Bringing a Darkness Into the World – Patrick Lane’s Witness By Poem and Prose to the Hunting (and Haunting) Death of a Cougar in 1949

Cougar. Photo Credit: Sonoma County Parks

COUGAR

The cougar before she falls from her high limb
holds for one moment the Ponderosa pine, her back
arched, her tail so still the forest stops.
There are silences to learn,
each one an invocation: the one that follows
a father’s rage at a child, a woman’s rage at a man,
a child’s tears – you watch as if the sound
was a language you must learn. But a cougar’s falling?
Nothing is so quiet. Even the wind stops to listen.
Beetles, busy at death, lift up their jointed legs,
Whiskey-jacks slide quietly away, and ravens appear
as if they had been made from the air.
It is to watch a thing whose only gift is death
give to herself, feeling the explosion in her heart
a thing she has made and not the men below
and not the dogs as they watch her falling
through the limbs and then erupting into sound,
their hard mouths biting what is already dead.
It is the boy on the horse so old it will not run,
A boy who watches, not understanding the men
who, when she falls, shoot their rifles at the sun,
as if with such exultance
they could bring a darkness into the world.

Patrick Lane (March 26th, 1939 – March 7th, 2019) from The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane, Harbour Publishing, 2011

It is a little more than four years ago when I had to learn the silence of Patrick Lane’s death. Master poet, master teacher, beloved friend.

Canadian Poet Patrick lane. Photo Credit: Richard Osler, 2014

And after headlines last week that the body mass of the wild mammals on this marvel of an earth keep shrinking and are now at 10% of our human mass I keep thinking of Patrick’s grief at the so-often ignored deaths of the wild creatures of this world. And then I think of his trauma, at ten years old, at being witness to the death of a cougar in the back country of British Columbia – and the poem (above) that came in the 1990’s about that shocking incident and then later, in prose in his  convocation address at the University of Victoria almost ten years ago.

Cougar, such a Patrick poem. The vivid descriptions and then an abstract observation or comment. The sharp close-in focus and then the out-take to the wider, more universal observation:

The cougar before she falls from her high limb
holds for one moment the Ponderosa pine, her back
arched, her tail so still the forest stops.
There are silences to learn,
each one an invocation:

And then he gives more examples, shocking ones of these awful silences, another observation, then a question and then back to the specifics of the silence before the killing of the cougar. It is this masterfull blend of showing and telling that draws me so often back to Patrick’s poems. And the power of so many of the lines in his poems exemplified by the lasting power of these last lines from Cougar:

It is the boy on the horse so old it will not run,
A boy who watches, not understanding the men
who, when she falls, shoot their rifles at the sun,
as if with such exultance
they could bring a darkness into the world.

Patrick, a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer,  is likely beter known for his poems but his non-fiction is exemplary as well. You can see that here in this excerpt from his November 2013 convocation address:

It is sixty-five years ago, you’re ten years old and sitting on an old, half-blind, grey horse. All you have is a saddle blanket and a rope for reins as you watch a pack of dogs rage at the foot of a Ponderosa pine. High up on a branch a cougar lies supine, one paw lazily swatting at the air. He knows the dogs will tire. They will slink away and then the cougar will climb down and go on with its life in the Blue Bush country south of Kamloops. It is a hot summer day. There is the smell of pine needles and Oregon grape and dust. It seems to you that the sun carves the dust from the face of the broken rocks, carves and lifts it into the air where it mixes with the sun. Just beyond you are three men on horses.

The men have saddles and boots and rifles and their horses shy at the clamour of the dogs. The man with the Winchester rifle is the one who owns the dog pack and he is the one who has led you out of the valley, following the dogs through the hills to the big tree where the cougar is trapped. You watch as the man with the rifle climbs down from the saddle and sets his boots among the slippery pine needles. When the man is sure of his footing he lifts the rifle, takes aim, and then…and then you shrink inside a cowl of silence as the cougar falls.

As you watch, the men raise their rifles and shoot them at the sun. You will not understand their triumph, their exultance. Not then. You are too young. It will take years for you to understand. But one day you will step up to a podium in an auditorium at a University on an island far to the west and you will talk about what those men did. You know now they shot at the sun because they wanted to bring a darkness into the world. Knowing that has changed you forever.

Today I look back at their generation. Most of them are dead. They were born into the First Great War of the last century. Most of their fathers did not come home from the slaughter. Most of their mothers were left lost and lonely. Their youth was wasted through the years of the Great Depression when they wandered the country in search of work, a bed or blanket, a friendly hand, a woman’s touch, a child’s quick cry. And then came the Second World War and more were lost. Millions upon millions of men, women, and children died in that old world. But we sometimes forget that untold numbers of creatures died with them: the sparrow and the rabbit, the salmon and the whale, the beetle and the butterfly, the deer and the wolf. And trees died too, the fir and spruce, the cedar and hemlock. Whole forests were sacrificed to the wars.

Those men bequeathed to me a devastated world. When my generation came of age in the mid-century we were ready for change. And we tried to make it happen, but the ones who wanted change were few. In the end we did what the generations before us did. We began to eat the world. We devoured the oceans and we devoured the land. We drank the lakes and the seas and we ate the mountains and plains. We ate and ate until there was almost nothing left for you or for your children to come.

The cougar that died that day back in 1949 was a question spoken into my life and I have tried to answer that question with my teaching, my poems, and my stories. Ten years after they killed the cougar I came of age. I had no education beyond high school, but I had a deep desire to become an artist, a poet. The death of the cougar stayed with me through the years of my young manhood. Then, one moonlit night in 1963, I stepped out of my little trailer perched on the side of a mountain above the North Thompson River. Below me was the saw mill where I worked as a first-aid man. Down a short path a little creek purled through the trees just beyond my door. I went there under the moon and kneeling in the moss cupped water in my hands for a drink. As I looked up I saw a cougar leaning over his paws in the thin shadows. He was six feet away, drinking from the same pool. I stared at the cougar and found myself alive in the eyes of the great cat. The cougar those men had killed when I was a boy came back to me. It was then I swore I would spend my life bearing witness to the past and the years to come.

The loss of that Cougar is so massive. And I think of lines from the recent poem, A River,  by American poet Anne Haven McDonnell, a poet sister, I say, to Patrick when it comes to her grief at the losses of our natural world: “There is no single loss, I say…One loss is every loss.”

For me Patrick’s loss is no single loss. It is part of a larger one inside me. Along with the silence and inside that silence of his death, this ache.