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A young buck peered into our side door, his two points resembling sturdy sausages.
Shakti, shy kitty that she is, crouched low a few feet from his nose.
Our minds went to nature films from Africa.
“She’s getting ready to pounce on him and sink her teeth into his neck!”
This is our Door to Wildlife.
It’s where Pepe encountered his first wild animal.
He had just moved with us from Montreal. A stranger had begged us to adopt him.
A middling-big fellow with longish honey-brown fur and floppy ears, Pepe had apparently never gone outside during his first six months of life. When we took him for walks, he took care to “hold it in” until we got home and he could pee in the kitchen. Trees were scary. Stumps, even more so. When he met his first one, he yelped and jumped high in the air like Bugs Bunny’s first cousin. Every scrap of paper, every pebble, was an existential threat.
Pepe was in constant motion. So, when friends visited, we put the gyrating, yapping dog out the side door. We counted on his agoraphobia to keep him close.
A moment later, the yelping took on an unprecedented intensity. We looked out the door and almost leapt out of our skins. Nearby, on the lowest branch of the old oak tree, was an adolescent bear, three times bigger than Pepe. Bear clung to the branch as Dog bounced up and down, inches below, excited to meet a long-lost friend.
How his mind worked still mystifies me: A tree stump or a scrap of paper scared him silly, but he saw a bear as a playmate?
Sometimes I feel like Pepe, like I’m on a strange planet where danger can take any innocuous shape. A playmate, a thing of joy, or an object of ridicule, can in fact be life-threatening, and I won’t even realize it.
I’m not alone, I think. So many threats surround us. So many voices tell us, so incessantly, what to fear. Often, they warn us against phantoms. How to discern real dangers from fake news?
How to see clearly what to do about raging wars-upon-wars? Can we even dream of solving climate change? Can we save ourselves from pollution? How to fix the economy gone haywire? Can we rescue the health-care system? How to depose the oligarchies of the world?
It’s unnerving, so we find relief by focusing on something like Bigfoot, contrails, or vaccines.
Pepe got himself hit by a car. Did he have one moment of clarity as he died? I wonder. He had such a short, strange life.
Shakti, on the other hand, wisely came back inside, and the young buck lived another day.
