The Abundance. Annie Dillard
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tasted good.
From time to time, one or another of us would look beyond our shaded roof to the sunny spot where the deer was still convulsing in the dust. Finally, our meal completed, we walked around the deer and back to the boats.
That night I learned that while all of us had been watching the deer, the others were also watching me.
We four North Americans had grown close in the jungle in a way that was not the usual artificial intimacy of travelers. We liked one another. We stayed up all that night talking, murmuring, as though we rocked on hammocks slung above time. The others—from big cities: New York, Washington, Boston—remarked now on the lack of expression on my face earlier, as I watched the deer, or the lack, at any rate, of any expression they expected. They had looked to see how I, the youngest of us and the only woman, was taking the sight of the deer’s struggles. I looked detached, I don’t know. I was thinking. I remember feeling very old and energetic.
I might have said that, like Thoreau, I have traveled widely in Roanoke, Virginia. I eat meat. These things are not issues. They are mysteries.
Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you? That there is suffering here, or that I know it?
We lay in the tent and talked. “If it had been my wife,” one man said with special vigor, amazed, “she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”
I nodded.
Now I am home. When I wake I comb my hair before the mirror above my dresser. Every morning for the past two years I see in that mirror, beside my sleep-softened face, the blackened face of a burnt man. It is a wire-service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror. The caption reads: “Alan McDonald in Miami hospital bed.” All you can see in the photograph is a smudged triangle of face from his eyelids to his lower lip; the rest is bandages. You cannot see the expression in his eyes; the bandages shade them.
The story, headed “Man Burned for Second Time,” begins:
“Why does God hate me?” Alan McDonald asked from his hospital bed.
“When the gunpowder went off, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘No, God couldn’t do this to me again.’ ”
He was in a burn ward in Miami, in serious condition. I do not even know if he lived. I wrote him a letter at the time, cringing.
He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by how life could veer.
Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them such pain.
This time a bowl of gunpowder had exploded on McDonald. “I didn’t realize what had happened at first,” he recounted. “And then I heard that sound from 13 years ago. I was burning. I rolled to put the fire out and I thought, ‘Oh God, not again.’
“If my friend hadn’t been there, I would have jumped into a canal with a rock around my neck.”
His wife concludes the piece, “Man, it just isn’t fair.”
I read the whole clipping again every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity, to the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on? And copy me on it.
When we walked by the deer at Providencia for the last time, I said to Pepe, with a glance at the deer, “Pobrecito”—“poor little thing.” But I was trying out Spanish. I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.
THE WEASEL
A WEASEL IS WILD. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton—once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. Examining the eagle, he found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to the bird’s throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: Was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his neck to clean the airborne bones?
I have been thinking about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Near my house in Virginia is a pond—Hollins Pond. It covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. There is a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods—fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks—in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
One evening last week at sunset, I walked to the pond and sat on a downed log near the shore. I was watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow warbler appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I had never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur spreading down his underside. He had two black eyes I could not see, any more than you see a window.
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rosebush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness, twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was a bright blow to the brain, a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled