April 15, 2009
People in my neighborhood on Elk Ridge above Briceland get very fond of their animals. Not just their dogs and cats and chickens and goats, but also their bears, foxes, mountain lions, owls, squirrels, ravens, and even sometimes raccoons. Some of them we aren't so fond of, but we keep track of them and wonder how they're doing, even so.
A couple of months after we first moved here full time, fourteen years ago, I walked into the living room and saw a huge fat diamond-striped snake curled up on the hearth with its tail in the air. First I froze. I was home alone, the neighbors I knew were a mile away, and besides I'd feel like a fool calling someone up for help and admitting I hadn't a clue. My husband, Herb, was on the road to Eureka, but I left him a cell phone message just in case.
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Nope, smooth tail, I was pretty sure of that. But maybe it was a juvenile rattler, the rattles formed year after year didn't they? And now that I'd been watching it for several centuries or at least ten minutes, it had shrunk from its initial size of six feet long and four inches in diameter to a more ordinary length of about two and a half feet. Just the right size for a juvenile rattler. Next thing to obsess about was how old a rattlesnake had to be to have effective venom.
There was a great clatter from the mudroom, and in charged Herb to the rescue, pitchfork in hand. We stood side by side on the living room stairs, watching the sleeping snake, discussing the merits of king snakes vs juvenile rattlesnakes. To chop off its head with the shovel would be messy, and brutal if we didn't get it on the first try. Pinning it down between the tines of a backwards pitchfork seemed iffy, it would probably wriggle out. And then what? We turned to each other in frustration, and suddenly saw ourselves clearly. True American Gothic, grimly clutching our pitchfork and shovel at our sides, defending our home.
When we finished laughing, we considered letting the snake make its own way out, the same way it came in. That method had worked well with the bat and the raccoon. (Before we added the heavy-duty sliding wood door, our neighbor Bill had warned us that a "cat door" in this neighborhood is spelled "raccoon door".) How did the snake get in, we wondered. One of the cats must have dragged it in through the cat door. All three were happily preening, so we were confident now that the snake wasn't poisonous.
After due deliberation, Herb got a plastic bucket to put over the sleepy snake, and I pushed a big scrap of plywood underneath as a lid. Herb carried the contraption across the road and liberated the snake in the canyon with our compliments. We did wish the snake had brought a camera though, to capture our American Gothic moment.
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Which is nothing compared to Liz and Charlie's ravens, up the road about a mile. They have a pair named Sally and Mortimer. Mortimer has a gap in his wing feathers, that's how I figured out we weren't sharing a pair. It's flat meadow for a ways around their house, since they're at the top of the ridge, so they can watch the ravens out the kitchen window chowing down on the dinner scraps left for them on the fence. Liz takes the scraps out in the morning while the birds are watching, and talks to them, so they know which side their--chicken bones?--are buttered on. They circle around watching while she puts up the scraps, wait politely until she goes inside, and then swoop down to the fence to eat.
Three days in a row while Sally and Mortimer were waiting for their breakfast, circling watchfully, the deer got into the garden. They love to test small gaps in a thirty-year-old fence, wouldn't you? Liz went through the deer removal ritual each time, calmly walking them out the gate, making no sudden moves so they don't panic and tangle themselves in the fence. This apparently made a big impression on her raven friends.
On the fourth day Liz was alerted to the presence of the deer by the screams of the ravens. She ran out and saw Sally and Mortimer methodically dive-bombing the deer, screaming like banshees, herding them out of the garden! After Liz quietly walked the deer the rest of the way out the gate, Liz and Charlie patched all the holes. On the fifth day they rested. This gave time for speculation, with plenty of nosy-parkering by the neighbors about the event. Guard ravens, trained by watching Liz? Was this an act of protecting their food source, an act of solidarity with or mimicry of their human friend, or what? Ravens are very smart birds.
When I express my envy of Liz's trained ravens, she dismisses it, saying yeah they have lots of birds, but we get more megafauna because we aren't out in the open, we're in the trees. I don't think megafauna are much fun in the form of mountain lions, since one sent our beloved cat Maya up the food chain. True, I do look forward each year to discovering where "our" bear will dent the fence this time on his way to the plum tree. He never goes over the fence in the same place twice. A very polite sort of bear, he doesn't bother anything else. After scarfing down all the plums on the ground he sometimes climbs the tree for more, without breaking any branches so far. He usually leaves us plenty of bear scat as a token of his thanks.
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Our kids who live in the city think we are pretty quaint with our animal stories, but that's what people do when they don't have a TV: get attached to their animal neighbors and talk about it endlessly. Get Bill to tell you about that mountain lion down at their place that Skipper kept treed all night.
Karen Lawson chipped in on the purchase of 320 acres on Elk Ridge in Southern Humboldt with 16 friends in 1968. She and her husband, Herb Schwartz, moved up from Berkeley full time in 1995 after the kids were "packed and shipped" to adulthood. They bought 45 acres next to their group-owned land, and live happily off-grid with three cats and a dog (and the odd visiting raccoon, bear, or king snake.) Karen retired from 37 years as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in 2004, and presently enjoys gardening, dancing, writing deep ecology suspense fiction, teaching dowsing, and serving on the Trees Foundation Board of Directors.
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2009