The Sacred Beasts (10 page)

II

The Beginning

The Sacred Beasts

WE ARE LYING on our backs, stretched full-length like children, on
the banks of Lake Santa Olalla, directly below a flock of herons that is
landing on the water. At once, hundreds of birds block out the sun and
completely fill the sky with their finely sculpted bodies and primeval cries.
We see nothing but immense dark wingspans and astonishingly slender and
delicate aerodynamic breasts and torsos, incandescent diamond-white, all
swaying in contact with one another as though engaged in the subtlest dance,
the perfect shape for worldwide migratory flights. By flying as high as
airplanes and floating on thermal air currents, these huge birds can circle the
earth in eight days, and this flock has probably just arrived from Scandinavia.

Many years ago, Katia and I conjectured their mental state as
something both sharp and continuous like Tibetan mindfulness, though I may be
the only zoologist inclined to imagine their sentience. It is very natural to
do so, however, and Sylvie groans in awe and follows in this direction almost
immediately. After the great altercation and the herons are in the water, she
says, “I have never seen them from below in a flock . . . I have never seen
anything like it.” She whispers as though we were before a sacred altar and a
goddess might look at us askance. “They must fly over the earth like that, the
wind lifting their wings . . . Do they feel . . . some wonderful . . . powerful
. . .”

“Does the heron feel the beauty of its flight over the earth?”

“Yes. It was breathtaking.”

“The question may be too beautiful for an answer.” It is the
eternal question nagging the quantitative. The god’s eye view is inherently
that of flight, a floating caress of the earth by an eye. We would, in all our
restlessness, our quick frustrations and resentments, lose all sense of the
flight’s beauty, were we the bird. But what of this perfectly shaped dancer of
the air, wings dexterous and sensitive beyond our marble angels: does it forget
the earth so easily? Something invisible passes over me, a sense somehow beyond
my thought, perhaps the secret I am always seeking. I see the bird gliding over
these tranquil waters, its reflection a phantom doubling its size and agility,
the flock now endless white water lilies descending from the sky, and the sun’s
ray breaks through, falls in a shaft of sunlight all the way to the lake
bottom; the bird’s eye gleams with it and it sees an undulant, swaying world of
blue-green-gold. Does it feel the beauty of its flight then? I cannot doubt it.

I turn to look at Sylvie and am doubly struck by beauty. She
watches me in wonder for what we have seen together and looks like a woman
about to make love. This would have flustered me years ago when I discovered
her, but I am now old enough to be a child of the universe, profoundly at play.
With her dark hair, now very long and her colorful, deep-necked tunics, the
exoticism of her face is striking. Her beauty has only grown in the time I’ve
known her. There is a wildness to it, yet it continually startles, glistens. In
every landscape, she is the most beautiful presence, though I do not tell her
so.

“My god, is this what you do with your life?”

“Oh yes,” I say. “This is exactly what we are here for.”

Sylvie has just graduated from the Sorbonne, and I have accepted
her invitation to spend several months traveling together in Spain. We have
repudiated our cell phones for the entire summer, and they are locked in the
glove compartment of my jeep, to be used only in an emergency. I planted my
sensors, cameras, and other equipment all over Doñana, Spain’s historic
wildlife preserve, a month ago; then we spent the month camping down the Costa
Brava. Now we have returned for my data, which will take a week or so for me to
gather. After this, we will go on to Madrid and Barcelona. It is spring, the
nights still tingling. Full of youthful idealism, Sylvie says that she will
draw and paint Spain, then the world, perhaps the universe. Nearly every moment
when we are awake, she is drawing either in color with chalk or with
charcoal—animals, flowers, trees, landscapes, often me. In her drawings, I may
look like a young girl, then a man, then a distinguished old bear. I may well
be all of these things, and her portraiture is as perceptive as it is
unpredictable. She amazes me and I apparently amaze her, so we are the best of
travel mates.

My own pendulum has swung to science again, and I have received
permission from the Spanish government to study the effects of climate change
on Doñana’s wildlife and flora. In the 1970s, I carried out zoological studies
in Doñana with Katia. The effects of global warming and climate change here are
devastating. We have only been here for a few days, but I already know that
bird clutches are smaller here than those in other parts of Spain. This
preserve is no longer preserving its wildlife. The flock of herons we have just
seen is an order of magnitude smaller than the ones I saw in the 1970s.

Doñana is now a chaotic, shifting region either flooded or parched
by drought, and we entered in a jeep. This alone is radical change. In the
1970s, people could live year-round in Doñana with no more than a canoe to
sleep in and a horse to pull it over perpetual wetlands. We are camping beside
the lakes and marshes while I gather my data. I will study the animal life in
scrublands, marshes, lakes and dunes all the way to the Guadalquivir River
before we leave, and Sylvie will draw whatever inspires her.

Now, I am fascinated to see the drawings Sylvie finished today. I
am as captivated by them as I am with the wildlife here. She drove off in the
jeep this afternoon, and I have no idea what she found. She smiles as I pick up
a drawing of a tamarisk tree growing in a lake. She must have gone to Lake
Tarje where they are abundant. Her charcoal rendering displays the convoluting,
almost convulsive form of this tree that rises from a tiny island in the lake
(created by the mud adhering to its exposed roots) and dramatically bows down
to the water with the endlessly intricate pattern of its fibrous, twisting
branches. Katia said these trees made her think of ancient, longhaired
madwomen, throwing their wild hair and arms into the water again and again, as
though they had lost something unutterably precious there. Sylvie has captured
the strangely passionate appearance of this tree.

I take up another drawing, which I see is based on an image of an
Iberian lynx’s head that I took from my cameras, one of the thirty or so
animals still alive here, saved by a conservation program. Sylvie has captured,
in colored chalk, the terrible beauty of this feral face; its contraries of
elegance and destruction, nobility and terror. Its large, upraised curving ear
tufts look like a primitive crown; and its kingship is perfectly realized in the
pitiless, intensely focused eyes that combine both golden light and shadow, the
vision of a creature stream-lined for predation. This wild face has thick dark
lines about its eyes like an Egyptian pharaoh, yet added to this are the shapes
of symmetrically jagged black bolts of lightning on its forehead as well as the
symmetry of black stripes on the cheeks, altogether suggesting Indian war
paint. Its face is framed by a pirate’s pointed black beard.

It is the warrior face of what was until recently the land’s top
predator, and its hunting skills are commensurate: it can jump to seize a bird
in mid-flight or kill a deer many times its size. It can also kill exclusively
for pleasure. Does this fierce face belie an innate cruelty, or does it
represent deadly extravagance? The same question could be asked of humans who
kill for sport. It is all there, a fiery enigma, in Sylvie’s drawing. I feel a
well of pain and frustration that this animal is now the rarest cat species in
the world. It was abundant during my last stay in Doñana in the 1970s.

“These are absolutely wonderful, Sylvie. You are showing me new
ways of perceiving.”

“You are showing me so much every day. I want to give back.” Her
face relaxes in luminous pleasure as she rests on one elbow, and her body has
the sinuous receptiveness of a woman in love. Our intimacy does not disturb me
anymore. All of our creation together, much of it side-by-side—the moments of
pure surprise, wonder, novelty, bottomlessness—all merging into the infinite
spaciousness of mental play; making a world and then wanting only to live
there; what one imagined as solitary and then found to be shared with an
incendiary spirit; its law solely that you must give your self to it completely
or miss it entirely; this existence together—is so much like love-making that
we have begun to look like lovers. How it would horrify Mariska; how it
delights me.

It is now late afternoon, and I want to look at the data collected
by one of my cameras placed beside a cork oak tree several miles away. Sylvie
wants to come with me in the jeep, and we drive through forests of pinewood and
heather. Suddenly she cries, “There!”

I stop the jeep. “What is it?”

She is breathless again. “Something alive, an animal with magical
colors, orange and black as though painted with Picasso brush strokes. It was
crawling on the ground so slowly, rhythmically. We went past it so fast I could
think of nothing but a small, colorful gnome with a magic disk. But that can’t
be . . .”

I laugh in delight. “No, from your description, it was a Greek
tortoise.”

She looks at me in consternation. “Must you always know
everything
?”

“I have no idea what
you
will say from one moment to the
next, and I love it! Do you want to draw that tortoise?”

“Oh, yes!” She takes her chalk and paper pad, and we walk slowly
back through tall clinging heather, rosemary and rock rose until we come to the
oblivious, plodding tortoise Sylvie thought was supernatural, the one for whom
our little drama is less than nothing. “It’s gorgeous!” she says, “orange and
black, autumn.”

“They’re all over the Mediterranean.”

“Can you leave me here so that I can draw it?”

“Of course.” Another piece of the universe—maybe Sylvie is the
woman to reach the end of it. “I’ll be back in, say, an hour and a half.”

Before driving off, I turn to take a last look. She is drawing
rapidly with intense concentration, but walking slowly and carefully beside the
tortoise as it plods along. I surely can’t drive back to the same place. Where
will they be in an hour and a half? Not even the tortoise knows. I am utterly
delighted by the chance encounter of this animal and woman. I drive off
thinking that I should tell Sylvie the story of Adwaitha the giant sea turtle,
who has a life span of two hundred and fifty years. As a hatchling, he was
given to the first head of the British colonial Raj and has now outlived the
entire British Empire. I love to imagine the incongruously languorous pace and
infinite immediacy of his perception. India’s colonial and religious wars—and,
for that matter, the world wars of the twentieth century—were no more than the
shifting of sand, sunlight and water beneath his four dancing feet. I can
imagine no gentler creature. How fitting that such a mind should exist in this
world; how tragic that his species, with little or no inbred fear of humans,
has been hunted to near-extinction.

I arrive at the cork oak tree where my camera and sensors have
been hidden in tall nearby grasses. I particularly want to see footage of
birds, wild boar and rutting deer. But first, I must appreciate the
magnificence of this tree. It is such a phenomenon that Sylvie will undoubtedly
want to draw it. Cork oak trees are found between scrublands and marshes, which
is also the range of nearly all of Doñana’s animals. It is a perfect place to find
images of wildlife because the tree offers nurturance to all species. In its
youth, it is an aviary for the nests of birds both large and small. Like a
Manhattan apartment building, every bit of the bough’s surface is taken by
residents, whose nests are side-by-side, and the birds also divide it into
sections so that they can nest with their own kind. In the spring, the sound of
so many young birds being nurtured is that of a rushing river. I treasure this
sound.

In old age, the tree is hollow and it then houses the lynx, wild
cats, jackdaws, little owls and barn owls. In death, it collapses into a mass
of limbs and bark that has been completely utilized by the forest animals, and
it then replenishes the soil beneath them. I stare up at this cork oak tree
from below. It is in its youth and possesses hugely twisted and gnarled limbs
that cover the sky, both Madonna and colossus of the forest. It makes me think
of both an octopus and a Minoan goddess. In the still light of late afternoon,
its entire surface glistens with the white dung of numberless birds.

Here I will find my wildlife, and I begin transferring the data
from the cameras to my computer until images of animals appear in extended
sequences on my screen. Then I come upon you, El Magnifico, my wild boar, the
black-pelted god who has carried out orgies of eating beneath this tree. There
you are with your thick black fur rumpling whatever shape your body may have
had and your tiny but brilliantly shining eyes and upturned tusks that seem to
be laughing. There is leering delight all over your furry face and I know why,
for it is there in my film footage: Your favorite food is the plethora of cones
this tree has dropped upon you as though you were its favorite. In the most
sensual fashion, your long tongue has sucked the sweet center of these cones
and spit out the bract like the most orgiastic of ancient Romans. How Sylvie
will adore your face and want to draw it, you creature of excess.