Let Them Speak
“Think of it - grizzlies ambling along golden cliffs overlooking the glittering Pacific.”
In the back country of central California there are parched hills, dry streambeds, and fields of irrigated carrots. Pickup trucks and old tractors send up tracers of dust. That was where, about twenty years ago, an off-duty nurse driving home from work saw a heap of luminous brown fur lying motionless on the side of the road. She pulled over to have a look. Or, rather, this is what she told herself. The real reason was that it drew her like a magnet. She simply knew she had to stop - to literally bear witness, as it turned out: the mound of fur was a baby grizzly bear that had been hit by a car. The woman sensed its mother's presence nearby. Perhaps the human was also a mother. Perhaps she felt protective. Heartbroken. Perplexed.
She called the Department of Fish and Game; a man in uniform appeared in a car with a siren and an official insignia on the door. Though grizzlies once ranged from Alaska to Mexico, and from California to the Great Plains, they have been extinct in California since the 1920's. The officer from Fish and Game told the woman not to speak of what they had seen, because people would come and try to find the bear that didn't exist.
The extinction stories of animals lost to hunters' zeal are bloody and sad. It is said that, in 1772, Father Junipero Serra sent his men into a nearby canyon to hunt. After several days of frenzied killing, they returned with 9000 pounds of grizzly bear meat. Prolific hunters are part of American legend: Davy Crocket, who posed for photographs next to a stack of bear hides, 105 in all. Daniel Boone, who carved the words, D. Boone cilled A Bar in a nearby tree whenever he shot a bear. Buffalo skulls piled high, the vast plains fertilized with their desecrated bodies. In 1909, President Roosevelt celebrated his retirement with a safari to Kenya and returned with more than 10,000 corpses of animals and birds. Humans are the only species that enjoys killing to extinction for sport. If we made a map denoting these losses we'd see a blur of stylized paws, feathers and fins - all that's left of the disappeared who once thrived in beautiful places made more beautiful by their thriving.
Since colonial times, the plentiful have vanished in frenzies of slaughter. Powerful predators like the Barbary lion were among those hunted most mercilessly. For centuries before Christ, Barbary lions roamed the forests and high passes of north Africa, from the Atlas Mountains to Egypt; they wandered throughout what is now Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya. They basked on the banks of the Nile with elephants, rhinoceros, wild dogs, antelope, leopards, wild boar, and the ancient, herbivorous Atlas bear. As humans settled in these places, they cut down forests, and the desert pushed lions north into harsher terrain. Their normal prey became scarce, forcing the lions to feed on domesticated livestock, so they were persecuted by farmers and shepherds. Ironically, because they were so beautiful, Barbary lions also adorned royal insignia and were the specimens of choice for zoos and private menageries, including those kept in the Tower of London. Colonial noblemen pursued them in lavish hunts organized for sport. Gunpowder and colonization finished them off at the hands of Arab and French bounty hunters in the early 1900's. The lions' demise reads like a timeline of colonial excess: extinct in Libya by 1700, in Tunisia by 1891, Algeria in 1899 and in Morocco by 1922.
And yet, simultaneous worlds continuously unfold alongside this one. The officer from California Fish and Game told the woman who came upon the grizzly cub that there is a membrane, a portal that the bears know is permeable. From there, they crossed to safety when the killing became too extreme. It is a thin corner that is also the place through which they return. One of the places where silence protects. A refuge where life can retrieve a lost stitch.
There are prophesies that speak of this time of transition, what Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning, a mythic awakening taking shape alongside news of calamity, like a mixing zone of saltwater and fresh as the tide changes. The prophesies grow bones, claws, feathers and fur as they take shape in our imaginations and in reality: species that were once thought extinct have begun to reappear all over the globe. The names and locations people a map in my mind: the Singing Dogs of New Guinea; Painted Frogs in Colombia; Formosa Clouded Leopards in Taiwan and their cousins, North China Leopards near Beijing. Elephant Shrews in East Africa and Great Fox Spiders in the U.K.
The insects and animals know each place where the web has been tattered by humans. They are coming to mend mutuality. They are here because Nature reweaves what unravels. They are returning to tend to each niche they once knew. Luckily for us, these include the niches and portals in our minds. Last week, when I was in Los Angeles, a friend took me to visit a museum of crystals, fossils and antiquities. There I met 'Little Nessie', a baby aquatic dinosaur we call Plesiosaurus that lived in the Early Jurassic period 200 million years ago. She now swims in the altar on my desk. As we were leaving, I heard someone urgently calling as if they were waving and shouting, Hey, over here! Look at me! It was the skull of a Cave Bear, thirty-five thousand years old. Because she lived during the last ice age, she knows something about transition times. We need her wisdom to guide us. I need her to help me finish writing my book. She now sits in the altar as well.
At the thinned-out places that are portals, flakes of the veil fall away like chipped paint from layers of forgery. With each extinct species that steps back through, a patch of resplendence is restored as the counterfeit world falls away. We do not yet know the full story and so cannot yet tell it, but we have the first sentence: When things seemed most dire, the Lost Ones returned and we glimpsed the world made whole.
