Page 118 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

The sun set across the highway, lighting the Starbucks, Taco Bell and Staples, the strip mall, storefronts

and parking lots: the unbeautiful world we have created for ourselves. And I understood. What we do

to the animals we are ultimately capable of doing to ourselves. When we left our communion with the

other living creatures of the earth, we began the process of leaving communion with each other, and

with the sacred. Somewhere in us, we know we are animal. We know they suffer and dream and attach

to each other, sometimes for life. We know they feel pain. And we look away. As we so often look

away from each other’s pain.

The following dawn, the teacher who was leading the medicine walk, a mixed-­‐blood Irish and American

Indian teacher named Valerie Wolf, woke us with a prayer song. We were at a lodge in Sequoia

National Forest. I loaded my car and began a fifteen minute drive, in order to walk among a majestic

stand of giant redwood trees. Within moments I saw a dead squirrel in the road. A slight thing, a baby.

At birth in early spring, infant squirrels have no fur and are blind. They stay with their mothers for

several weeks, nursing, curled into little balls, eyes closed. Then they venture forth; just a few months

later in midwinter they are grown and prepared to mate. That is, if they survive their number one

cause of death. Not owls, snakes, hawks, or mountain lions, though all of these are squirrels’ natural

predators. And not directly humans, though we have hunted, skinned and eaten squirrels for millennia.

The primary danger to squirrels is our vehicles. We slaughter them repeatedly, on our way to

something else. The body is not eaten, gathered up, skinned. No one keeps or uses any part of the

creature. Like all the dead birds and animals along our roads and highways, they end up road kill. Public

trash.

There is one other way in which humans threaten the existence of squirrels, along with so many other

wild animals: we obliterate their homes. Where there used to be woodlands, forests and meadows

there is now the landscape of our human life: cement, brick and steel.