went to bed but could not sleep for hours. I must admit I was afraid, very afraid.
In the morning I was woken and came out onto the veranda to listen to the first sweet bird calls and wave of life as birds proclaim their territories. But on the antique Tuscan marble table top there were the smudged claw marks of the owl. In red-black blood. In front of my chair.
I had looked into the eyes of death... And I am alive.