On May 14 of 2008, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of Interior, followed the urgings of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall and placed the polar bear species (Ursus maritimus) on the endangered species list. Hunting bans were implemented to prevent the importing of hunted polar bear hides.

Before this, a powerful controversy had been developing in the scientific world and continues even now. Environmentalists and many scientists believe that, due to global warming, the ice habitat of the polar bears is receding and endangering them and that in a matter of several decades they could possibly become extinct.

Other scientists believe this to be incorrect. Prominent Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor views the receding ice not as a danger to the bears but as a possible advantage as it frees up more territory for bears to find prey and possibly render polar bears’ environment less harsh. He points out that polar bear populations have increased from 5,000 in the 1960s to between 20,000 to 25,000 individuals in the 2000s. They’ve survived even more extreme climate changes in the past, he says.[i]

Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and a member of the World Conservation Union, has an opposing view. He believes that the retreating ice will impact the bears harshly through important habitat loss. The regulations governing trophy hunting the bears and their prey have contributed to the polar bear’s population rise, he claims, not the retreating ice.

The Inuits, the native Eskimo people in Canada, Alaska and Greenland, side against the hunting ban. An Inuit spokesman, Duane Smith, says, “I don’t see how listing it as threatened will compliment the sustainability of the population. It’s the climate change that’s the problem, not the sustainable hunting of the polar bears.”[ii]

The Inuits believe that the polar bears are hunted at levels that do not put the population at danger. The Inuits have lived in Alaska, Canada and Greenland for more than a thousand years, coexisting with the polar bear.

In papers and articles discussing the pros and cons of the hunting ban, the most noted interest of the Inuits in this conflict is the annual one and a half million dollars that is brought into small Inuit communities by the polar bear hunts. Some people argue that the reason the Inuits oppose the ban is because they’ll lose the trophy hunt profits. But a 2010 study released by the Humane Society International and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “The Economics of Polar Bear Trophy Hunting in Canada”[iii],  shows that perhaps this is not such an important thing, because

o       As much as two-thirds of all Inuits communities do not host and lead polar bear hunts, in spite of the urging of the government.

o       The sum of polar bear hunts only supply one tenth of one percent of economic earnings of Nanavut.

o       For 98% of polar bear trophy hunting communities in Nanavut and the Northwest territories, the trophy hunts provide only 2% or less of average income for residents.

o       Only in 3 of 31 polar bear trophy hunting communities in Canada earn more than 2%, and even then it does not exceed 10-13% of average income for the communities.

o       The polar bear trophy hunting makes an economical income difference for only several dozen individuals, at the most.

However, the polar bear’s importance to the Inuit is more than economic. The polar bear—or “Nanuq,” as the bear is know to the Inuit—is the Inuit’s most sacred animal. In traditional Inuit legends, the bear is a wise and powerful beast and is even almost human. There are some legends of polar bear men: beings that walked upright, talked, and lived in igloos, shedding their fur skins in the privacy of their homes.

The polar bears are also one of the most important resource animals to the Inuits. The meat is a substantial food source and the hide is used as material for clothing, especially women’s boots. Only the liver is thrown away, a part of the bear that will make even sled dogs that eat it violently sick.

The Inuits, who have lived with Nanuq for over a thousand years, insist that the polar bears are not in danger and are in fact increasing in number. Perhaps they’re right. Scientists squabble and political forces argue, each of them clinging to their own island of ice. Some people see gain in the rise or fall of the polar bear, and others are determined to honestly help the magnificent beasts. Only further studies and the passing of time will yield answers to help settle this controversy.

[ii] Article: “Polar Bears Are The Wrong Target Say Inuit”.  Clive Tesar.

[iii] Article: “Study Finds Little Local Economic Value in Trophy Hunting: Polar Bear Hunts are of Economic Importance Only to a Handful of Individuals”. March 5, 2010.

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Val K. is a 14-year-old writer who lives in a corner of Utah with her parents, two siblings, and assorted pets. She has written three novels, two of which are part of a fantasy series. Besides writing, she participates in such activities as reading, drawing, weaving, biking, hiking, catching snakes, and chores.

To read Val’s other work published on WIZ, go here and here.

Light’s rise sparks bright blooms:
birdsong, fields of it, vining–
spring’s first green flourish.

These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher,  screeches and churrings of magpies, ravens’ gravelly croaks, a woodpecker drumming a juniper tree, jangling songs of meadowlarks outshouting everyone.  Quite stunning, this send-off of the season of low, cold light.  And I can’t help but detect in the intertwining of different avian dialects the bloom of flowery beauty and signature fragrances of meaning.

The language of the birds, or the green language, is the mythical, magical language of wisdom and divine insight thought to pass between birds and those humans with ears to hear the music of the cosmos with which birdsong is thought to be impregnated.  Some traditions equate la langue verte with the adamic or perfect language.  Many folks might consider any relation between birdsong and human utterances and comprehension illusory.  But if you listen closely, you will hear chirps in the language of many species ranging from rodents (prairie dogs’ alarm calls sound bird-ish, and the noisy grasshopper mouse chirrups constantly) to cats (chirps and trills) to amphibians (our Woodhouse toads pip at us) to insects to puppies to people–especially babies.  My nearly 19-year-old disabled daughter, who can understand more words than she can say, chirps, hoots, and trills in response to questions and other words of address.  After nearly two decades of studying her bird-like, tonal language, I think I can rightly claim that I’ve gained from it deep, magical insight–including into the quiddity of human expression.  Because of my experience with her and what I think I hear in the language of birds and other animals and insects, I’ve begun to wonder if, rather than acting as the basic phoneme of  a foreign language spoken by creatures with which we think ourselves to have little in common, the chirp might just lie at the root of human expression.

Whatever else it’s said to be, the mythical language of the birds is highly poetic, layered with multiple strata of meaning, playful, punful, sliding, gliding, beguiling to the ear when performed aloud, and, when conveyed in written interchange, deeply engaging of the mind’s inner ear.

For WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff and Celebration, let’s see if we can outshine the birds in their spring ceremonies.  Human language can be just as green and gorgeous, just as textured and as alluring as the language of the birds.  And when it comes to the opening of new prospects and possibilities, human language can have no rival.  Even the language of the birds lags behind the best effects of the best human language: opening-the-possibilities acts of authentic creation.  Poetry, with its multifaceted, many-leveled effects and metaphoric prowess–its strength for getting across–can create, so to speak, more world.  As John D. Niles says in Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Narrative, “It is through such symbolic mental activities [as storytelling and poetry] that people have gained the ability to create themselves as human beings and thereby transform the world of nature into shapes not known before.”

So this Spring Poetry Runoff, let’s go green in our language.  I don’t mean Green, as in supportive of social or political movements touting environmental protection.  In some cases, that language is the least green of all.  I mean let’s go green, as in producing living, doing, being language that acts to open possibilities by virtue of its creative élan.  I mean let’s give out words that don’t just describe experience, they create experience, providing raw materials that others can recombine for their own narrative needs, thus altering, here and there, world and worlds.   Referencing John Miles Foley, Niles  calls this cosmoplastic, or “world-building” energy of human language, “wordpower.”

During this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration, we’ll not only be running the poetry contest with prizes in the Most Popular Vote Award and Admin Award categories but also an open-invitation haiku chain (a developing tradition on WIZ), a non-competing category for those poets wishing to participate in the Spring Poetry Runoff just for fun, the Runoff Rerun (re-publishing of one of last year’s poems), and other activities.

Hope you join in.  It’s spring.  Let’s sing it up.

To review submission deadlines, rules, voting procedures, and prizes, go here.

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Photo of singing western meadowlark by Alan Vernon.

In the colder climate of northwestern Pennsylvania, where I lived for a few years during the early to mid-seventies, I came across eastern spiny soft-shelled turtles (Trionyx spiniferous spiniferous), snapping turtles, and wood turtles with encouraging frequency.

But I have lived three decades in Utah without meeting one single chelonian (turtle or tortoise).  Plenty of snakes—Utah hosts a diverse and thriving snake population.  Lizards, too—lots of ‘em.  But where are the turtles?

A glance at Petersen’s Western Reptiles and Amphibians suggests Utah sightings of the painted turtle, the snapping turtle, and the spiny soft-shell.  Then, of course, there is the small population of desert tortoises, Gopherus agassizii, or Xerobates agassizii, down in the southwest corner of the state in the vicinity of St. George.

Sources suggest that the few painted and snapping turtles found in Utah are introduced, not native  species (released pets).  The soft-shell’s presence in Utah, rare as it appears to be, may exist by virtue of the Colorado River environment as the waterway flows through the southwestern corner of Utah and along the borders of Nevada, California, and Arizona.  The desert tortoise’s Utah range is the northernmost extension of a population found in southeastern California, the southern tip of Nevada, western Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico.   However, as perhaps the most distinguished member of Utah’s chelonian order, the desert tortoise is threatened by drought, by wildfires, by development, by predators, and by upper respiratory tract disease (exascerbated by the release of unhealthy pet tortoises back into the wild).  It may well disappear from Utah.

May I speak openly of the loneliness I feel over Utah’s absence of turtle denizens?  Or will I be laughed from the state by a population with no reason to think of turtles at all, except when through no fault of their own these mild creatures stir up local politics and debates about money?  Despite my decision to live here, Utah’s dearth of turtles thunders like silence in the wilderness interface in my mind—that place in the gray matter where the squirming old brain—the reptilian brain—lies beneath the newer, domesticated, cultivated, subdivided brain we use to watch television.  In that wilderness interface where these two brains trade secrets, there’s a volatile zone where some of us—maybe all of us—recognize origins and old relations.  In this place I feel as plain as hunger or thirst a deep, deep lack of turtles in my life.

This same part of my brain sparks and catches fire when I go to the reptile and amphibian house at a zoo or see a picture of a turtle in a book or on the Internet.  I think: I know this creature.  I’ve started telling people I was raised not by humans but by the wild turtles of the Virginia Piedmont. Maybe it wasn’t true before, but it’s true now; I swear it.

Okay, that’s me—but why should other Utahns care one whit about whether turtles live or die on their turf?

I’ve heard—it’s only a rumor, but a popular one—that Utah, especially along the Wasatch Front, is the con artist capitol of the United States.  Not only do unusual numbers of horse traders and pettifoggers live here but also the good citizens living in these desert valleys provide prime pickings for confidence schemes of all kinds. I mean, it’s said thimbleriggers from all over esteem Utah as happy hunting grounds.

I wouldn’t know—I haven’t seen the numbers.  But I can’t help wondering if the reason for this alleged disproportionate population of predators consuming valued resources rightfully belonging to others might rest in the lack of Turtle People to intercede on behalf of the hard-working but slower-dreaming creatures for whom the great tricksters—Coyote, Jackal, and Anansi—are just too much.

They wouldn’t be for Turtle.  Too bad the ones in Utah are Threatened with a big “T”, are sick, or are genetically isolated because they’re introduced (probably released pets) and so can’t disperse progeny to rescue us from perfidious rascals, and, occasionally, from our perfidious selves.

Notes
1.     Blair E. Witherington and R. Erik Martin, “Understanding, Assessing and Resolving Light Pollution Problems on Sea Turtle Nesting Beaches,” Florida Marine Research Institute, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, FMRI Technical Report TR-2, 1996, p. 1 of section titled “Problems: The Effects of Artificial Lighting on Sea Turtles; www.turtletime.org.
2.     Many sources describe how different kinds of animals and insects orient their migrations by the light of the sun, stars, and moon, and the reflections of all three off other surfaces.  In the case of turtles, Witherington and Martin (see note 3) raise the issue throughout their report, especially in the matter of turtles selecting nesting sites and light pollution’s effect upon turtle hatchlings.
3.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Problems: The Effects of Artificial lighting on Sea Turtles, p. 2.
4.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Executive Summary,” p.1.
5.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Problems: The Effects of Artificial Lighting on Sea Turtles, pp. 3-4.
6.     Ibid, pp. 11-13
7.     Ibid.
8.    Joe Bower, “The Dark Side of Light,” Audubon Magazine (March-April) 2000; magazine.audubon.org/darksideof light.
9.     Ibid.
10.   Ibid.
11.   Ibid.

Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as the loggerhead turtle, the green sea turtle, Ridley’s turtle, and the leatherback, their bellies full of eggs, approach land from the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, flapping through the water like short-billed birds.  Migrations begin in March and, one species following another, last through September (1).

These turtles follow pathways mapped in their brains by genetic memories of turtle forebears.  Perhaps the knowledge exists also as an imprint of each hatchling’s experiences of scrambling from its nest above the tide line down to the surf.  However they find and follow them, these routes are millions of years old—older than human consciousness and human memory, some say—and are calculated upon frequencies and intensities of light: moon- and starlight (2), along with other urgent signals.

The turtles flap toward land, dreaming of warm sands with dazzling night skies above and a million-dollar view of the sea surface filled with stars. And that’s where the trouble starts, because people flock to this same real estate.  Thinking not of turtles but of investments and lifestyles capitalizing upon those same views the pregnant turtles crave, people also build above the tide line, sometimes a little farther back from where turtles build.  Nevertheless, that urge for excellent sands that turtles strive to fulfill is becoming an endangering desire, especially since humans feel uneasy in that very darkness turtles equate with survival.

Resort, condo, and parking lot glare now pollute select nesting sites.  Scorning the lit beaches, some gravid females choose darker if in other ways less advantageous places to dig their nests.  Some wander in confusion in the water, where pushed past their limits they may drop their eggs in the sea (3).

Despite the light, many turtles do come ashore (4), make their depressions in the sand, lay their hundred or so eggs then bury them.  Now weary and vulnerable, they seek shiny visual cues from heaven to guide them home to the sea.  Instead, streetlights seduce some onto roads where automobiles injure or kill them (5).

Even more devastating is the effect random gleams have upon the babies.  Experiments and other evidence demonstrate that, flapping their tiny turtle wings, hatchlings fly toward the nearest luster.  This ought to be the ocean’s surface, resplendent with stars and moon glow.  Instead, many threatened or endangered fledglings flutter into parking lots to pile up in confusion beneath lamps (6).  There they die of exhaustion, exposure, or are eaten by predators.  Some attracted by outdoor swimming pool lights turn away from the sea and tumble into concrete pools where they are trapped.  Or instead of scrambling toward water and a chance at life, they angle off toward abandoned beach fires where they crawl into the flames and die of their burns (7).  Or following streetlights, they tumble into roads and are killed by passing cars.  In many instances where hatchling disorientation by light pollution occurs, a hundred or more baby turtles may die.  And if, indeed, baby turtles imprint upon their birthplace for future reference, then the disruptive effects of bad lighting, even when hatchling are rescued and taken out to the sea, could prove disadvantageous to future generations.

Disorientation resulting from bad lighting doesn’t happen just to turtles.  In 1954, workers on the ground at Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia discovered the bodies of tens of thousands of night-migrating birds that had flown straight down the shaft of a guide light into the ground (8).  In 1981, around ten thousand birds died when they tangled with the Ontario Hydros Lennox Generating Station’s floodlit smokestacks (9).  In 1998, Lapland longspur larks migrating at night across Kansas hit lighted radio transmission towers.  The body count in this instance: five to ten thousand birds (10).  Often, migratory birds become caught in this moth-to-a-candle trap because of bad weather, circling intrusive lights until exhaustion claims their lives (11).

Birds, turtles, and many other animals and insects depend upon cues of natural light to make important decisions the way we humans depend upon honesty and good judgement to make choices that work to our advantage. The celestial positioning of moon and stars; reflections of the same off bodies of water or off the leafy canopy of an ancient forest; slickrock on canyon rims mirroring moon- and starlight; silhouettes of mountains, dark and corrugated against the horizon’s shimmer: for animals, these all “read,” marking out through air or overland well-worn trails essential to their species’ survival.

Some states have passed lighting ordinances to reduce amounts of destructive and distracting glare in public places and on private property, but ignorant of how light pollution interferes with ancient thoroughfares animals and insects have used for generations, many people continue to culture light in inefficient gardens everywhere they live.  Closer and louder than heavenly lights, these weedy beams crowd out native stars and shout down entire constellations.  For nocturnal insects and animals, the volume at which we broadcast electric light after sunset is comparable to our human neighbors for a block around turning up televisions, car stereos, and high-tech home stereo systems to a mind-boggling blast.  In this way we render incoherent this gorgeous energy that some of our own origin stories deem an organizing power.

We might think of the problems light pollution causes other species as being an unfortunate trick of circumstance our dominant presence plays upon the “lesser orders’” abilities to cope with our technologies.  True tricksters use irony or higher understanding to set right a bad situation, teach a lesson, or restore balance.  Light pollution, on the other hand, is nothing more than a careless but compelling lie.  And so almost offhandedly we lead astray the genetic futures of many species of life—even trickster Turtle, carrying within her out of the sea guruwari, the resonant turtle past and vibrant turtle future.

Old wives’ tales hold that lies come back in some way on the liar that made them, since lies, even careless ones, set into motion series of events that break free of the liar’s control.  One thing we know: careless lies become the hunting ground of irony, enabling the great tricksters with their insatiable appetites to break out of the dance of balance and harmony and set out once more on the prowl.

Conning the con is not Turtle’s preferred manner of being-in-the-world.  Usually, Turtle acts in this role only to help less imaginative creatures protect precious resources—water or food, for example—or to correct social imbalances, or perhaps to mete out comeuppance, which is also a way of restoring order to the world locally and at large.  Someone must show the clever ones that they don’t, as they suppose, run everything.  Someone has to teach the Anansis, Jackals, and Coyotes that there’s more going on than even they, the wry ones, can imagine and restore them to their proper places when they become too destructive or powerful.

In one African tale, all the animals in a village labor to dig a water hole to relieve a severe water crisis.  But at night, Jackal, who didn’t lift a finger to help, sneaks in from the desert to drink at the well. Then he muddies the water so no one else can use it.  The other animals complain but don’t know what to do to.  It is Turtle who solves the problem.  Smearing a sticky substance on his shell he submerges in the pool, and when Jackal sneaks in to steal and foul the water, up comes turtle from below and bumps against him.  Poor Jackal!  He sticks to Turtle’s carapace like a fly to sap.  Turtle parades the stuck Jackal before the others who laugh and jeer at him, then he delivers him to Lion’s den.

In a Yoruba tale from Nigeria, Anansi the Spider twists rules of etiquette to avoid sharing his yams with travel-weary Turtle, who arrives just at dinnertime.  As Turtle opens his mouth to bite into a yam, Anansi says, “In my land, we wash our hands before we eat.”  By invoking this and other rules of good manners, Anansi keeps Turtle from the yams until the spider has himself more or less eaten all.  Turtle knows he’s been slighted but understands that two can play this game.  Likewise drawing upon rules of hospitality he invites Anansi to dine at his house.  Anansi does not imagine that anyone is as clever as he is; also, he’s greedy.  Anxious to eat well at someone else’s table, he arrives at the river’s edge where Turtle lives and there faces a dilemma.  Turtle’s house lies on the bottom.  To get to the food, Anansi must sink through the water.  Anansi tries to sink himself but nothing works.  Finally he fills his coat pockets with rocks.  He sinks down and arrives at Turtle’s table where the feast has been laid.  Wide-eyed with gluttony, Anansi reaches for his first bite.  But Turtle says, “In my land, we remove our coats before we eat.”  Anansi removes his coat and floats up out of reach of the food, losing not only his meal but also a perfectly good coat.

In a Cherokee tale, Turtle and Coyote race to see who will win Turtle’s dinner.  Turtle may be slow, but he’s no fool.  He knows Coyote intends to cheat him so he turns back before the race is over and secures the meal for himself.  Thus Turtle cons the con artist.  Another good Cherokee story presents Turtle as a master of illusion.  Turtle outsmarts Rabbit in a race over five hills by locating one of his turtle relatives on each of the hills, fooling Rabbit into thinking he is seeing something he isn’t.
Some might wonder at such a stolid, slow-moving creature achieving revered trickster status, but as a former hunter of turtles I share this reverence for Turtle’s ability to gain the upper hand.  Because once upon a time, Turtle tricked me.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves.

My familiarity with this place is so deep that, even though I’m asleep, I know I’ve entered a region of my personal Dreamtime. Many peoples have Dreamtimes, though perhaps not so many as used to.  For Aboriginal Australians, Dreamtime is an ancestral era when totemic creatures walked the land, chanting the world into existence. Dreamtime is also a state of being.  The Australian landscape thrums with vibrations, jiva or guruwari, seed vitality, the resonant blastosphere of the present containing the past and the future; the land Dreams. Relation arcs between highly charged places—sacred places—and individual consciousness, and this, too, is the Dreaming.  For the Aborigines, Dreaming is believing.

My Dreamtime is like that, a place-time in my soul that keeps current origin images from my childhood in rural Piedmont Virginia. Where I live now, in the bone-bared west, there are no places like our old weeds and woods.

I hurry down a path, the only strip of earth not overrun with green growing.  I feel a child’s desire—anxious, anticipatory.  I come to a sluggish stream.  Sometimes it’s a small pond, sometimes a large puddle.  I wade in and peer into the water, which may be clear as a windowpane or muddy as a storm, and there are the turtles.

Perhaps the sight of them arouses the reptilian part of my brain, because I know them.  Their bone backs curved like river cobbles, dappled like the bottoms of sun-flecked pools. Their stout, scaly legs, tipped with fine claws—legs of plodding, ancient design.  Their retractable necks.

Without thinking, I catch them.  I don’t know why.  In the dreams, I don’t question my motives.  It’s not obsession or any form of predation.  Simply, the turtles are there and I catch them: spotted turtles, eastern painted turtles, and the occasional indefinite specimen, something that’s just elemental turtle.

Part of it might be a need to touch the carapaces.  To get the gist of a turtle you really have to feel the curve of the shell against the palm of your hand, filling your hand; you have to get its heft, like a stone, only alive and kicking.  Then there are multifarious shell colors and patterns. It’s as if each animal has chosen a kaleidoscopic variation on this or that motif: star clusters in deep space; flower petals mixed with loam and old leaf; algal strands and shadows.  Whorled like topographical maps, turtles’ shells seem to bear record of where they have been and how long they stayed.

Living in arid Utah as I do now I need to revisit these creatures swimming the headwaters of my earliest consciousness.  So the Dreamtime takes me to them.  When I catch the Dream Turtles and look upon their shells, I feel something beyond satisfaction.  It’s as if to touch and to gaze upon a turtle shell is to receive a Rosetta stone that keys other matter for meaning.  One thing: turtles present the domes of their backs skyward, as if waiting for the world to settle there.  So it was that some cultures believed life began or was remade on the shells of turtles.

A Hindu myth of the world’s cycle tells how water overcomes the world every millennium, destroying all but the most basic silts and elements of life.  At such times, Vishnu enters into a new incarnation, one fitting for this water world—Chukwa, the turtle.  In a no doubt suitably ornate vessel that recalls in mystical detail the backs of modern turtles, he gathers a mixture of elements necessary to re-spawn the world.  When this period of reborning is over Chukwa fixes to the spot, supporting Ma-pudma the elephant, or four elephants, who in turn bear up the reborn Earth.

An Iroquois creation story tells also how the turtle, a water creature, made possible the creation of land.  As in the Hindu tale, the world’s surface is fluid.  But according to this Dawn of Earth story, the animal inhabitants fail to build good ground until they lay their mud and sticks on Turtle’s back.  Turtle magnifies their efforts by growing and becoming North America: Turtle Island.

In a Chinese myth, a turtle is the world.

Some might think such origin tales lacking in finesse, childish, unscientific, rather uneconomical in the creation scheme of things.  But I get it.  Part of my brain engages and applies the truth in these old, old stories.  Obviously, turtles have sustained a very long relationship with the earth—older than our own, by most traditional accounts and by all scientific ones.

The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.

Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could just get over thinking we’re smarter than we actually are.

Here’s another octopus story.

Took Otto’s wardens long enough to figure out what was going on.

Here’s a story about barn swallows you might have seen.

My experience with octopi is unfortunately limited (thanks to a high school guidance counselor), but I’ve watched swallows for hours—barn, cliff, and violet green.  They exhibit flying skills that shout mental sharpness and high engagement with their surroundings.  Their language, too, is lovely—soaring phrases and jazzy riffs that light up whatever spaces they breeze through.  Beside white-throated swifts (and, of course, park pigeons) swallows are one of the species of birds that show the greatest tolerance for people’s presence.  Many times they’ve let me in among them while they’ve dipped and whirled very close in.  For me, watching them fly is like watching a group of mathematicians scrawl out geometrical problems at high speed on a three-dimensional blueboard.  Very satisfying for this mind to try to follow.

The debate over animal intelligence is progressing very slowly.  The holdup?  Well, that would have to be … us.  We’re hung-up on wanting to be the smartest creatures on the planet, to play the lead roles on this living, growing, prowling, blossoming, metamorphosing stage.

I’ve had enough experience with animals to suspect strongly that the “I’m smarter than other species and even smarter than others of my kind” mindset is not unique to people.  I lived with a Siberian husky that definitely thought herself smarter than other dogs (she was) and smarter than I was (yes, at times), and she absolutely believed herself physically superior, to the point of challenging me to follow her in intimidating feats of derring-do.  I’m uncertain how her rangy, forty-pound body supported such an ego.

And the coyote is not cast in folk stories’ trickster roles by happenstance.

But human beings exert more influence upon the world than dogs or coyotes, from our tool-grasping gift for altering the physical environment to our cosmoplastic abilities—our narrative prowess—and the effects they bring to bear upon all life.  That we struggle with the question of whether or not animals exhibit intelligence might speak more to shortfalls in our awareness than it does to the question of what’s actually happening around us.  That is, our wonderment over animals’ intelligence and feeling might posit some narrative failure on our part, which means it’s a failure of relationship, narrative being one of the primary approaches we take for exploring and developing connexion.

Furthermore, the slowness of our thinking about other species is not something isolated to our relationship with the nonhuman world.  The levels of imperceptiveness and bad behavior people demonstrate toward nature is but an extension of the bad behavior we exhibit toward each other. Thus any progress we make in our behavior toward nature ought to be paralleled in improvements in how we treat each other, and the other way around.

If we can figure out how better to pay attention—if we can tune our minds for deeper engagement—then learning from nature at a higher rate of speed than we do and applying with grace what we learn to humanity’s condition could work out very well for us. For some people, I know it does work that way, as well as the other way around—nature learns from its contact with us. This is not to say that we’re no different from other species; obviously we are. Perhaps we’re the farthermost extension of an entire system’s quest for greater consciousness; perhaps we’re seeking broader dimensions to creativity–maybe even godhood. We have our narratives to explain who we are and what we’re about, but those can and should change. Jesus initiated a powerful narrative shift, new language–and thus a new way–for being in the world and for being-with-others (including animals) when he broke up the unyielding eye-for-an-eye storylines of the Mosaic Law.

Perhaps we think we can get away more cleanly with careless relationships with the natural world, which we appear to believe has no law or awareness, than we can with mankind, which has an extensive and evolving set of laws governing its behavior along with somewhat heightened consciousness where the well-being of our own kind is concerned. But the abuse, exploitation, destruction, apathy, annoyance, clumsiness, insensibility and so on we display towards nature is not behavior we exhibit only toward nature. If we’re doing it “out there,” it’s happening inside governments, businesses, communities, and homes in one form or another. We may not be aware what things that we’re doing to each other are destructive, clumsy, etc. We might say, “This is the only way to handle this. Nobody knows a better way, so there must not be one.” We might say, “This is how it has always been done.”  We have reams and reams of “look no further” language arranged in unmoving narratives.  Meanwhile, Otto is shooting out the irritating lights above his aquarium with a highly accurate water pistol.

Why?

Because they’re there and he’s there, and because his circumstances changed him to the point where he figured how to change his circumstances.

Is this not one chamber of the heart of the creative mind?

Then two years ago, members of that same storytelling festival committee recruited me to participate.  I was assigned to write an introduction for the festival, a preamble that would signal to visitors that the storytelling was about to begin.  Another purpose for the introduction: To support the opening ceremony during which each of the evening’s participants carried a lit candle into the auditorium as they entered single file.  The candles symbolized the intentional passing of stories–heirloom narrative valuables–from generation to generation. 

I decided to write a story–a faux folktale–explaining where the old stories came from.  It was an interesting process, composing a story that all the cultures involved found acceptable.  I had included a reference to the German story about the wolf who ate a family of goats.  One of the Navajo committee members asked that I take that out because, as she said, “Navajos can’t hear about bad things happening to their animals.”  Navajos, of course, herd goats and sheep.

Through this revising process and that, I worked up a story that all approved of.  It’s just a light thing, addressing an audience containing children, meant to support the festival’s theme and to work in the significance of the candles.  But the festival committee liked it so much that they used it for two years in a row and plan to use it every year.  So my dream of releasing a story into the common narrative environment, free and open to effects of use, came true.

I tell about this here at WIZ because I consider language to be part of the natural world and human language to be something creation has given rise to for purposes perhaps beyond our ken and certainly beyond our grasp.   To my thinking, the condition of this planet is deeply dependent now upon the quality of human language giving rise to expression.  One of narrative’s most important energies: creating and communicating the range of possibilities from which other beings in the world might choose to create their own prospects.

Here’s the story:

Pass the Flame

A long time ago, a man and woman had many children.  They taught their children how to walk, wear clothing, and eat food to stay alive. 

But they didn’t know how to teach their children to be wise.  So the children made the same mistakes over and over, which caused everyone a lot of trouble.

The man said to the woman, “The things we taught our children aren’t enough.  We must teach them to be wise.  But how?”

“We have nothing of ourselves we can do this with,” said the woman.  “We must look for a way.” 

So the man and women set out on a journey.  After walking many days, they came to a strange mountain.  On one side was a desert with sand dunes.  On another side was a tropical rainforest.  Yet another side was covered in fir and pine.  There was frozen tundra up there, too.  The sea lapped at the mountain’s foot.  On this mountain, summer, winter, fall, and spring happened all at the same time.

The man and woman climbed the mountain and sat down to wait.  “How will this place help us?” they wondered.

They saw shapes in the distance moving toward them.  The first one was a bear.  When the bear reached them, it said, “I will tell you why I have a short tail instead of a long tail, like I used to have.” 

Behind the bear was Coyote.

“This is what happened when I stole the sun and the moon,” said Coyote. 

Behind Coyote was an Eskimo.  “This is how mosquitoes came to us,” the Eskimo said. 

“This is why my tail is bald rather than bushy, like it used to be,” said Possum.

“This is why I have big eyes,” said Owl.

“This is how I taught Anansi not to be rude to guests,” said Turtle.

“This is how me and my blue ox Babe carved the Grand Canyon,” said Paul Bunyon.

“This is how I became a spider,” said Arachne.

“This is the sad story of how I became a weather cock,” said Half-a-chick.

“This is how I tricked Raven into dropping his cheese so that I could take it from him,” said Fox.

“This is how I defeated the dragon with my golden reed pipe, thereby saving my sister,” said a boy named Bayberry.

“This is how I learned not to speak to wolves in the woods,” said a girl in a red riding hood.

And so it went.  After many days, the man and woman were so filled with stories their eyes glowed with light.  The animals and flowers and trees and people who had told the stories said to the man and woman, “Now you have some wisdom to give your children.  But for the wisdom to work, your children must in turn tell the stories to their children, and they must tell them to theirs.  If they don’t, life will go back to the way it was, with everybody making the same mistakes over and over.”

The man and woman thanked the creatures that told the stories.  They went home and told their children all of the wonderful tales they had been taught.  When the children heard the stories, their eyes also glowed with light.  It was as if someone had touched a burning candle to an unlighted wick in each one, causing wonder and wisdom to leap up like flames.

Tonight, we who have inherited these stories and the love of storytelling honor those who taught us by doing our duty and bringing our tales to you like lighted candles.  We invite you to tip your candles toward us so that we may pass the flame.

“Why do dragons keep maidens,” she asked,
“Not killing or eating them?  Why hoard
Them in caves and sleep while foolish maidens
Weep, wringing jewelry and dabbing pale
Gowns at their eyes?  It can bring no real pleasure.
Fell Dragon stokes inwardly its wizard fire
While Fair Maiden strums her lyre, lamenting
Yon Burnt Hamlet from whence she came.”

She put down the book and said: “Lately,
I’ve smelled sap rising in trees, seen flames
In petals, heard the bee squirm panting
Past pink ruffles of the cottage rose.
I feel sudden breezes on still days,
My eyes ripe, I look for the cock pheasant
To fly up from my heels when I walk 
The ancient hills through green seed grasses.”

And as she stood and went with book under arm:
“In a shop in the city there’s a boy with dark skin.
His eyes, they never waver when they take me in.
I would blush, but I am older than he is.

“Another working in the fields for my father
Carries the sun in him as he comes away.
When we talk, I look straight into his noon.
Then I shut my eyes against his ray.

“A third’s pride billows on his brow like a storm.
The shifting winds of his regard bluster
In his touch.  He blows cold, then he brews warm.

“What shall I do?” she said.  “What shall I say?
It’s as strange as fairytales, as dreams,
As my father in the barn among the horses.
My green faith dissolves to bream in a pond
Flitting from my glance for the rushes.
Desire wings me beyond the well-kenned paths.
I cannot get past its creature.  I fright,
I cry when the moon shakes her horns.
I mourn the new grass I once trod bare-soled.
All that I can see is smoke and gold.”

To this we must all come.  But who has come to it now, and where?    

Walking deeper into the field of decomposition gases, I looked around, guessing what I would find.  I was approaching the gravel pit, a dumping ground for domestic and wild animal carcasses and the scene of occasional war crimes of the sort some people commit against animals.  It’s common to find coyote remains around the pit, along with elk and deer carcasses, tree prunings, the ashes of bonfires, articles of clothing, and aerosol cans—the residue of ”huffing” parties.

My eyes had a difficult time picking out the body of the coyote because his full winter regalia of desert-soil-hued fur blended in well where he had been dumped against the weathered  juniper barricade some rancher erected decades ago to prevent cattle from wandering.  I’m guessing the coyote was an adult male because of the animal’s size.  Wind ruffled the luxuriant fur, and my own hand felt drawn to touch.  But I didn’t.  Touching the animal might spark a response that under the circumstances I couldn’t support. 

The animal’s head was turned away and its rust-tinted, smooth-furred triangular ears—with some exceptions, the common earmark of un- or less domesticated canids—caught my eye.  Having lived with huskies, I have learned to watch upright ears like these for expression of feeling and intent almost as much as I watch the animal’s eyes, mouth, and tail. 

These ears—silent.

That the animal still had ears and scalp told that it had not been killed to collect the twenty-dollar  bounty paid for coyote scalps.  I don’t even know if the county is running a coyote bounty this year.  Without closer examination, I could get no indication of how the coyote might have died.   Later, I might go back to the carcass.  But not now.

Lambing season has been in progress for over a month, with some lambs showing up early in December.  Possibly, a sheep rancher picked this animal off because it threatened his herd.  Maybe it posed someone some other problem.  Or maybe it had been killed because, as I’ve heard it put, “It’s a coyote and deserves it.”  Maybe—just maybe—it stopped there and laid its life down on its own. 

To reflect on this coyote’s death, I thought I’d explore some of the stories people tell about coyotes, specifically the Navajos. 

Navajos have a deep and amazing tradition of Coyote stories, though Coyote is different things to different Navajos.  In “The Pretty Language of Yellowman,” Barre Toelken tells how the Navajo grandfather Yellowman told Coyote stories to his children and grandchildren.  Why?  Because, he said, “If my children hear the stories, they will grow up to be good people, if they don’t, they will turn out to be bad.”  Coyote, of course, represented the “bad” end of the spectrum of cultural and spiritual possibilities.  Yellowman’s stories encouraged his listeners to laugh at Coyote’s antics, not because the stories are funny, but because laughing at wrong behaviors helped set in his children’s minds the logical boundaries of Navajo social behavior. 

For other Navajos, Coyote is evil incarnate, the first witch, which of course associates him with skinwalkers and that whole tradition of doing evil to get power over people and resources.  This tradition—the tradition of the Evilway singers—is quite serious in nature.  You don’t laugh at this Coyote because evil is not to be laughed at, only driven away.  I suppose this is in some ways a fundamentalist view of Coyote, similar to Mormon fundamentalist views of Satan and evil, whereby the world is infused with evil, a very dangerous place indeed, and you make every effort to separate yourself from it.

To another kind of Navajo, Coyote is not evil incarnate, but like you and me, prone to get himself into trouble by “Coyoteing around”—that is, he brings his suffering upon himself through bad choices.  But rather than being identified as an evil that must be driven out, this Coyote is held up by tradition to be the first patient, the first beneficiary of the Coyoteway healing ceremonial.  Thus he is the type for all sufferers who scald themselves in physical and spiritual hot water yet have a chance for treatment and recovery.  Such people are “killed” by their actions, like Coyote is in the stories, over and over, yet with communal and sacred helps and invocations he always resurrects.  In the Coyoteway Ceremony, Coyote’s particular trouble is that he loses his skin, that largest organ of the body through whose responsiveness we sense the world.  In Coyoteway ceremonies, Coyote’s pelt is returned to him and he is healed of the devastation. 

Some hold that skinwalkers (the evil incarnate side of the story) take parts of the Coyoteway out of context and use it in “transformation” ceremonies where they don the skin of the animal whose powers they wish to exploit for whatever bad purpose, “becoming” that animal.

Then there are all the Navajos who believe part of this and part of that. Some non-traditional Navajos seem to be moving away from these “children’s stories” or have not been given them.  Since it’s hard for a white girl like me to know on short exposure which kind of Navajo I’m talking to, I avoid raising Coyote issues with Navajos.  However, many Navajos, traditional and non-traditional, associate Coyote with bad luck, and here it’s especially hard to tell where Coyote the folk figure ends and Canis latrans begins.  Crossing paths with a coyote (Canis latrans) is cause for great concern. Yet killing the animal could bring even worse luck, since it would upset the natural balance and immerse the world into sickness and chaos.

I grew up in the animal-rich environment of rural piedmont Virginia.  A convert to the church, I had already imprinted on the natural world and was deeply involved with animals before I learned that people, only “a little lower than the angels,” are the appointed stewards over the earth.  People, I was taught, are children of God and have the potential to ascend above the angels.  And while animals, before they were created in body, were “intelligences,” they rank below us in intelligence (indeed, in some versions of stewardship, animals are apportioned only instinct).  God did not endow them as he did us, and so, except for animals that have wisely proven themselves helpful to man, they have no real foothold in our community and no community of their own.  This idea that animals are … well, just animals … doesn’t quite jive with my experience with them.  From my earliest days, I have seen intelligence in their eyes and body language and interacted with them as beings with an equality of intent and desire for life.

This is perhaps why, when I think of Coyote (big or little “c”), I lean toward the Coyote-as-first-patient narrative strain of folk stories.  Something about this metaphoric Coyote levels the playing field.  That we often get ourselves into trouble by “Coyoteing around” seems like a fair appraisal of our human and our animal conditions.   That we might “resurrect” when we kill ourselves through our bad acts is a wry herald of divine hope, echoing, in down-to-earth language, more familiar scriptural narrative that tells us the way to life is losing it and that our hearts must break before they can become whole.

The kids’ tales are good, too.  In Virginia, when I was a child, folktales were an important part of the reading curriculum.  Many stories have stayed with me, acting as a kind of guardian language. 

The Coyote-as-evil-incarnate—I’ve seen some of that as well, but not from coyotes the animals, who after all are opportunists and take advantage of whatever circumstances seem good, including ones we set up for them, inviting their exploitation. 

At the gravel pit, I’ve come upon one harrowing scene of violence done upon a coyote and her pups.  But in spite of the to-be-expected instances of coyote bodies turning up at the pit, I understand that coyotes are not so easy to catch or kill as some wish they were.   Like anybody else, they can make mistakes.  If they survive them, they learn from them.   And their biology is such that any if many animals fall victim to large-scale bounty-hunting, shooting, trapping, or any other attempt to curtail their presence, they will resurrect their population by means of increased fertility.  And they can pose threats—many actions, human and animal, do.  Yet after having had a little experience with these creatures over the last three years and reading about them in order to try to understand them, I’m coming to believe that to catch and kill a coyote takes a bigger Coyote.