Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

Sal did not hear or heed. Going straight ahead, the color of ivory, distant in the clear, dry light, she stepped into the shadow of the trees. The others and their riders followed, jogging one after the other till the last was gone.

Norah had stopped in the middle of the meadow, and stood in grass in sunlight Flies hummed.

She tossed her head, turned, and trotted back to the line. She went along it from one to the next, teasing, chivying, Kimmy yelling at her to get back in line, till Sue broke out of line to chase her and she ran, and then Ev began to run, whinnying shrill, and then Cass, and Philly, and all the rest, the whole bunch, cantering first and then running flat out, running wild, racing, heading for Horse Camp and the Long Pasture, for Meredy and the long evening standing in the fenced field, in the sweet dry grass, in the fetlock-shallow water of the home creek

(1986)

Four Cat Poems

/ have a dream farm which I visit at need, to go around stocking the bams, yards, and pastures. The first livestock I bring in is usually a Jersey cow and three or four sheep-Jacobs, maybe. A donkey or two. A couple of riding horses -- now the farm enlarges and grows woods, hills, long trails... And, if only somebody wanted to work them, you can't just have them standing around, but oh, a pair of Shires! to see forged

for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

Sometimes a llama. Several llamas. Rabbits. Or a whole acre, fenced carefully, of guinea pigs.

Dogs, of course. Yard dogs. Large dogs. Nothing small that yaps. Large, lean, lazy deerhounds. Have to pull ticks off long soft ears while hound looks mournful. A standard poodle, most kind and courteous being. A big red chow dog Tao dog But listen, you dogs, if you don't treat the cats right, you're out. Understand?

All cats are balloons. All cats are petunias. All cats are mangold-wurzels. All cats are yin enough. All cats guide me.

M

tfj&fjiBm

151

Tabby Lorenzo

The small cat smells of bitter rue and autumn night His ears are scarred.

His dark footpads are like hard flowers.

On my knee he rests entirely trusting and entirely strange, a messenger to all indoors from the gardens of danger.

Black Leonard in Negative Space

All that surrounds the cat is not the cat, is all that is not the cat, is all, is everything, except the animal. It will rejoin without a seam

when he is dead. To know that no-space is to know what he does not, that time is space for love and pain. He does not need to know it

(1984)

Four Cat Poems \-153 A Conversation with a Silence What kept you out so late my love?

I was running, I was running in the dark.

Dawn and raining when you came home.

The trees are clouds and roads to me. I run the sweet dirt-darkness in the rain and up where leafy chirping sleep-warmths nestle their blood for me. I meet my enemies below: the White One, the Singer.

What does your brother watch from the window?

Ghosts in the other garden.

I don't see ghosts. I go farther

along the cloud-roads

to kill where darkness branches in the rain.

(1986)

(1978)

154 ABUFFALO GALS

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson A black and white cat

on May grass waves his tail, suns his beHy among wallflowers.

I am reading a Chinese poet

called The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases.

The cat is aware of the writing of swallows on the white sky.

We are both old and doing what pleases us in the garden. Now I am writing

and the cat

is sleeping.

Whose poem is this?

IX

(1982)

"SchrOdinger's Cat" and "The Author of the Acacia Seeds"

"SchrOdinger's Cat" isn't exactly an animal story, except in this respect: The cat, which for Erwin Schro'dinger was a parable-cat, a figment-cat, the amusing embodiment of a daring hypothesis, enters the story as an actual, biagraphico-historical cat (his name was Laurel, and his visit during the writing of the story is described exactly as [during the time that] it occurred), and so changes the thought-experiment, and its results, profoundly. So it is a story about animal presence -- and absence.

So the real presence of an animal in a laboratory -- that is, an animal perceived by the experimenting scientist not as an object, nor as a subject in the sense of the word 'subject of the experi-menf (as in Nazi experiments in pain on human 'subjects'), but as a subject in the philosophical/grammatical sense of a sentient existence of the same order as the scientist's existence -- so such presence and perception in a laboratory where experiments are performed upon animals would profoundly change the nature, and probably the results, of the experiments.

'The Author of the Acacia Seeds" records the entirely fictional results of such 'subjectivism' carried rather farther than seems probable. It grew in part out of the arguments over the experiments in language acquisition by great apes (in which, of course, if the ape is not approached as a grammatical subject, failure of the experiment is guaranteed). Some linguists deny the capacity of apes to talk in quite the same spirit in which their intellectual forebears denied the capacity of women to think If these great men are threatened by Koko the gorilla speaking a little ASL, how would they feel reading a lab report written by the rat?

157

158 JT BUFFALO GALS Schrddingsr's

159

Schrcxiinger's Cat

AS THINGS APPEAR TO BE COMING TO SOME sort of climax I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast

On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite

hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together, and by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, "Well what's wrong with a person trying to express themselves?" The left leg, the arms, and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy. "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. "My wife has great legs."

A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow torn with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers about their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he has gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.

Where?

Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing but almost anything is worth telling In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam's Disease. It is incurable except by total decapitation. I even like to dream when

asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just lying there. Now here I am, lying here. Hard at it

Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and cheeping like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves: rather like fine chicken- wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled.

So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving This grief is with me still. I fear it is part of me, like foot or loin or eye, or may even be myself: for I seem to have no other self, nothing further, nothing that lies outside the borders of grief.

Yet I don't know what I grieve for my wife? my husband? my children, or myself? I can't remember. Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note and the harmonic rings along the mandolin-strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes. Some note keeps playing that makes me want to cry; but what for? I am not certain.