Order Carnivora

Note: I still want to edit this one so that it feels more like a poem and less like a lesson. Hmmm. Unsure how to do this

Order Carnivora. Caro, flesh, +
vorare, to devour. From the
house cat to the walrus
to the grizzly—ursus horribilis—
“once found through the lower 48,
now confined to wilderness
areas.” I am glad I will
not run into one, yet still
feel bad we permanently attached
“horribilis” to their names
(and of course also hunted them
nearly to extinction.)

I had a teacher once
who liked to go to northern Canada
and hide in a wooden shelter and
watch the grizzlies eat and
poop and walk around and
sometimes charge at each other.

It always seemed like courting
disaster to me—but I admired
his pursuit of nature in the
raw, not sliced into islands
of habitat, or scrambled
by repatriation programs that
required airlifting huge,
stunned mammals to some
godforsaken place in North
Dakota where they would
be continually watched and
encouraged to have sex,
not for pleasure, just to
reproduce the species.

And even though Jim experienced
nature in the raw, most bears
don’t. Most are stuck in a
3,500 square mile museum
where people can go
and ogle them from the road,
where they get shot if they cross
the imaginary lines
we’ve drawn. Their park
is part refuge and part cage.

In the Absarokas, though,
you are on their turf.
Greg told us:
Walk loudly,
stay in the light of day,
sing when you’re going into
dark stands of whitebark pine.
Pay attention in scree fields,
that’s where they come
to turn over the flat stones
and lick up moths by the thousands.
If you’re walking down a trail
And you smell a fresh kill,
just turn around.

I weigh my caution
my soft body
my first time thinking
like prey
against the tyranny
of roads and ranches.
In the currency
of species survival,
What is one sheep gone?
One cow?

We’ve been taught: human life
is the most sacred thing there is.
The lives we guard with barbed-wire
fences, second only to our own.
We have to protect them from
the bears of our childhood nightmares,
with weapons if need be.

But the thing is: in the wilderness,
you don’t carry guns.
We make our own rules in our domain:
our houses, ranches, towns.

In the wilderness I learned
to tread lightly on the earth,
knowing we are light and fragile things—
beings made of air
compared to grizzlies’ bulk,
their momentum,
the 1800 pounds of pressure
per square inch
held between their jaws.

Hannibal and the Elephants

Loxodonta africana
are more difficult to tame
than their Asian cousins,
but the ancient Carthiginians
and Romans did it, and used them
in their armies.

Ploughed over the Alps, white
as salt, to arrive in the morning light
to the city’s disbelieving occupants.

The giants stood in silence,
ears flapping like leaves,
feet planted on familiar city streets.
The people of the city
had never seen them before
and for the first moments
could not breathe. Snatches
of description had reached them—
beasts with teeth embedded
in their heads—the listeners
imagined a grisly mosaic
of canines and molars studding
the animals’ faces. “Long flexible noses”
conjured up a sort of Pinnochio.
At “the size of a house
and feet big as dinner plates”
they just laughed and dismissed
the rumors as fancy.

So nothing could have prepared
them for that moment when
the unimaginable materialized,
corporeal, before them.

They should have been afraid
but their bodies were filled
brimful with wonder. In the stillness
the peoples’ knocking hearts
were not betrayed by trembling hands
or knees. The only thing that shook
was the elephants’ ears in the breeze.

The silence stretched
in the yellow light.
Finally a man here or there
realized that the moment
had become elastic,
infinitely long. And began
to breathe again.

It was then that the elephants charged.
Beautifully curling trunks
slapped around columns,
grasping, ripping them down.
Majestic heads swung
side to side, parting the sea of people
with two white swords.
And the screaming. Through dust clouds
raised by feet falling as falling trees.
Trumpeting—what a word—
fanfare, bugles and brass,
maybe even drums.
The people keening.