THE WILDLIFE OF AIR BELLOWS

the bear

the bear and 2 coyotes--black coyote on right

bear and coyote

 

bear two nights before

These pictures were taken by a field camera triggered by motion, strapped to a tree. The place in the foreground  where the light is concentrated is the "bait pile," deer corn strewn over the ground and apples spread on the ground. The lore on coyotes says they don't eat apples. One of the pictures is a coyote with an apple in its mouth. It's the apples the coyotes are looking for here. The camera is about a tenth of a mile from my house on the other side of the road. I've been told bears were  in here, have seen traces, like at a rise in the road about half way between house and camera site a bear has been taking a dump on the road at the highest place that overlooks a great part of this valley between ridges. The camera recorded that the bear lay down comfortably in this place for two and a quarter hours. Coons, deer and coyotes passed through the pictures, the bear watching. I presume the bear knows the coyotes, the coons and the deer from nightly sightings. The bear is huge, estimated at 400+ pounds. From the standing picture, the bear looks pregnant to me, at least swollen up toward winter hibernation. I've become acquainted with this bear through the photographs. Since it appears comfortable here and has evidently been here several years, explaining the bear droppings on the place in the road that reappear from time to time, I feel like this is my bear sharing the mountain with me, my God-given neighbor.

 

coyote with apple in its mouth

 

ninja raccoon faces coyote intruder

 

coyote turns away

 

deer and raccoons

  

Most interesting to me, seeing this line of 500 images in the course of a couple of days and a nights, is seeing the critters living in the woods around here do not attack each other on sight. In a couple of the pictures, coons and coyotes face each other. In one of them the coon is standing on its back feet in a martial arts fighting stance (195). The coyote looks on with apprehension, body language saying, Looking for trouble I am not. Next frame (196) occurs in the same minute, the coyote showing its side, showing itself not a threat. Ninja Raccoon relaxes his stance. I believe, one-on-one, a coon could shred a coyote's face in a hurry. Two or more coyotes, I believe, could subdue a coon, but they'd have to be swift, which they are, and experienced, which they are, and work as a team, which they do. It appears the bait pile, like a watering hole, is a safe zone where it is collectively agreed, no killing at the communal kitchen. Until one of the deer feels for a split second the shaft of an arrow pierce the heart. My hunter friend, the only one with permission to hunt this part of the woods, is recording times the bucks pass through. The camera also gives him an idea of what is living in these woods. He had always been told coyotes don't eat apples. Turns out they do. It also turns out he is feeding the night critters of Air Bellows, day critters too. I'm feeding the birds here at the house and the donkeys with sunflower seeds and carrots. He's feeding everything else with corn and apples.

 

all four pictures the black coyote

 

 

 

 

 

I found several pictures of the black coyote, the one easily mistaken for wolf. I went looking at google images for wolves and coyotes. The long thin snout is coyote. A wolf's snout is more like a dog's. It looks like the black coyote travels on his own. Possibly he's the leader of the pack, top dog, scouting all the time, looking for something of interest. If it will take more than one, like maybe a lone calf in a meadow, he rounds up the pack and lays out his plan for attack. Don't get attached to any of the animals in these pictures. This plot of ground is no more than a slice of pepperoni on their whole pizza. They have an extensive range. Humans are looking to kill the deer and the coyotes as well as a bear. Humans don't kill the coons so much anymore, but going by the apparent understanding between the coon and the coyote, coons know that coyotes like raccoon meat. In the picture above, the back of the black coyote, notice his left front leg is missing, though its shadow is on the ground. His leg is raised carefully in slow motion, turning to the right to place his foot silently on dry leaves. Or maybe he's just trotting through, seeing what he can see, smelling the scent of every coyote, coon, squirrel, crow, turkey, deer, bear, human that had passed in and out of the communal kitchen, listening for any sound of footsteps on dry leaves. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it in full consciousness in the present moment. 

 

crow

 

turkey

 

squirrels

 

the reaper

 



While I was writing about the black coyote, three college-age girls came to the door and asked permission to park here and walk to the waterfalls. They'd been told the waterfalls are beautiful. Here I am, looking at these pictures for a few hours, writing about what I see, and three girls whose probable closest acquaintance with wildlife might be the cats they grew up with, I felt it important to advise them of what is in these woods. The bigger ones, the coyotes and the bears, are new to the area, the reason I don't go walking in the woods anymore. I advised them to step on twigs, talk a lot, make noise, let everything know a bunch of humans is passing through. I told them they won't see anything, because everything will see them first and go someplace else. I said none of these animals is looking to get you. They don't want to get you. They will leave you alone. If you see one, don't run. I said running means to them you want to play chase. You lose. Stand still like they do when they see one another. Show absence of aggression. My final advice, "Be wary. Don't worry." I came back to the house. I think they went back to the car and left. My hunter friends, who know what is going on in these woods, only go into the woods with a gun that has stopping power. Friend, who hunts here, walks into the woods in bow season, arrow in place. The only time he will require is the time it takes to pull back the string and let it go. I used to say nothing to city people visiting waterfalls about the possibility of running into a bear, coyote or wolf, but now that I know what is in these woods, I feel obliged to warn city people with no country experience about what they're getting into. Give them a chance to make a decision. It's no petting zoo.

 

 

 

 

 

the bear

 

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TO HUNT OR NOT TO HUNT

tantric painting

Driving on the Parkway after dark is an interesting challenge concerning the deer that see headlights and think they're two floating lights, not imagining it is a ton of steel, plastic and glass in motion. Yet dogs get it and cats get it. Bobcats get it. Possums don't appear to get it. I used to drive like these critters were in the way. That has changed. I finally got it that I'm driving through their world. They know those smelly, noisy four-footed gigantic beetles stay on that track where nothing grows. They stay off it during the day. But at night, it doesn't register that those lights are the same as the giant beetles that zoom by during the day. Deer in the headlights makes a good metaphor for the look in the eyes of people working in Japanese and Chinese restaurants when you say something to them not from the menu. It makes me want to leave Japanese and Chinese-to-English phrase books with them. Somebody says, "What time does the bus depart?" and they can see it written in dancing chicken footprints. Maybe cell phones do that now. It's not annoying. It's just dazed people from a culture entirely different from ours, languages entirely different from ours. I'd be dazed in the same way working at a Hardees in some Chinese mountain town too small for a dot in atlases. Somebody say to me, "What time does the bus depart?" I'd probably say, "Ohio gozymas," that poorly. I can't help but be sympathetic with these people making a living in a place where everybody looks down on them, and they're proud people, just like we are.

There is so much to be sympathetic about, I'm wondering if sympathetic concern might be an affectation we learned somewhere along the way thinking it was real. I think it might have been "real" in a tribal setting where everyone is intimately connected with everyone else, where nobody has their own business. Sympathy seems like it is right for people nearby we know well, but to hear about an earthquake in China where a school caves in on the kids, the grief of the parents, I feel for everyone concerned; sympathy is what I feel. Then the Japanese tsunami nuclear disaster. It messed up a lot of people, dogs and cats. I'm sympathetic. Every day on the news children shattered by landmines, "smart bombs" killing indiscriminately, tormenting twice that many with pain, grief and agony. I see pictures of little black refugee kids like skeletons and I feel sympathetic. I want to help. I can't do anything. Don't have money to send, can't go volunteer in a refugee camp, and if I did have the time and money, there'd be no end to it, running from one rescue mission to the next, all of them too late.

It's hard to pull in from not feeling a twang when I hear news stories about other people's misfortunes. But I also need my energy here where I am, in the world I live in, with the people I live among. That's where my sympathy belongs, where I need it first. It's hard not to avoid being wrenched every day by somebody's agony someplace in the world. It seems like paying too much attention to the agonies out in the world on tv, in other countries, albeit artificially, diminishes attention that is needed at home. It's a narrow line to walk, a razor's edge even, finding how to be aware, even prayerful, of what is happening around, but with the dispassion of knowing it is outside my jurisdiction. That's somebody else's immediate concern. I have plenty of immediate concern here at home. In my spiritual path I've come to see that everyday life is where it's at. I have learned I find much more interesting people in the ones I already know, the people who live nearby, the people I see wherever I go in my world. I'd rather know the people I know of these mountains than somebody famous in NY or LA or anywhere I am not. The pop world keeps us believing that wherever we are is not where It is at. It is always somewhere I am not.

Yesterday, talking with my friend Justin about the thrill I had from a full week of focus on one theme, writing wide-open, four straight days from getting up to turning in, fingers dancing on the keyboard, Caterpillar frustrated because she couldn't hold my attention for more than a few seconds at a time, a touch on top of her head that says I'd love to pet you, but I'm involved in the part of the human mind that cats don't have, the forebrain, thinking abstractly, putting thoughts together to tell a story. I believe she reads me telepathically, which makes me wonder what she sees when I'm thinking about a fiddler I've never met in a time I didn't know first-hand. She went off to her bed seeing there was no penetrating the peasoup fog. Four straight days of total focus on one theme and a full day of rewriting, writing new paragraphs to fill in blanks, then two more days of rereading and clarifying sentences that needed it, changing words, even nit picky words, like changing an in to a with. These sorts of details matter. I'm still in the charm of that fixation. Heard five minutes of news once a day to keep abreast of Syria and Turkey. Finally, today I've reached the place that rereading as editor has become boring. I want to do something else.

Justin told me I get the same thrill out of writing and painting that he gets out of hunting. He said, "Hunting is better than sex. Sex is the same over and over. Hunting is different every time." We talked about the thrill of attention focused absolutely for a period of time. He sits in a deer blind or in a stand in a tree for hours without moving or making a sound. He takes his four year old boy with him, teaches him silence and patience. He takes his five year old girl, too, and teachers her the same. Justin hunts to eat. He gets Welter Ham in Whitehead to butcher his kills like beef and keeps it in the freezer. At the moment he has the head of the last buck he shot with a nice rack in the freezer waiting to be mounted. Justin also takes Crystal hunting. She's good. He aims to put both kids through gun safety courses where they can learn more than he could teach them. He could teach them plenty, but the course does it better. Also, like in learning to drive from somebody besides parents, there is no parental tension in the way. I cannot allow myself to kill even the spiders in the window corners. Yet I know they're about killing to eat. Everything living kills to eat. Chickens eat grasshoppers. Cats eat mice. Coyotes eat cats. We eat lunchmeat from the grocery store, steaks, hotdogs, bacon, chicken nuggets, and we don't kill anything. No dragging in a dead squirrel, peeling the skin off, etc. Justin was taught to hunt before he started school. I said of the baby, Vada, "She'll have her first buck when she's six." Justin said, "Before that."

In my own Way, I have no problem with killing for food. I don't even have a problem with somebody making a kill and leaving it for the coyotes. Who has a problem with road kill? Same difference. I will slow down to a stop if necessary to avoid hitting a critter of the night. I've had raccoons, possums, cats, dogs, squirrels, rabbits dart under the tire from the side, no time to even lift foot from gas pedal. I don't like it, but remind myself in God's way of seeing that it is a blink of an eye leaving the body suddenly. I say a prayer for the being's soul every time I nail one or see one on the road. I can't help but see them people like us, consciousness in a particular form. They're in the same realm of consciousness as our dogs and cats. If they were tame, we could connect with them like we do with our pets. I do enough killing without intent just from living in the world as it is now, driving everywhere we go. It's because I see the four-leggeds as my friends I haven't met yet. I think of them as the true Innocents in our world. Humanity mows over them like they're nothing. I have a hard time seeing a deer hanging by back feet, guts tumbling out on the floor. I can't do that. It has surely come to me from previous lifetimes, my never wanting to hurt anybody or anything. I never learned to want to hurt somebody in a fight and never learned to want to see one of God's baby's die by my intent. I don't believe I have the right when I'm not needing the food. That's when I join the food chain, saying a prayer of gratitude for the soul of each one killed. I make sure my hunter friends understand my reticence about killing is for myself and does not extend beyond myself. I admire their skills and enjoy hearing their hunting stories. I can't help but think there is enough killing going around; I don't need to participate in it just because it's going around. And deer aren't going to get overpopulated because I'm not killing them.

I'll go on feeding my friend the possum that lives under the house. I put out extra seeds on the ground by the feeders for the red squirrels that came marauding. I feed them and they leave the bird feeders alone. I decided when I put the feeders out that I would accept whoever in the neighborhood came in to the food kitchen. It's a good shelter for the small birds out of sight of the hawks and in such a thicket the hawks are unable to maneuver. Chipmunks dart through the leaves on the ground and become invisible when they're still. I have a small peaceable kingdom inside my circle of trees around the house. The gray squirrel that lives across the road drops in from time to time. Putting out enough for the bluejays too, they don't bully the other birds. This is the world I want to live in. Can't do anything about it beyond my property line. Out there in the rest of the world it is going to be what it is going to be. In here, in my circle of trees the critters have a free food kitchen with seeds they like. It's unrealistic to want the peace I want for myself for everybody else in the world. That's their choice, and their business. In my world the birds sing and the pair of red squirrels chase each other round and round like kittens.


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KILLING GRASSHOPPERS

     balser's traume by anselm kiefer



Entertaining myself lately reviewing major decisions I've lived my life by that were made in childhood. When it comes down to it, I've an idea in childhood is where I mapped out the life that I have lived. It's an odd notion upon first looking at it. When it first struck me, I thought of a couple and was satisfied I'd made some decisions back then that I've lived by. Time rolls on and more come to the foreground; it's beginning to look like I made all my major decisions pre-pubescent. It's kind of scary considering my mental condition at the time. Nonetheless, the part of myself connected with my innermost self had understanding parents did not have, preacher didn't have, teachers didn't have, no adult in my life had, understandings that seemed obvious to me and I could not make out why no one else could see them. It wasn't that I was "crazy" and out there in my own interior space. Like what I have come to call the absolute subjectivity of everything, which I've come to see in my adult years is consciousness.


I see a deer assessing whether to run across the road in front of my car or wait til it goes by. The deer is conscious, conscious as I would be standing at the side of the road wanting to cross it when one of those big noisy boxes is approaching. The deer doesn't know anything but these things run only on the paved lanes, highways. Dangerous places. The deer doesn't know it hurts like hell when you get hit by one and sometimes it's deadly. The deer doesn't know that. It's only a year or so old. I can just about count on the deer jumping across the road in front of me, not understanding what 50mph means, no idea of what a ton of steel means at 50 mph. Can't assess speed by standing by the road seeing a car approach. It looks like it's going kind of slow when it's approaching. I touched the brake to slow down and be ready to stop if I had to. The deer bolted and I pushed on the brake pedal just enough to give the deer a chance to get to the other side. If I'd not seen the deer or if I'd not anticipated that it would run, learned from experience, it would have been a T-bone hit in the doe in full stride. She was too beautiful to hurt, too innocent. I've been told by someone who knows that I am hyper-vigilant, but my close lookout for deer about to cross the road in front of my car has kept me from hitting deer most of the time. Sometimes, they're like a rabbit and jump out of nowhere in front of you and there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.


For one thing, it was in my childhood I realized I did not want to do any killing. I killed so many grasshoppers in childhood that surely the god of grasshoppers has cross-hairs on me. I had pet chickens and caught grasshoppers for them. My grandmother was happy that I kept the grasshoppers out of her garden. Kansas is loaded with grasshoppers. I was pumped so full of anger that I lashed out at the helpless, the grasshoppers, killed them by the thousands. I wasn't thinking about grandmother's garden. That was collateral benefit. It was the killing that was important about it. Redirecting my anger to the helpless innocent that can't fight back. The anger was powerful. All through that time I did not realize what I was doing. In adult years I've met two other guys who were serial grasshopper killers in their childhood. In each case was a daddy who lashed his own anger out on the helpless innocent kid, who turned his anger to the helpless innocent grasshoppers.


In adult years I have a few times caught a grasshopper to see if I still had the ability to catch one easily. I'd hold it, study its beauty close and tell it how fortunate it is that the grasshopper killer within has ceased his evil ways. I toss it into the air, its wings take over and it flies a little ways and falls into the grass. I watch it hop a few times and consider how I've changed, what I was going through in that time, what made me take my frustration out on insects. It was open season on all bugs. No big deal killing bugs. The adults approved of killing bugs. It's about all they ever approved of. Once, I did something so obvious it told volumes, but I didn't get it at the time. Daddy built a snowman one year in the front yard. Before the day was over I had chopped it down with a shovel, hitting it, hitting it, taking chunks out of it and watching it go away down to the packed snow. He never built another one and I was glad. I didn't want him to. That snowman was him and I couldn't stand looking at it. I hated it. It too was defenseless and unable fight back. In cub scouts we had to do a father-son project to work together on something. He built a little airplane out of little sticks and glue and paper. Rubber band worked the propeller. As soon as the father-son project was done and approved, I filled the plane up with firecrackers and blew it into tiny pieces and then I set them on fire.


By this time in the life I don't want to kill anything, not even spiders. Right now I have a big spider in the kitchen window. Its body is an inch and a half long and the legs that long too. Big thing, but I like having them in the house. I don't have flying bugs very long. The main reason came some time ten years ago, maybe. My neighbor had come into the house one day when I was gone, with permission, looking for something and a spider like this one jumped on him. A spider has never jumped on me in my house. Or anywhere else. He said he swept it off his shoulder with his hand. Next day a wounded spider like this one in the kitchen took up on my bedroom ceiling. I could see it had been seriously wounded. It stayed there over a week. Then it rolled up into a tight ball and stayed that way a day or two, then it disappeared, was gone. It may have gone off to die, or it may have healed itself. I don't know. But every morning when I saw it on the ceiling I thanked it for its bravery jumping on what it only knew to be an intruder. I thanked it every day for being my friend and putting itself in harm's way for my sake.


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