Back in Oregon this summer, I woke up one morning to a thud. It sounded like somebody had thrown something at my door. That was not impossible, but, since I was staying in a guest house in a backyard, it was unlikely. I forgot about the thud until, dressed and ready to go to the library, I stepped outside and found a dead bird. It had flown into a window—hence—thud. Like all the birds I’ve seen that have died by flying into windows, it looked as if it were under some kind of spell and not properly dead at all, a kind of Sleeping Beauty I at least am not brave enough to kiss. I had most of the blinds down in the place where I was staying, but I’d left one up. Probably that was the window it hit.
My response was not guilt—it is not irresponsible to leave the blinds up on a window. I feel sadness about the way its life and my life crossed. A bird doesn’t know what a window is and can’t be expected to know. The whole purpose of a glass window would mean nothing to a bird, even if you tried to explain it somehow. It’s like a deer by the side of the road. They don’t understand cars. They will keep dying, but they are not learning. Of course, saddest of all are pets, for whom life must have always been so soft, if limited in scope, until it was suddenly over. Wild animals expect death to come suddenly and unkindly, even if they don’t grasp the idea “car.” Pets, though.…
I go through this same internal song and dance when I leave doors open for fresh air. Fresh air means fresh bugs. Sometimes it’s you or the bugs, in which case I kill without a care, but sometimes it’s just their dumb luck, and then you have to decide how much you’re willing to inconvenience yourself for a fly. When you see them going to window screens over and over you think, yeah, it does feel like that should be a solution. If I were a bug I would think I was onto something. I’d be like, there’s airflow here. Airflow for sure. Freedom’s just around the corner. If I just keep buzzing at this, I’m gonna break through. I can feel it.
I had a very difficult time trying to catch a moth that had flown inside the place I stayed. It found the existence of window screens as frustrating as any bug and my attempts to get it out were not much better received. Once I did get it outside, and it went off, I thought about how baffling this kind of experience must be to moths and spiders who are suddenly scooped up and deposited in strange places that they don’t know, into, depending on the weather, what might be a completely different climate.1
The alternative to this procedure was letting the moth starve to death while it tried to fly through the window screen, which seemed much worse. Or simply killing it, which was about as much trouble as getting it outside. Would death be, in some unknown way, “kinder”? I’m not a moth. I don’t know. I can kill a moth, in the right circumstances, but I find it very hard to kill spiders. A spider could weave a web that said, “I’d rather you just smush me” and I’d probably still carry it outside. I think some part of me believes that one day all the spiders I didn’t kill will come to aid me in my hour of need. Who knows, perhaps they already have. Maybe every day I’m silently accompanied by a hundred helpful spiders.
The other night I had a dream in which I was dealing with a villainous man who had two enormous killer dogs. I befriended the dogs and explained to them my situation, and also that they needed not to kill my dog, and they agreed to help me out and refrain from killing Boswell. Once the villain figured out that I’d won over his dogs, though, he began slowly poisoning them to death. When I woke up, my mother told me that there had been a coyote hanging around in the backyard.
Not a lot of animals give me the creeps, but coyotes are up there. I love all the folktales about trickster coyote, but I can only imagine that these were told about some more endearing and less repulsive earlier form of the animal.2 They’re the Uriah Heeps of the animal world; they always look like somebody’s kicked them but you know they’d be on you given half the chance. The sounds they make at night are blood-curdling. And of course if you own a small pet they’re a menace. Lots of people where I live let their cats wander around, which is probably very attractive to a coyote.
Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel, in the moment, as if the coyote had shown up in response to the dream. Behold, the enormous killer dog. The second thought, after wondering if my dream had summoned this coyote, was that most of the animals that wander through the backyard are at worst just annoying, and usually have more to fear from us (or the dogs) than we do from them. A coyote is another story. Boswell would probably try to fight a coyote and he would probably die, because nothing in Boswell’s life has prepared him for something like that. He wouldn’t know enough to be afraid. He would not intuit another set of rules. I’m not sure he even knows that other things can hurt him.
When I feel sorry for other animals I feel sorry about what they don’t understand. But it’s not as if I understand all that much, or as if I don’t spend some non-negligible part of every day howling a silent why why why why why. A coyote knows more than I do about life and death, and maybe it doesn’t ask why because it doesn’t have the energy for pointless questions. Perhaps coyotes just keep moving and killing and eating until they can’t anymore. Probably another reason I don’t like them.
Furthermore, in the case of spiders, usually they end up being dropped quite a distance.
Or maybe I only see coyotes with mange.
for me, at 76, every single word you wrote is something i spend time thinking and doing (Boswell = cats Tilly and Buddy). i even talk houseflies into flying back out an open, screenless window in my kitchen. Or wave them thru it like i'm playing a game.
time on my hands, joy and sadness. touching lives, as many as i encounter, no matter how 'small'(?)/different, grows more and more a blessing and an enlightenment.
(Sometimes I find a finch that bounced off that same window, or the french doors, and put the body safe from the cats, and sorta wait and watch. Some awake and fly away. I swear it.)