by Mike Jaynes

A small grey ghost comes to me most every night. I usually sleep well; I am content. I’m not bitter about life, and I take great pride in working as an Animal Rights Activist. And yes, I often feel an urge to go to forests, deserts, and other wild places, and I often howl at full moons. If they’re full, I try to howl at least once. Sometimes the howl is soft since you can feel silly about it now and then.

I long for the simplicity of woodland animals. I feel confined to this power structure and value system of modern America. I feel boxed in; it’s too departmentalized, but I am not often unhappy. I usually sleep the totally intense, sprawled sleep of the perfectly content. But usually, a small grey ghost flits across my bedroom, just out of sight.

Like gossamer.

It’s not a literal ghost; it haunts my mind. Or at least that’s what I think.

I hesitate to even write of it because it is so very personal, yet I find my fingers pressing various letters on my out-of-date keyboard. I probably can’t tell you exactly what this ancient ghost is, but I think I should try…indirectly, though.

I’m spending my days looking for something called Perfect Wildness. More on this later, but I think indirectly is the only way I’ll be able to write about it. Perhaps it’s the only way it will let me write about it. Before I go into the deep spiraling vault of outer space and beyond the space-time continuum of logic, I’ve gotta back up. To understand the small grey ghost, you have to come with me to the past.

Fall, 1993. It was a fabulous fall. Leaves orange and red. Temperatures falling toward winter. Wood smoke in air. It was the holy time of autumn; it is my hands down favorite. I was 17, and I was in a highly mystical state of mind. I was engorged on nature and all things natural. I have been obsessed with our natural world since I was in scouts, and at 17 I was nearing a catharsis. My life was about to take a permanent shift.

And it involved nature.

To get to the point, it has to do with an extremely special friend of mine named Jenny Hapnew. I’ve heard people of my parent’s generation say that there are no hippies under forty-five, but I swear, she seemed like the real deal hippy to me. She introduced me to a group of sustained living people who travel the country and sleep in wild places and live in communes and drop out of society because they believe it is big and evil and counterproductive to our peaceful human nature. They have a point.

She was a member of the Rainbow Tribe.

Ah, the Rainbows. They with their odd names would come back into my life in an absolute huge and changing way later.

But that happens years after this.

This was the fall of 1993, and the Rainbow I was currently fascinated with was one very spacey Jenny Hapnew.

She was fabulous. I never got to completely know her –she set out for the desert soon after that fall ended- but what I knew of her blew my mind. She understood about my fascination with woodland creatures and my belief that we are not alone in the universe and my commitment to finding “perfect wildness.” Perfect wildness is something I am searching for, and it is probably too personal to go into detail here, but I’m certain it exists. I’m certain it is attainable by modern human beings.

Jenny understood.

She said she “dug” it.

She was right on.

So I went camping with her and some of her friends on the backside of a mountain near Chattanooga, where we lived. It was late October, and the air was turning cold. Jenny told me she was heading out to the Sonora with some Rainbows to live in the desert. Sounded good to me. I didn’t want to pack it out to Burning Man, but I thought it was cool she was willing to go so far.

We ate sandwiches and admired the inside of a purple VW microbus owned by a friend of hers named Stilts. We listened to some people playing hand drums and watched members of the tribe gather chalky dead wood for the bonfire that night.

Jenny was beautiful to me. Tall. Slim. Curly brown hair. Freckles. She was into nature and didn’t really care about what most of the world cared about. I excused myself to take a leak in the woods. I walked some yards out of the clearing, the sounds of the people and campsite fading away. I walked into a pre-twilight wood line and did my business. I zipped up, and I saw it.

Motionless.

Graceful.

A huge deer was less than twenty feet away looking at me. A buck. It’s downy head and liquid black eyes were enchanting. His body strong and streamlined and tensioned with taut muscle and woods vitality. His nose majestic and damp and black and triangular. I made no move. I knew this was something special.

I have never been hunting in my short life, and I will never go. I care not to shoot down creatures with more animal grace than most of us will ever have. I have no desire for that particular bullyboy male reaffirming blood sport.

My first thought was that of woodland creatures. As I said, at seventeen, I was in a highly mystical state of mind. My friends and I often went camping, and I yearned to find proof of mythological creatures. The centaur, sylphs, nymphs, satyrs, I was sure they all existed. I still am. But at the moment I saw the deer in the woods, I felt this was important. I knew, I absolutely knew this had deeper meaning. All I had to do was watch. And listen.

He bowed his noble head to the pelt of the forest floor. Then the eyes back up to mine. The tall maples on each side of him seemed to grow still. The laughter behind me died. The green woods behind him seemed to slow. The buck looked at me, turned around, walked about fifty feet, and stopped. He turned back toward me, a much smaller animal now, and looked at me. I did what any dreamer would do.

I followed the buck.

I stopped about fifteen feet from him. His move. He twitched an ear, chewed some grass, and stood in increasing darkness. The Eventide wasn’t far away, and the deeper woods were more tenebrous. They were more vibrant. More alive. He looked at me, looked away again, and bounded another fifty feet or so deeper into the woods. He stopped and looked. I followed.

I estimate our stopping and starting with me following his lead happened seven or eight times. I probably followed that buck a quarter mile or so away from the campsite. We finally ended up in a copse in just about full dark. I sat on a damp decaying stump and watched him eat fallen leaves. He was so intensely beautiful. A silent fall creature in the woods unconcerned with the tribbles of man. He looked about me again, shook his downy tail, and walked off briskly. He walked much further than before and eventually out of sight in the maze of light Birchwood trees. Their trunks like sentinel ghosts, vertical and glowing.

I didn’t follow; I knew he was gone. I sat on the stump in the forest night and tried to fathom what just happened. I was, and am, no expert on the normal behavior of Tennessee white-tailed deer, but I thought it was a strange occurrence. Why didn’t he run off like most deer do when confronted with humans in their habitat? Why did he keep stopping and letting me follow him in the woods? Was he leading me somewhere? What could this mean?

I knew Jenny would have something interesting to say about this; she would never think anything metaphysical silly or outrageous. Her mind was open to the fact that in an infinite universe, all infinite varieties of all possibilities are possible. She wasn’t like my other friends who loved to get to the Friday night football games early to get good seats. She didn’t worry about rims for her cars or chains for her neck.

She was a creature of legend.

She was wood smoke.

She was falling leaves. She was white robes at midnight. I haven’t seen her in years, yet when the leaves start falling and the air turns cooler, I think of her and smile. And I wish her the best –wherever she is.

I thought of her and decided I should head back. I found my way back with no insurmountable problems a little wit and woodcraft couldn’t solve. A few hundred yards from the campsite, I saw the dim glow of the bonfire. I heard the drums sooner than that. She met me with a flashlight about a hundred feet away from camp. It is so vivid in my mind. There she was. She stood on the dark forest trail in plaid pajama pants, a long-sleeved black shirt, and deep pools of darkness for eyes. I remember her calling my name. I remember her saying I almost worried her curly head off by wandering off like that. I told her I would explain later, but for now to turn the flashlight off.

She did.

I remember the moonlight coming through the swaying pines. I remember the touch of her warm skin in the cold night. I remember standing on that forest trail with the high distant stars as brilliant needles of flickering reds, blues, and whites. I remember being absolutely, completely, and entirely alive in every pore of my body and every sense of the word. I remember my mind racing from the influence of some pills she insisted we try together. I remember my brain cleaving and splitting again. I remember being inside her and feeling my hands melt into her back and under her skin and wrap around her knobby spine. I remember becoming one creature with her in the October woods joined in that ancient, primeval remorseless now of fire and heat. I remember her softness, her femininity. I remember her particular gasp and straining of her neck…the long cords and tendons standing out in relief against moonlight as she entered the point of no return. I remember many things from that night. I remember my short-lived freckled obsession called Jenny Hapnew. Maybe I even loved her. I remember drifting on the downward slope toward sleep with her curly head resting on my chest under the trailing starlight. I remember the owls and the coyotes. I remember hearing her heavy, deep, rhythmic breathing and thinking of those liquid eyes of the buck disappearing deeper into the wood. The deer would not go out of my mind. I thought of its flickering ears, its white tail, its cloven hooves, its wise black animal lips.

It felt like the start of something.

It was.

I have many obsessions. I have hobbies and passions and books and movies and articles on them all. I mentioned earlier about my quest to find Perfect Wildness. I think I’m closer to it now than I have ever been, and it is deeply entwined with another particular passion.

Cosmology. Look it up. It has nothing to do with hair and nails. Okay, I’ll look it up for you. Webster says: “The study of the physical universe considered as a totality of phenomena in time and space. It is also the astrophysical study of the history, structure, and constituent dynamics of the universe.” A little heavy, but you get the point. Cosmology looks at the cosmos and says, “Damn, that’s big.” That’s an easier and more accessible definition. I spend many a night with my eye pressed to an 18 times power magnification eyepiece of one of my telescopes. I love it. I love the hugeness of what we are such an insignificant part of. I see moons, planets, stars, and quasars, super nova remnants, stellar gasses, asteroids and the list goes on.

Think of the speed of light. 186,000 miles per second. Second. Turn the television off one night and go outside. Bring your trusty flashlight from the kitchen drawer. Point the light heaven ward and flick it on. Count “one one thousand,” and flick it off. The photons from that little plastic flashlight have traveled 186,000 miles in that short one second span. The moon is a quarter million miles away. So in a little over two seconds, those photons have raced past the moon and are on their way to forever.

So.

A light year is the distance light travels (at the speed of light, of course) in one year. Think of the astronomical distance it covers in one second and then multiply and find out how many seconds are in a year and multiply that by 186,000.

Yep.

Pretty damn mind boggling, if you ask me. Enough of the astrophysics, but I wanted to give a brief background on my fascination. So, with a decent telescope (a hundred bucks or so) you can see objects that are millions of light years away.

Imagine.

We live in an extremely large neighborhood. The universe is so outrageously huge it nullifies our existence. Nothing we could ever do here in our tiny molecule of a corner of space could ever affect the universe on a whole. I distrust humanity, so this gives me immense peace and comfort and it makes me sleep well. We could cook our six billion human bodies to radioactive goo and the universe would continue to expand. Perhaps the Betelguisians will simply make a note to reseed Earth in a million years or so after it cools down. We just don’t know. What I do know, though, is that the cosmos is unfathomably big, and that brings me comfort. It is my obsession with the stars and the vast interstellar gulf between that brings me to the next point in my search for Perfect Wildness.

Spring 1995. I am now a worldly and narcissistic 20 years old. Oh my, I am a handful. A sophomore in college. A fraternity guy (yes, I admit it). I was volunteering with the local Boy Scout office. You see, I made Eagle Scout as a teenager, and I have always liked scouts. I volunteered to help out some younger cub scouts with an astronomy project they were working on. We had met in a local observatory and I gave a little spiel on the cosmos and why it is so impressive and what not. Then they toured the observatory and looked at the moon and stars through the big 65 cm vacuum reflector, 25 cm vacuum refractor, and 20 cm full disk telescope. They loved it, and so did I. The night was clear, the distant suns were enchanting, and we all left happy.

I was riding my bike back to my campsite when it happened. Riding a bike is a fascinating thing. Cyclists see things that motorists can’t. You zip past at fifty mph, and everything is a streak of blurred color. A bike is a different story. The only sounds you make is the click, click, click of not pedaling and the whir of the chain when you do. I was riding down a long stretch, and I saw something dark in the middle of the road.

It was crying.

I turned and pedaled up and I took a better look.

My heart broke into thousands of pieces on the dark road in the cool Utah night.

A dog had been hit by a car and was dying a bad death in the middle of the two-lane blacktop. He was horrendous. Apparently the car hit his back half. He was absolutely crushed flat from his fore legs back. The bones and meat and sinew no more than an inch high in the bag of black skin. His right leg was torn off, and one eye hung on his cheek. He had bitten his tongue badly. His one eye looked at me and the world exploded.

I felt his horror. I don’t know how; I only know I did. This is the point in the tale where the closed minded and the unthinking dismiss me as a whacko. This is where you either continue to believe me or you call me a cheap storyteller. I really don’t care because I knew it happened. I am an animal lover; yes I am. They are my life, and I would die for them. This also marks me an animal activist nut. I don’t care. So, believe what you will. I am telling you I saw that poor broken dog’s eye and I felt his horror, his confusion, his pain. There was no taking this pup to the hospital vet. This dog was waning quickly. Intestines and bones were spread out behind him in a fan pattern. As the world spun, as the stars opened, as I begged for forgiveness, my hands found his noble throat. And in a moment, it was over. It takes a lot of strength, and a hell of a lot of necessity, to strangle a large dog. But it was quick, and I ‘m certain it was the easiest thing for him. I’m certain it was the right thing to do.

The oddest thing. When he was dying, he didn’t struggle. I stared into his good eye the whole time. The flicker of a memory scurried across the back of my mind. It only took six or eight seconds for him to go limp, but it was so damn long. I wondered if he knew this was the only kindness I could show him. I wandered if he knew I would remember him and honor and cherish his memory for all of my days. I wondered if he knew I had never killed an animal in my life and that it was breaking my heart to do it now under a bright Utah moon. As the last light was leaving his dark animal eyes, I managed to hunt down the memory that was flying across the back screen of my mind.

It was the buck.

The buck in the Jenny woods.

The deer and the dog I was now with had the same dark, fierce, compassionate eyes. I made the connection as soon as the dog went slack. Suddenly his neck felt hot, and I jerked my hands away. It felt like a shock. I know -- sounds nuts. Surely it was just my animal lover’s mind playing tricks on me. Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever happened, I thought of the deer of two years’ prior. Somehow I knew he and the night dog in the road in front of me were connected. They were lessons. They were guiding me. To what? To Perfect Wildness, I believe. I heard a strange, choking, braying sound and realized it was coming from me. I cried for this lost life. I cried for this warm blood on the dark pavement. I was upset I had to come along exactly when I did, but there was something else I felt. Honor. I was honored to ease this wise creature’s suffering. There was a message his matted fur and his shattered eye and his torn entrails would teach me eventually. I remember his wise, black animal lips. This experience was a guidepost on my path. His death was not in vain; it had meaning.

Say what you will about my inclinations for animals. Make whatever judgments make you feel better about yourself and your rational world. All I know is that it was a shame that poor dog had to get so mangled up like he did. He had to die, but at least he died outside in the fresh air…the way I want to one day go.

And I know this.

I scraped up every piece of that stiffening creature I could find in the moonlit night. I took him twenty or so feet off the road into the woods and there in the Utah moonlight and the high, indifferent starlight, I buried that dog with my bare hands.

So, if you can’t figure it out by now, I do a lot of dreaming. I also do a lot of hiking and outdoor type things. I feel content when I can control the rage I feel for animal suffering in our world. I feel my fate somehow got cross wired with somebody else’s. Somewhere out there is some perfectly nice fellow who deserves the fantastic life I have who has been royally screwed. He has what I deserve, and he can’t understand how in the world his life has come to this. He often curses, I would imagine.

Sorry buddy.

We know about Jenny, we know about my obsession with the cosmos. We know about the buck and the poor, poor dog. To get closer to the tale of my quest for Perfect Wildness, we also need to know about yet another natural obsession of mine.

The moon.

This is no surprise to those who know me.

I know…it falls into the category of the cosmos, but it needs to be treated in a separate category of its own. I am ecstatic. I have studied its phases and patterns for years now. I won’t, but I could tell you about the sidereal month, waxing and waning crescent, waxing and waning gibbous, first quarter, last quarter, and the daily thirteen degree arc eastward. The moon is a large part of my life. It’s not original, by any means, but I am obsessed. Cultures obsess over it. The Greeks had great, golden orgies and Dionysian mysteries devoted to it. It is molten silver; it brings me peace.

One thing that’s odd. All these incidents, the buck, the dog, and some more I’ll briefly (your welcome) tell about all were under the light of the moon. The moon is not visible every night. Sometimes it’s cloudy, and sometimes it doesn’t even rise until well after midnight. Sometimes it’s new, or so near to new that you can’t see it. Regardless, all of these incidents leading me to Perfect Wildness have been accompanied by the light of a moon. Maybe a summer crescent moon, or a fall gibbous moon or some other phase of moon, but my old companion is always sailing in the layered sky when these creatures guide me on my way.

So.

Late summer of 1998. The sturgeon moon had came and gone and it was a late rising waning crescent moon. Guess what? I was camping. Hiking actually. A young lady friend and I were on our sixth twenty-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Let me explain. The Appalachian Trail stretches from Georgia to Maine. The young lady I was with for about three years was an avid hiker, and we started in Georgia and began hiking twenty-mile sections of it whenever we could find a weekend off. We did quite a bit of the trail in those three years. I’ve hiked about three hundred miles of it, and a hundred and twenty of those were with her by my side.

We were in North Carolina. It was late, after midnight. I walked fifty feet or so away from our camp and relieved myself in the woods. The crickets were deafening. The night breeze found the dark leaves. I began the return hike and an utterly foreign sound stopped me.

The cry of a baby.

As clear as day, in that moonlit night, deep in the Appalachian mountains, I heard a baby cry. It sounded just like any other baby you have heard, and it was so out of place it transfixed me. It seemed mocking, vibrant, and coming from a tree above me and to the right. I looked toward the sound. The darkness of the night and the deeper darkness of the tree trunks and leaves. And then I saw it.

A wildcat.

Puma, panther, mountain lion, the same thing. It was crouching on a branch about four feet above my head and about ten feet away. Its eyes were yellow and reflecting the moonlight in eerie animal eyeshine. Its fur was liquid darkness; its eyes were lambent. And it was crying.

Then I remembered. The old Eagle Scout training kicked in. I was told long ago that panthers sometimes make a keening sound very similar to the cry of a human baby. It is supposed to lull prey into confusion. The oldest trick in the book. Lull your enemy into slackness and complacency, bring them in an inch at a time, and slam the door.

I stood perfectly motionless.

The wild cat continued to cry. Keening ululation in the October dark.

The lambent glowing eyes narrowed, and the cry was replaced by a low pitched, soft, blood curdling growl.

I stood perfectly motionless and tried to get my idiot mind to think. Think! What is one supposed to do when the eyes narrow and the cry becomes a growl? What’s one supposed to do when the cat body in the tree, perhaps as big as a golden retriever, is crouched and flexed and full of sinew and muscle? I could imagine the retractable claws. I could imagine the lightning reflexes and the tearing of the canines. What’s one to do when one is eighteen miles deep in the Appalachian Mountains and the only person within miles of you is a very petite, fatigued, and spent blonde sleeping the post-lovemaking sleep of the dead?

Then I remembered.

We were told to not look away if our gazes had locked.

Did he know I was staring at his eyes? Did he know I was transfixed and it was impossible for me to look away from those narrow yellow slits in the trees?

Look at him, and back away.

Humans have no tapetum lucidum, so we have no eyeshine. But there was no doubt in my mind that this wild creature could see my eyes staring at his. There was also no doubt that he could smell my fear. I could.

I slowly backed away and walked backwards up the dark pine needle trail. The yellow eyes followed and receded in the distance. After the trail went around a bend, I lost track of the animal’s eyes.

Those eyes.

So large and oblong and yellow and alive. Their aliveness activated those memories of the deer in another wood and the poor dog in the Utah night. Those eyes were wild. Perfect Wildness again filled my mind. It invaded my senses, and vibrations began. I felt I was gaining on my elusive goal. I felt again it was possible for modern man to feel the rhythms and heat of our world and universe.

I woke my companion up by zipping the tent and climbing in her sleeping bag. No words preceded our coupling. Nothing but the remorseless now. When you see your death in a very close tree limb, and you walk away, you feel alive. When you see the wild yellow eyes settle their gaze on you and you pass in one piece, you feel alive. Our lovemaking was intense and atavistic. It was a longing in the night, a cry for or against fate, and ancient mantra. I had escaped a very nasty situation and her heat and hunger were my affirmation of life itself. We stayed up late on that secluded North Carolina mountain, and in that moment I was convinced I would live forever. I felt that rush of life, that surge of power that made me drive harder, cleave and batter her; I wanted to be inside her and drive death away once and for all until I felt my idiot head would explode, my lungs collapse, my heart shred. I bellowed an animal yell into the dark, forever night and then after our release, we fell together into the void, falling in slow motion forever and ever and ever…..

The summer of 2004 was spectacular. Boat rides. Sun spangled lakes. A restored VW microbus camper. Teaching summer class. A report that a tumor in a loved one turned out to be the good kind. Fireflies most every night. Long talks by candle light. A couple new pets. Three full moons, and a lot of private.

Way the heck back there on page one of this, I mentioned a small grey ghost. I’ve been avoiding writing about it, and I’ve even considered taking it completely out and focusing on my dream of Perfect Wildness.

I can’t.

It is a very personal experience, but it is relevant to my life view and my goal. Again, I’ve gotta back up….

Earlier this summer, I started volunteering at a local shelter that does great work for animals. It has been an experience both phenomenal and heartbreaking. A quick lesson is in order. Our local shelter focuses on companion animals (dogs and cats) though the occasional chicken and even pig make their way to the shelter. There is an average of 350 to 400 animals in the run-down facility at all times.

Due to lack of funding and lack of room, euthanasia is a must. About 125 a week are killed. I find this horrendous. So I volunteer. We take a big load of dogs and some cats to a local pet store on Saturdays to try to get them adopted. Usually ten or twelve find homes, and that is great.

Seventeen or eighteen animals killed every single day is not great. It is sickening. It is horrendous. Listen people, these animals are not sick. They are not old and vicious. They are cute Labrador puppies. They are adorable beagles. They are basset hounds with great, floppy ears. They are tiny kittens that meow in confusion as the cold needle is slipped into the kitty flesh. They are boxer, dalmations, Siamese, daschunds, puppies, kittens, chickens, pigs. I am so very passionate about this crime, I could scream. I often do scream. The crime is us. The crime is our lack of education and the absolute refusal, for some reason, of chattanoogans to spay and neuter. This is an abysmal path for an activist to go down, but I have been led here. If you want a pet, adopt a homeless one. If you buy from breeders, you kill homeless animals. Before you go to a breeder to get the “just perfect” pet you “deserve,” walk down those kennel aisles and see the confused, scared and loving eyes of the dogs and cats you are murdering. The type of people who value “pure bred” dogs and cats would never dirty their precious shoes with the smell and the filth of “the pound.” But my rage seems to be getting the better of me.

Okay, enough of that. I realize my words can offend people, but they are written in absolute honesty. The homeless animals in the shelter have changed my life. There is a reason I am putting you through my homeless animal activism speech. I’ve told you of the long ago deer in the woods with Jenny’s Rainbow Tribe. I’ve told you of my friend, the poor dog that was killed by a car and buried by me on a Utah night. I’ve told you of those lambent panther eyes in the trees deep in the North Carolina mountains. These events have all steered me toward Perfect Wildness.

There is one story left to tell, and it is most difficult.

It involves that small grey ghost that wanders around bedrooms late at night.

It involves one of those homeless animals from the shelter.

Just some weeks ago, my girlfriend and I went down to the shelter to look for a cat. She rescued a little black kitty who was abused and severely damaged. The kitty’s name is Salem. Salem was operated on, and she is now fat and sassy and convinced of her superiority. Kate decided that Salem needs a playmate. I agreed, so we went to the cat room at the overcrowded shelter.

Oh, the beautiful kitties. Big black ones. Short haired ones. Tabbies. Siamese. Fat brown ones. Tiny white ones. All meowing and prancing and showing off. All hoping for that last chance.

Kate, dreadlocks swinging port and starboard, goes to the employee and tells her we want the oldest, ugliest, most un-adoptable one she has. You see, most people want cute kittens, or very clean short hair cats. Kitties get adopted like gangbusters; cats get shipped out the back door in great, furry, dead piles.

The lady immediately had one in mind. She led us to him. He was about four years old, though they weren’t sure. He was very skittish.

He was grey.

It took about five minutes of coaxing until he would come out of his cage and let us love on him. But after he warmed up to us, he was fabulous! A purrer! A meower. He had a great shovel shaped brown head with white splotches here and there. He had some scratches and marks of a hard homeless life on his lithe body. He shedded like I’ve never seen any cat shed. He was covered in burrs and filth and dirt. You see, the adult cats and dogs rarely get washed and never get groomed. Especially the ones likely to get quickly euthanized.

The lady said probably no one would be interested in a cat like him, and he was probably going to be “sent back” in a day or so to make room for some new kitties that were just being weaned.

We took him immediately.

So, let’s back up and talk about euthanasia. I’ve seen where they do it. I wandered around one day at the shelter when I was volunteering. I played dumb and wandered back to the “kill room.” The easiest way in the world to sneak into anywhere is to simply walk purposefully, look like you know what you’re doing, and stride straight the hell in. If you look like you belong, most people accept the fact that you do. You can always claim ignorance. It’s worked for me in numerous, numerous situations. I have a penchant for deviousness.

So, the kill room was abandoned. No technician to hear me say “um, I’m sorry. Is the bathroom back here?” What was there was the cutest, most adorable black and white puppy you have ever seen. The tag on his cage had him slated for euthanasia that very same day. Oh my god, he looked at me and emitted the tiniest little squeak. I bent down to get him out of his cage and hit the road (take the puppy and run), and I heard voices in the outside corridor. I wondered out the back door (festooned with plenty of NO ADMITTANCE and EMPLOYEES ONLY and UNSANITIZED AREA sign [I’m slightly contemptuous of authority]), and was stopped completely in my tracks by an overwhelming wave of stench.

Thousands of flies were buzzing around two gigantic coolers propped against the back of the building. This smell was unlike anything I’ve smelled and beyond description. The lids of the coolers were ajar. They were overcrowded with things in plastic garbage bags –dog and cat shaped things. I thought of that poor damned puppy in the kill room. I this smelled so horrible to my human sense of smell, what must he smell with his heightened canine one? It was wrenching to think of the last few minutes of that beautiful pup’s life in fear and the smell of mass death permeating his nose, his eyes, his fur. What horror must he have felt? What horror do 17 animals a day, 125 animals a week, 500 animals a month, 6000 animals a year feel when they are confronted with the bleak, unyielding, final end of the line?

It breaks my heart. It keeps me up some nights. It motivates me to volunteer when I can. It forces me to take in homeless animals. It urges me toward direct action. It makes me so very, very sad to think of these wise creatures reduced to this reality because people will not spay or neuter or control their animals. It is a crime; it makes me violent.

Seeing what I have seen, knowing what I know, I was not going to let that big, grey cat no one wanted end up in those coolers. It was not going to happen. No way, period. I know I can’t adopt them all, but he was special. He was different. He had large yellow eyes of just the exact same shape and color of another, larger cat I once met in the Appalachian night. I knew he could teach me something. He was coming home.

Well, they send adopted animals straight to the vet to get spayed or neutered and to give them a general health check up. We opted to pay the extra fifty bucks to the vet for the complete blood test like we always do, and they did.

And I got a call.

Feline Leukemia Virus is a highly contagious, one-hundred-percent fatal disease cats can get if they are not vaccinated against it.

Grey wasn’t.

Grey had it. Tested positive. No cure. No chance of bringing him home because Salem is too young for her vaccinations, and feline leukemia is so very damn contagious. He can’t be released (please never, never release a domesticated animal to the wild). Nothing to do. My vet, whom I use often and trust very much, told me the only humane option was euthanasia. It may sound insane. I barely knew the cat, but my heart sank. Colors faded, and cruel fate taunted me. My world slowed, and I felt the anger building. The injustice. The pointlessness. She said she could do it, or she could send him back to the pound and they would do it.

Coolers.

Flies.

Garbage bags.

No way in hell.

I told her I would pay whatever it cost to have her do it. I asked her if she could wait for me to spend some time with him at her office, and she said sure. She expects this kind of stuff from me. I told Kate, got my keys, and in the slanting sunlight of a beautiful August day, I drove to death.

Buddhists believe all life is sacred.

I like that. It’s very eastern. As I drove, I wandered how a cat I barely knew could affect me so deeply. It was his eyes. Those same eyes, leading me to wildness.

Perfect Wildness.

I got to the vet, parked, walked in, signed, waited, was greeted, let to a room, and they brought him in.

Purring so loudly. Rubbing, licking, prancing. He seemed to be glad to see me. Did he remember me from the pound? Could he smell my kindness? I like to think so. He was a very loud meower and a very loud purrer. The doctor gave me ten minutes or so with him. I held him; I petted him; I cried. I spent long minutes with him in my lap, shedding profusely, with his head looking upward at my eyes. Big, yellow eyes. He seemed happy. I felt the rough indentations from his scars. Fights? Mating? Only he knew. What sights had those yellow eyes seen? What moons? What suns? What stars? What loves, babies, feasts? Did he know my grey-blue eyes would be the last thing those yellow ones would see here on our green world? He stopped circling the steel table, sat down, curled his long grey tail about him, and looked at my face. He didn’t look away, but his elongated pupils narrowed as the doctor and more light entered the door behind us.

Yellow eyes narrowing.

The doctor had a syringe.

Let me stop for a minute. Yes. Yes, I know it was absolutely necessary. Yes I know it was absolutely painless. Yes, it still tears me up inside to tiny pieces. I can’t help it if you find it silly or trifling, it is simply how I am.

I have always heard that the injection was completely painless. I had never witnessed euthanasia before. I don’t recommend it. But if your companion has to go through it, be there with them. It is your responsibility. You owe it to them.

Pentobarbital Sodium is primarily used to euthanize dogs and cats. Enough of it will do just a good of job on humans too. The vet tech held him. This upset him a little. I would guess that his life as a stray was one of fierce independence. I sat in a chair and looked into his yellow eyes. He looked away briefly and then looked at me. He looked through me. The Wildness was there. Perfect Wildeness was in those wise yellow eyes. He was weakened from the disease and despite my protestation the vet said he could not go home and must be euthanized now. The right thing to do is the hard thing to do. I held him and felt the life under his beautiful fur. He looked at me. A slight jerk of the paw as the needle went in. No turning back now. Tech and vet sweet talking. Long muscles and sinews rippling. Eyes. Shedding hair. I muttered “we tried.” I counted after the vet said “here we go.” Two seconds.

Two seconds.

I knew it was quick and painless, but I had no idea it was that quick. The plunger wasn’t even all the way down before the breathing stopped. The Pentobarbital Sodium instantly stops the heart, and this instantly stops life, or at least what we know of life here on our brown round world. Those eyes looked at me and then through me. And then they looked no more. Grey’s mysterious and beautiful life here was over. I only came into his life at the very, very end of it, but even I am astonished at how he affected me. I feel honored. After that incredible purring machine with the outrageously loud volume stopped forever, I wretched in the bathroom, fumbled to my car, and in a daze I drove home on a summer day with absolutely perfect weather and a sky of cloudless blue. There was only one piece of happiness to the day: He did not die in the back of the shelter, alone and awash in the stench of the full dumpsters and the buzz of a million flies. He died with someone who loved him –barely knew him but loved him deeply- holding him as he became as still as time.

So what’s the point? We know of a nameless deer and a curly freckled girl of great beauty in the woods of fall 1993. We know of a poor dog on a dark Utah night in spring 1995. Then the summer of 1998 with the yellow eyes of the predator in another distant wood. Finally the small grey ghost of the summer of 2004. Eleven years of my life have passed, and these four incidents are some of the most memorable. I have had countless joys and some pains in that decade plus one, but these are some of the most poignant. I remember both good and bad things. And what about that?

The deer.

The dog.

The mountain lion.

The grey cat.

These four creatures are signposts –guides, perhaps. Their memories urge me to find that balance between today and times past.

Perfect Wildness; it is possible. I will remember all of them, and what about those? Those memories?

Memories. It is our memories that make us who we are. Not what we can remember, but what we choose to remember. These animals all had the same earthy eyes and the same magic about them. They make it possible to do the things necessary to contribute to the animal rights world. These memories are old ancestral ones. Memories of forests, satyrs, myths. Atavistic memories of night fires of centuries ago. Eons before the towering glass and metal buildings of our world lie these memories. They come to me at night.

In my life, I do things. I sleep deeply because I live completely. I have many passions; I have a million things going on, but I don’t let myself get too busy to stop and look. To stop on a busy street and look to clouds. Remember those patterns you could find when you were little? Remember those cloud sheep, cloud birds, and cloud funny faces? They’re still there. Stop. Look up. Find them again.

My days are full of sun and challenge and adventure. My nights are filled with the
content sleep of the dead. Before sleep comes, I often lay alone and listen to the night. Often, I am visited by that small grey ghost. I don’t see him, but I feel him. It is comforting. I sense something.

Yellow eyes watching.

I hear Kate’s deep breathing beside me, and I get out of bed. She is asleep. Yellow eyes watch, and I pad silently through the soft night noises, through the moonlight coming through windows and making silver squares on the dark carpet. I walk through the satin blackness of our house.

I continue down the hall. The living room is lit slightly from the neighbor’s porch light. I see the glint of animal eye shine in my cat perched on the back of the dark couch, and I think of those deep Appalachian woods and those two much larger yellow eyes –watching. I walk out our front door into the cricket song moonlight air. I walk to my car and climb on the hood. I lay on my back with arms outstretched. The metal is cold, the warmth of use long faded. I lay under brilliant stars, distant and furious. I think of Perfect Wildness. I lay in the night and I feel closer to it. Closer than ever.

The great bowl of the sky covers me, and I contemplate my role in this vast unending universe of things countless and wonderful and terrible. I know it is my duty to be kind and to fight for animals. To love them and protect them and if they have to die to be beside them. I close my eyes and inhale night scents. Peace comes to me. I see a small grey ghost by the hedge line. Yellow eyes watching. A late firefly winks in the sprawling constellation Hydra. The lights of a distant jet slowly wink eastward. The night wind finds my face.