The Judgment of the Birds

[W4TVQ]

Of late I have been immersed in the writings of the late Loren Eiseley, works of rare beauty and sensitivity, written by an anthropologist/paleontologist. This is a passage from his best book, The Immense Journey, which particularly touched me, one I felt I had to share with you so you could rejoice in it with me. It takes place as he awakens in a forest glade, to see above him a huge raven with a squirming nestling grasped in its beak.

Quote:

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

No one dared attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as if to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and the another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.

[Speculum]

Nice story! One year, a flock of five or six ravens frequented our yard. They would fly close overhead, sometimes seeming to talk to us, once even laughing at us. Here's a painting inspired by their visits.

Your quotation is reminiscent of the following two events from our life –

One day, shortly after we had settled into the home we built in Maine, and while we were still learning to settle into the new life we were building here, we visited a neighbor, himself a several-generation Mainer, where we noticed, and commented on, the absence of a small, few-months-old puppy that we had seen at their house during previous visits. The fellow told us that the dog had never been in good health, and that it had recently turned increasingly sickly, and that it had become necessary to put it down. So, earlier that day, he and the dog walked together into the woods behind the house, where the fellow shot the dog, a single bullet to the back of the head.

We were appalled. “How could you do that!” "How inhumane!" "That's terrible!" Etc. Gently, the fellow explained to us that the dog was too sick to live, and so the question was, Where and how was it going to die. And walking the dog out into familiar woods with someone it knew and had grown to love, and quickly killing it there, was far more humane than putting the dog in a car, driving it thirty miles to a veterinary hospital that it had never been to before, and where all the attention it would receive, including the administration of the fatal injection, would be impersonally performed by people who did know the dog and whom the dog did not know.

Further, he reminded us that death is as much a resident of the Maine woods as each of us and all the animals and plants that live here, and that the sooner we learned that, the more comfortable we would be. And he was right.

A second incident involved our chickens. One day, a fox grabbed one of our hens, and took it into the woods, there presumably to devour it. Our dog, having witnessed the event, took off after the fox. Some while later, the hen reappeared on our lawn, with several ugly teeth marks on her back amid a missing handful of feathers. For a few minutes, she pecked and scratched for bugs in the lawn, and then, calm as you please, she wandered into the hen house, where she laid an egg, just as she did every day.

Watching her, we wondered how we would react after having barely survived a terrifying life-threatening incident. Surely, we thought, we would be fussing for days, weeks, longer. We might never fully recover. And yet, this hen simply walked on. My guess is that when the fox nabbed her, she behaved in a manner appropriate to that circumstance, and when the dog convinced the fox to release her, she behaved in a manner appropriate to that circumstance.

We have learned a lot from our neighbors -- two legged, four-legged, and winged.

[phyllis]

Thank you both for sharing those stories. Violence in nature and in the streets where I live remains difficult for me to integrate. I know what the gurus and teachers say about that, and in my soul, I know that they are correct. When I am safe inside my own piece of the planet, then I can visualize the rightness of it all; but when I am out, and exposed to it, the pieces come apart. There is a place on Zoo Fence where you talk about the impossibility of keeping evil locked up, and that we have to face it and come to terms with it. I am that way about violence.

[Ihavesayso]

"the dog was to sick to live..."

While we may be saddened when we end the life of a pet to "put it out of its misery," or even that of an animal we slaughter to feed ourselves, we allow fellow humans to linger for years in conditions of abject despair, from which there is no seemingly, hope of recovery. Stefan's neighbor made the decision that his dog was, "...to sick to live," so he killed it. Was his motive truly his love for his dog so great, that he terminated its life, rather than see it suffer, or was he just tired of caring for it?

Only his neighbor could answer that question for us. If that neighbor were me, and I had made that decision for my sick dog, I would intensely dislike having that question asked of me! If we keep humans alive on the slim chance that a "cure" will be found, that will restore their health, if we truly love our pet, would we not care for it, until it expires naturally, in the hope that a cure will eventually do the same for it, instead of ending all chance of that ever happening by executing it?

Discussing this topic with a friend, he said, "The most miserable life is better than the best death!" Is it? If I believed that the physical experience is all there is, I would have to answer, "Yes;" however, knowing that my present condition, is just a parentheses in eternity, my response is a decisive, "No,!" as I can think of many possible states where I'd rather be dead, than have my body experiencing them!