A delicate conduit
Wolf pup and caribou: how often I have thought of these two since news of their discovery hit the media this fall. They were found by miners in Northern Canada in 2016, but news of their existence and what information their intact fur, skin and muscles from 50,000 years ago may bring became widely public only in September.
Initially, I thought they were found together, or near enough to one another that their ancient fates were intertwined. One story line I fantasized gave me wolf pup’s pack dragging caribou calf to her death, providing sustenance to her mom, but leaving the eight-week-old pup to freeze or suffocate back at the den while unattended; a tragic theme of consequences common in nature preserved forever. But that story, and others like it swirling in my mind, were not the case. Wolf pup and caribou weren’t connected. They were merely two unrelated paleontologic finds during the same season in 2016.
Yet something about those two young animals found intact within weeks of one another in the Yukon permafrost stays with me.
In the late spring this year, I was walking the meadows with my dog Penne, a sprightly 12-pound sighthound. He was taking in the smells, sounds and yes, sights, of the outdoors like he customarily does when we walk. Since he was free roaming near by, I didn’t register his posture, poised with his nose facing the dense grass in our east meadow. When I noticed he had stopped there, I called to him but he wouldn’t come. I walked over to where he was standing but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He still would not budge. Only when I moved my hands over the grass, changing its direction, did I see what looked like a weathered branch. It wasn’t a branch. It was the foreleg of a very young deer, unspoiled down to its dainty hoof. It was broken off below the shoulder, bent in two places. A delicate conduit to a missing mass, a tiny torso, a beating heart. I picked it up. Penne drew closer. He didn’t want the leg for anything but sniffing. How it resembled his own slender foreleg.
Little One, what happened to you? A sweep of the grass revealed nothing more of this fawn. No mangled parts or malnourished carcass lying in wait of discovery nearby. Many are the possibilities that brought this fragment to rest in the grass. He could easily have died of natural causes. Only about 70 percent of fawns make it through their first summer. His leg could have been carried off long after he perished by a coyote. Or, a bobcat could have gotten to him while his mama was off foraging. I’ve seen both predators on this land. Chances are, this leg has been lying in the grass for at least a year. Though intact, its fur and bone are dried and brittle.
I don’t have the tools that paleontologists studying wolf pup and caribou do. Even if I did, this foreleg would be unlikely to tell us something astonishing, the way that mummified Ice Age creatures can. I can only speculate and ground some of that in things we know about baby deer. I can relate this artifact of my meadow to the many deer I witness traveling through and grazing, and the many fawns I see accompanying mama does each season.
Yet there’s something lasting about finding such an artifact. Touching and holding this whisper of a recent life, sussed out by my canine companion—which I could have easily missed had I been in a hurry or distracted by things waiting for me to attend to—left an imprint on me.
It’s the kind of impression that Susan Griffin was talking about in her 1996 collection, The Eros of Everyday Life. In the opening essay, she redefines nature as a source of meaning: "…another way of thinking is inevitable, an approach that posits consciousness as part of nature, an experience of knowledge as intimacy rather than power.”
Yes, when scientists are through with wolf pup and caribou, we will certainly know more about the time in which they lived—what they ate, what’s encoded in their genes and how those things compare with today’s plants and animals. Knowledge the way we generally regard knowledge. Valuable as such.
But what if knowledge entwines itself with what and where we are, too? And what if that knowledge fails in producing facts the way we generally regard facts, but is not diminished by that failure?
There’s so much I can never know about the fragile foreleg discovered in the meadow—how long it lay there, and whether its owner died of predation, disease or neglect. But the very experience of finding it is a form of knowing. An intimate form of knowing a land that I spend much of my time in. It’s not the only place that I know well, but familiarity is not akin to the intimacy invoked here, nor that I believe Griffin was describing.
It is knowledge-as-connection, as opposed to knowledge-as-mastery, -control, or as Griffin says, power. It is knowledge-as-non-power. That fawn’s frail leg wasn’t just the thing that connected to the rest of its body before it perished. That fawn’s frail leg connected me back to the land, the place, my reasons for wanting to be not just in it, but with it, and reminded me that while I don’t have all the facts about it, I have ample knowledge of it.
