Note: this was posted last September, when we were on the verge of going to France to visit the Dordorgne Valley and Vézère Valley (the Vézère River is a tributary of the Dordogne).
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This morning, at the beginning of my swim, a little silver trout jumped out of the water just beyond where I was heading, the curve of its body an opening parenthesis to my thinking. I was thinking about last evening, going out to the deck to bring in my towel and bathing suit. I looked down to the grass between our house and the woods and a huge bull elk was looking back. He hadn’t yet lost the velvet on his antlers. The sun had set but the sky was filled with pinky-gold light and he was glowing. He still had his summer coat, golden brown, and as he turned, wondering at the best course of action, it was like a moment out of a painting I’ve always loved, Pisanello’s Vision of St. Eustace.
It’s in the National Gallery in London and when I was in my early 20s, working in Wimbledon, I used to go the museum on its free day (they’re all free days now) to look at it and a few other favourites. Going from room to room was overwhelming but I’d visit the Vision and add several others each time. I was drawn to the dogs, their expressions as they gazed upon the stag carrying a crucifix within its antlers. Not the last time we were in London but the time before, I went to the National Gallery to see if the painting still had its magic for me and oh yes, it did. Sometimes encounters, however distanced in time or space, even from a second-storey deck to the mossy grass below, feel potent. They feel deeply meaningful.
What it did it mean, to see the bull elk looking up at me? I don’t know. Yet. I called to him to go away (I suspect he might have been sniffing out the grape vines growing against the house and I know from experience* that elk can do a lot of damage) and he turned into the woods. I realized then that his harem was just beyond. They crashed away, a lot of them. (A harem is typically around 20 or so cows.)
Within the parentheses of my thinking this morning, the elk, the kingfishers I didn’t see today, the return of the chickadees who nested elsewhere this year but were splashing in the birdbath yesterday as we ate lunch on the deck with friends enroute from Savary Island to Gibsons, the nuthatches waiting in the mountain ash for their turn in the water, the tiny tree frogs, newly hatched and hopping out of the tubs of salad greens, the pots of mint by the greenhouse door, the ferns below the front porch. The elk remind me of walking into Natural History Museum in Dublin decades ago to stand among the skeletons of Megaloceros giganteus, the giant Irish elk (though not actually an elk but most closely related to fallow deer), their huge palmate antlers 11 feet across. It was a moment to feel both small and outside of history. The animals begin to appear in the fossil record 400,000 years ago and the most recent appearance is 8000 years ago. They are beyond us, beyond time, and yet they still exist–as skeletons, as paintings on the walls of caves in France and Spain. In a month, we’ll be France to visit them there. (I’ve wanted to do this since I was 20 and wrote a poem, published in my first poetry collection, about the caves of the Dordogne Valley. When I lamented to John that I would probably never see them, he went upstairs and booked a flight.)
In 2008, in late September, I was drinking coffee on the upper deck, the same one I stood on last night to confront the bull elk below, when I heard the strangest sounds coming from the woods just beyond, the same woods the elk crashed into last evening. Grunting, yes, and a sound like a shrill bugle. And I could hear more, not an echo, but the same sounds a little further away. There was crashing. I called my dad in Victoria (he’d hunted all his life and knew a lot about wildlife) and said, Dad, I’m hearing sounds in the woods and I wonder what they are? I held the phone, an old cordless phone, up to the air. He listened, and then he chuckled. It’s 2 bull elk, he said. They’re rutting and challenging each other for the cows. I remember there was such urgency to the sound. A year later my father died and there are many things I regret but calling him and letting him hear the bulls in my woods is not one of them. He talked about it in the months to come, as he grew weaker, and went into hospital, and never came home.
Sometime in the middle of the 15th century, Pisanello painted a stag with a crucifix held aloft in its antlers. St. Eustace looks in amazement, as do his dogs, though one hound chases a rabbit. The woods are tipped up and when you look closely, you see birds in flight or nesting in dark trees, you see a bear, two more stags, heavy with antlers, and tiny flowers on the forest floor. Sometime around 17,000 years ago, someone, maybe many people, painted animals–horses, giant elk, bears, wildcats–on a cave wall in Lascaux and even though we won’t be able to see the originals of those (though we will visit other caves where we will), I look forward to meeting them with the same astonishment as I met Pisanello’s stag and the elk on the grass below my house last night, the velvet on his antlers golden in the dusk.
This morning, one trout jumped at the beginning of my swim, and another jumped to close my thinking with its silver parenthesis as I finished. On the surface of the water, a maple leaf, some delicate feathers, tiny flies, the first sunlight on the islands beyond.
*elk don’t delicately nibble leaves or browse on clover; they tear trees apart–our old orchard a case in point–and they’ve dragged vines from the side of our house in the past.
...Theresa Kishkan 