The skunk, the wolf

I am out early this morning, before sunrise. Frost on the grass. Something to my left: quickly, a blur, movement, a plume going around the fence into my neighbor’s yard. Then, the scent: the skunk has been nosing among my stick pile over on the side of the house.

Our two yards connect; a fence between, but with an opening so the grass cutters can make a clean swath of their work. A fence at the back has perennials along it; some still standing, their brown stalks white this morning with the dew, frozen. We are just at the equinox.

The skunk is trapped by the fence in that yard, and she probably knows it for she has been here before. I have noticed her scent other mornings.

My neighbor’s fence forms a boundary around her yard; the only way out, without unlocking a gate, is back through here again.

I decide to wait, to see, but to go inside to give her peace.

I am sipping my coffee, watching.

It isn’t long. Movement along the back, behind the spent chrysanthemum bushes. There she is, low to the ground, moving fast. Now she is behind the peony stems, a long small black mammal but with oh! such a beautiful wide white stripe, her body’s shining crown, directing the eye along the bright topcoat to the plume long and black and silver and white: the peacock of the small mammal world, her train trailing behind her like a young queen.

It happens so quickly that I have hardly registered her before she is at the edge of the yard, around the fence, and gone. I want to see her in full, but it will never happen. It is a miracle that, where I live, I have seen her at all. But everywhere there is less cover, less “habitat.” If she is to survive she must forage among the land the humans have overtaken.

Young female skunks are out at this time of day and year. It is not yet spring, but almost. If she had a woodlands, I’d not see her at all.

A memory: I stand within a little copse of small trees, shrubs really, looking out into a clearing in the distance. In the sunlight of late afternoon stands a wolf. I believe it is a wolf.

In the Olympic National Forest years ago I saw her. It was not yet sunset, and she was off in a little clearing. The sun was lighting up her fur from behind. I could not see her face clearly nor her eyes, but she was facing my direction. I am sure she knew I was there.

In the hazy sunlight of memory, our eyes meet, and we remain like that for a time. I know I should be afraid, but am not.

I wish I could say it was a numinous moment for me, that time stood still; that some understanding passed between us; that I felt her consciousness. But none of this happened. The little I can remember feels plebeian, worthless, as though there was no message. The fact that still my memory can create the scene — that I can see the motes of pollen dusting the air in the distance between us; that it is green green and there is moss; that her fur has points of light in it: this is enough. It is a picture I can take out of memory and look at when I need to, and that is enough. Lately I have taken the picture out more often.

Later, when someone I tell puts the idea in my head, I find myself wondering if what I’d seen was a wolf. But it doesn’t matter in the end. I have the memory, and something happened. That is all.

In the Coast Salish language, the word for wolf is “stakaya,” says a page I find on the internet. Don’t know whether to trust it or not. Perhaps words do not matter.

I have seen wolves, certified as wolves, in zoos. It’s a pretty tired trope by now that animals in zoos don’t “look wild.” Yet it seems true, too. It’s sad they’ve been taken away from where they should be, and would be if it weren’t for us. As I write this it all feels so trite. But it still seems true.

What must it have been like for a child to be raised by wolves? I’m so curious! There are stories, and I try to follow them to their sources, but come up with nothing much that feels like it might be accurate. “Accurate” is a useful word, but it doesn’t help here. The stories give information mostly about the people writing them. The child when rescued was “feral”: damaged, hardly human, turned into an animal, needing to be kept institutionalized. Or the child was happy, loved the wolves who loved her back, knowing many things that only wolves could have taught her, living a wonderful life. It is the narrator’s projections I get; that is all.

I do not know, we do not know, we can not know. Did such things happen? Seems true. What was it like for the child? What was it like for the wolves? I find myself wondering about this more than I should.

Anthropologist Natassja Martin recounts her mauling in Siberia by a bear which she has turned into myth, and a book, In the Eye of the Wild, about medka, a concept meaning one “who lives between the worlds,” the Indigenous term for being bonded with an animal, their spirit and the sapiens’ fused in some way, implying obligation. At least that’s what I take from reading.

When somewhere else on the internet I run across a photo of a Siberian wolf, captioned, staring into the camera — an arresting photo, the taiga burning in the background — the first thing I wonder is whether it is fake. No one would be able to get that close to a wolf during the vast burning that summer! But, then: maybe it was possible, for a skilled photographer with a very long lens. Who am I to say it’s impossible? I quit wondering, because I think the photo says something true, and for me now that is enough. I believe what I want to believe. And the truth is that the taiga is continually burning now, some place or another.

Where it remains.