ANIMAL OMENS
By Alison Moore, Writer in Residence
4/6/21
It all started with Writers Tears, an Irish whiskey distilled from the lamentations of poets and unpublished, promising novelists. We sat sipping in the Adirondack chairs on the patio as the sun slid further down. We were enjoying the clement weather, the extension of daylight, the garden growing before our very eyes. In spite of the Writers Tears, there was much laughter. A kind of communion without confession on the edge of the Ozark Plateau.
Then the eagles arrived. At first, only one flew where we could see it in that elevated airspace where raptors cruise the thermals. One eagle is a cause for celebration, a rare glimpse of that noble emblem of freedom, prominent on the seal and currency of this country, looming over my own passport picture. When the second eagle appeared it seemed we might be witnessing a pair heading for a treetop nest. Pastoral. Natural. Sexual. It was spring, after all. Then the third one zoomed into view and we had to wonder. Was it a crow? No matter. All three flew in hot pursuit of a squawking, slender heron, whose long legs trailed behind, providing a potential handle to be grabbed in flight and stolen from the sky. The heron banked northwest toward Clabber Creek, tucking its legs for a water landing. Meanwhile, the chickens milling around the coop went crazy.
Donna, David, Bruce and Carl rushed from the porch to a vantage point above the Clabber, but I didn’t follow. If the eagles were going to murder the heron, I didn’t want to see it happen; hearing was bad enough. I swallowed my Irish Tears and headed up the hill.
By all later reports, the heron survived. Maybe humans scared off the eagles, maybe the collective ruckus of the chickens gave them pause, but I doubt it. We had seen something that seemed improbable: three birds ganging up on another one. It didn’t seem fair, but then not much in nature is. For the record, the eagle has been close to extinction. Predators and prey take turns being one or the other. The heron had undoubtedly stabbed fish with its long beak for supper so was not entirely innocent in the grand scheme of things. The eagles may have felt some competition.
But what did it mean? What were we to make of it? Benjamin Franklin once said that a bald eagle was “a bird of bad moral character.” These days, maybe the Great Blue Heron would be more fitting on the new president’s hard-won podium.
The air had been stirred. The omens didn’t stop. Last night I woke in the wee hours to an unearthly banshee scream from the general direction of the pasture. Coming out of a dream, I didn’t know which side of the night the sound came from—my own human mind, or from an actual animal. Of course, I thought of the two new lambs, as yet unnamed. I couldn’t help but think of their anonymous predators: cougars, coyotes, a squadron of eagles, or some of each. I looked out the window to the field and couldn’t see the lambs, hoping like hell they were hiding in their half-moon house, beyond the reach of hunger.
Stella and Jacomo raced up the hill, barking their big white heads off, and Zulu brought up the rear, woofing in solidarity. The dogs danced on that fine line between named pets and the undifferentiated wild, starting out as protectors, crossing over to the realm of the feral. If they caught whatever it was, those canines would tear it apart.
The dogs kept barking, then coyotes joined in, yipping in that way that verges on collective hysteria, a Greek chorus tuning up. All of it echoed through this valley until the original predators crossed the creek and melted into the wilderness they came from, leaving me to wonder,
To live is to remember: everything is hungry. Ravenous. The bird of prey, the trickster coyote. The Great Blue heron. Wealthy dictators in third or even some first world countries. Something will be killed and eaten. Humans are the biggest predators of all. Here, on a sustainable farm, we try to take only our fair share; we tend to flora and fauna, harvest it in one way or another. We eat our fill and save what we can. But we are a tiny fraction of the whole.
Last night when I watched from the open window, peering into the moonless dark, looking for the lambs, I knew I was safe inside four walls with a roof over my head. If I had a predator, it was miniscule, like a virus, a cell gone awry, or some familiar, obsessive fear at 4 a.m. Whatever was still wild below the window didn’t have me in mind. And yet, everything is a link to something else in the long food chain of survival.
In the morning I looked for the lambs. There they were, unharmed, white as clouds on the sunlit field of green, killing nothing but grass. They survived the night. It goes without saying, there will be others.
What does it all mean?
No matter. It’s time to at least try to name them, whether or not they come when we call. We might be able to tell the difference between one and the other. If we’re lucky, they will know us, for a while.