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with a twig to see it hop, but no hop came. So I crouched down
low on my hands and knees, and sure enough, her swollen ovi-
positor was sunk into the gravel. She was puls-
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 239
ing faintly with a movement not nearly so strained as the egg-
laying mantis s was and her right antenna was broken off near
the base. She d been around. I thought of her in the Lucas mead-
ow, too, where so many grasshoppers leaped about me. One of
those was very conspicuously lacking one of its big, springlike
hind legs a grass-lunger. It seemed to move fairly well from
here to there, but then of course I didn t know where it had been
aiming.
Nature seems to catch you by the tail. I think of all the butter-
flies I have seen whose torn hind wings bore the jagged marks
of birds bills. There were four or five tiger swallowtails missing
one of their tails, and a fritillary missing two thirds of a hind
wing. The birds, too, who make up the bulk of my list, always
seem to have been snatched at from behind, except for the killdeer
I saw just yesterday, who was missing all of its toes; its slender
shank ended in a smooth, gray knob. Once I saw a swallowtailed
sparrow, who on second look proved to be a sparrow from whose
tail the central wedge of feathers had been torn. I ve seen a com-
pletely tailless sparrow, a tailless robin, and a tailless grackle.
Then my private list ends with one bobtailed and one tailless
squirrel, and a muskrat kit whose tail bore a sizable nick near the
spine.
The testimony of experts bears out the same point: it s rough
out there. Gerald Durrell, defending the caging of animals in
well-kept zoos, says that the animals he collects from the wild
are all either ridden with parasites, recovering from various
wounds, or both. Howard Ensign Evans finds the butterflies in
his neck of the woods as tattered as I do. A southwest Virginia
naturalist noted in his journal for April, 1896, Mourning-cloaks
are plentiful but broken, having lived through the winter.
Trappers have a hard time finding unblemished skins. Cetologists
photograph the scarred hides of living whales, straited with
gashes as long as
240 / Annie Dillard
my body, and hilly with vast colonies of crustaceans called whale
lice.
Finally, Paul Siple, the Antarctic explorer and scientist, writes
of the Antarctic crab-eater seal, which lives in the pack ice off the
continent: One seldom finds a sleek silvery adult crab-eater that
does not bear ugly scars or two-foot long parallel slashes on
each side of its body, received when it managed somehow to
wriggle out of the jaws of a killer whale that had seized it.
I think of those crab-eater seals, and the jaws of the killer whales
lined with teeth that are, according to Siple, as large as bananas.
How did they get away? How did not one or two, but most of
them get away? Of course any predator that decimates its prey
will go hungry, as will any parasite that kills its host species.
Predator and prey offenses and defenses (and fecundity is a de-
fense) usually operate in such a way that both populations are
fairly balanced, stable in the middle as it were, and frayed and
nibbled at the edges, like a bitten apple that still bears its seeds.
Healthy caribou can outrun a pack of wolves; the wolves cull the
diseased, old, and injured, who stray behind the herd. All this
goes without saying. But it is truly startling to realize how on the
very slender bridge of chance some of the most efficient pred-
ators operate. Wolves literally starve to death in valleys teeming
with game. How many crab-eater seals can one killer whale miss
in a lifetime?
Still, it is to the picture of the sleek silvery crab-eater seals
that I return, seals drawn up by scientists from the Antarctic ice
pack, seals bearing again and again the long gash marks of un-
thinkable teeth. Any way you look at it, from the point of view
of the whale or the seal or the crab, from the point of view of the
mosquito or copperhead or frog or dragonfly or minnow or roti-
fier, it is chomp or fast.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 241
III
It is chomp or fast. Earlier this evening I brought in a handful of
the gnawed mock-orange hedge and cherry tree leaves; they are
uncurling now, limp and bluish, on the top of this desk. They
didn t escape, but their time was almost up anyway. Already
outside a corky ring of tissue is thickening around the base of
each leaf stem, strangling each leaf one by one. The summer is
old. A gritty, colorless dust cakes the melons and squashes, and
worms fatten within on the bright, sweet flesh. The world is fes-
tering with suppurating sores. Where is the good, whole fruit?
The world Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor cer-
titude, nor peace, nor help for pain. I ve been there, seen it, done
it, I suddenly think, and the world is old, a hungry old man, fa-
tigued and broken past mending. Have I walked too much, aged
beyond my years? I see the copperhead shining new on a rock
altar over a fetid pool where a forest should grow. I see the knob-
footed killdeer, the tattered butterflies and birds, the snapping
turtle festooned with black leeches. There are the flies that make
a wound, the flies that find a wound, and a hungry world that
won t wait till I m decently dead.
In nature, wrote Huston Smith, the emphasis is in what is
rather than what ought to be. I learn this lesson in a new way
every day. It must be, I think tonight, that in a certain sense only
the newborn in this world are whole, that as adults we are expec-
ted to be, and necessarily, somewhat nibbled. It s par for the
course. Physical wholeness is not something we have barring
accident; it is itself accidental, an accident of infancy, like a baby s
fontanel or the egg-tooth on a hatchling. Are the five-foot silver
eels that migrate as adults across meadows by night actually
scarred with the bill marks of herons, flayed by the sharp teeth
of bass? I think of the beautiful sharks I saw from a shore, hefted
and
242 / Annie Dillard
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