We lost one of our cats recently. Mr. Allnut (named for Humphrey Bogart’s character in The African Queen) asked to go out at about 4 one morning a few weeks ago, and I let him go. He never came back, and a week or so later, a neighbor confirmed Mr. Allnut’s fate—met, we all agreed, at the business end of a coyote.

We live in central Austin, but a very steep and heavily wooded ten-acre draw cuts through our quiet neighborhood. The terrain is so treacherous it’s hard to explore, even with the permission of the friendly neighbor who owns it, which means it’s easy to forget that the nightlife is literally quite wild in our back yard. We used to hear the coyotes occasionally years ago when sirens sounded at dusk or dawn, but they’ve apparently learned to sing under their breath. They’re still here.

I loved Mr. Allnut. He looked like a stuffed animal, with his regular markings and crossed blue eyes, and he behaved like one too: he suffered being cuddled and cooed over with a resigned limpness and clawless stoicism. And I still miss his sister Adelaide, and Spike with the light bulb at the end of her tail, and Kerbey and Skitter and Widget. They were cats of regular habits who just disappeared over the course of the years. I learn a lot a lot slower than the coyotes and must finally acknowledge that we always live in the midst of predators.

Apparently a lot of us are deluded into thinking that large predators are restricted to “wilder” places than cities and suburbs. One multiyear study in Chicago surprised the wildlife biologist conducting it; he found that the city’s coyote population was much larger than expected and that urban coyotes lived longer and are much more active at night than their rural siblings. They live not just in green spaces but also in apartment districts and industrial parks. Because they learn very quickly to avoid traps, it’s hard to get an accurate number, but the author of the Chicago study thought there could be up to 2,000 coyotes there—a much denser population than would cover a rural area of equal size. It’s likely that this study applies to most major metropolitan cities, including, of course, Austin. (In fact, former Madroño Ranch resident Melissa Gaskill wrote a piece on the city’s coyotes for the Austin Chronicle back in 2008, and coincidentally a story headlined “Tensions Over Coyote Trapping Split Austin Neighborhood” ran just this morning in the Austin American Statesman.)

Predator. It’s a compelling word, derived from the Latin meaning to plunder or to rob, so to call something a predator is to freight it with moral judgment. As far as I can tell (which isn’t far because I lost the magnifying glass to our edition of the compact Oxford English Dictionary), the word referred only to human behavior until it made a zoological leap in 1907. I wonder if that leap helped give steam to the notion in land management circles that rubbing out entire species was not only a reasonable stratagem but a righteous crusade. Predators rob and steal and, therefore, must be punished. Destroyed.

The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale project is the longest continuous study of the predator-prey system in the world, spanning more than fifty years of observation on this frigid island on the Michigan side of Lake Superior. The scientists involved have concluded that to designate wolves simply as dangerous nuisances to be eradicated is to miss the hard and necessary work they do; the apex predators are vital to their complex ecosystems, despite the fear they inspire and the losses they cause. In other words, as Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay “Thinking Like A Mountain”: “too much safety” from wolves, and presumably other apex predators, “seems to yield only danger in the long run.” Because we often don’t take into account the needs of the mountain or all the other participants in a predator-prey cycle, we ranchers or hunters or businessmen end up poking ourselves (or our grandchildren) in the eye. The length of the Isle Royale study has brought academic rigor and complexity to Leopold’s beautiful musings, and has showed the scientists how much they still have to learn: “Navigating that complexity without hubris will be a great challenge.”

So you can probably connect the dots so far: despite the loss of Mr. Allnut and his compadres, I can’t entirely condemn the responsible coyote, who was just doing his job. He’s also probably eaten many, many rats and provided other services I don’t know about. A righteous campaign for coyote extinction would be understandable but could also be very ill-advised.

Now I’m going to make a crabwise move. At about the same time Mr. Allnut disappeared, we lost our beloved ranch cat Callie. Despite the fact that she was mostly white like Mr. Allnut, she managed for the eight or nine years she lived at Madroño to stay clear of coyotes, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, hawks, eagles, owls, and the occasional mountain lion. She was also immensely talkative and sociable, always accompanying us to visit the chickens and occasionally eating out of the feed buckets right alongside them. I frequently scrambled her an egg, a privilege she just as frequently lost each time I found her counter-surfing yet again. She spent many, many hours on my lap, drooling and kneading, shedding and purring. She was a good mouser and all-around excellent creature.

After she was diagnosed with skin cancer on her nose and ears, ranch manager Robert Can-This-Really-Be-In-My-Job-Description Selement smeared the affected parts with sunblock as often as possible, but of course she licked it right off. The cancer began quite literally to eat her nose and upper lip. We balanced our distress at her appearance with her comfort as long as we could bear. She’s now buried by the shed, near her empty food bowl, her grave awaiting a marker as colorful and lively as she was. It’s very hard not to think of cancer as another kind of predator, not to think: Eradicate. Kill. That’s what predators deserve.

In her thought-provoking Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag examines the language we use to describe some diseases and the use of disease as metaphor in non-medical arenas. A three-time cancer patient herself (she died of leukemia in 2004), she wanted to release cancer patients from the invisible but real shackles language slaps on them. Cancer, in her view, is “in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid,” encouraging radically reductive thinking and action. She particularly objects to the images of war, pollution, military or alien invasion, and genocide that cluster around cancer as a metaphor because they inevitably become confused with the individual cancer patient who becomes a loser by dying, a toxic dump site by being diagnosed, an invaded country, a helpless victim of ruthless overlords. Having cancer is a complex issue in and of itself without having to bear the burdensome, accusatory implications of the metaphors surrounding it.

As a language nerd, I wonder how to name to my own metastatic cancer because my words shape the choices I make in treatment and the rest of my life. While I can see why declaring war on cancer seems appropriate, I’ve come to find the analogy misleading at best, self-eradicating at worst. This cancer is as integrally a part of me as the coyote in my back yard, as the wolves, as any predator is a part of its distinctive ecosystem. Like a coyote, my cancer quickly learns to avoid the traps we set for it. While I don’t want to be eaten, I also don’t want to declare war on myself. Perhaps we’ll find some intimate connection we don’t know about yet between the loss of apex predators and the rise of cancer. Perhaps cancer provides some kind of service in this world of ours that has been so rapidly rearranged in the last century, when we began to use the word “predator” to describe non-human behavior and then went to war. Perhaps we need a new metaphor that allows us to live consciously and respectfully and curiously with the world around us and within us, navigating that complexity without hubris—and without metaphors of violence and condemnation.

What we’re reading
Heather: Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Martin: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

Last Thursday got off to a grisly start in our West Austin neighborhood, bringing a stark reminder of the violence inherent in the way we humans live on the land. We usually attempt, more or less successfully, to keep this violence implicit—behind the walls of slaughterhouses, say, or with the cleanup crews who scrape the roadkill off our highways—but every once in a while it bursts forth in explicit, unimaginable horror, demanding to be acknowledged, as in the aftermath of oil spills. Or, on a much smaller scale, on our street last Thursday.

It was about 6:45 a.m. and Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound and I had just set out on our usual two-mile morning perambulation. As we turned the corner to climb the first big hill I saw S. and A., two of our neighbors, standing in A.’s front yard. The light was still tenebrous, and my eyes were still filled with morning blear, so I asked them, stupidly, if everything was okay.

In response, A. gestured at the spiked black steel fence that encloses his back yard and said, “Deer caught on the fence.” I looked again, and sure enough there was a young buck hanging from the top of the fence by one back leg, kicking occasionally in an attempt to get free. Since Chula was getting increasingly agitated, I pulled her away and continued up the hill.

When we returned, some time later, A., S., and the buck were gone. I allowed myself to hope that all had turned out well, but then I heard the unmistakable pop of a gunshot—an unusual sound in our part of Austin—and then another a few seconds later. When we got to the bottom of the hill, I saw a small group of men gathered around something by the curb.

I put Chula back inside and went to investigate. The object by the curb was the buck, his mangled hindquarters covered by a tarp, his eyes rolling around in his head, which thrashed and clattered against the pavement in his death agony. An astonishing amount of blood rolled down the gutter toward the storm drain.

A. filled me in on what had happened in my absence: while S. had gone to fetch a pistol to dispatch the creature, the buck had worked his way loose from the fence, but not before hopelessly mangling both his back legs in his frantic efforts to free himself. He somehow dragged himself across one street and two front yards (including ours) before they caught up with him again. S. fired once and missed, then fired again from point-blank range; unfortunately, as they discovered later, the second shot merely went through the buck’s cheeks, causing him to get up and haul himself across the street, where he finally collapsed in the gutter.

Unwilling to fire any more shots, S. and A. asked C., the neighbor in front of whose house the buck had collapsed, if he had a hunting knife. C. went back inside and got what A. later described as “the world’s dullest hunting knife.” S. hacked at the buck with the knife until he finally slit his throat, but, as A. said, “waiting for the buck to bleed to death became too much, so S. was able to sever its windpipe, which quickly—and thankfully—brought the deer’s life to an end.”

It was at this point that I wandered up. I’d been standing there only a few moments, trying to take in what I was witnessing, when A. looked over my shoulder and said, “Heather doesn’t need to see this.” I turned around and saw her walking toward our little group, and headed back to intercept her. As we walked back up our driveway, I noticed several spots of bright red blood, signs of the buck’s last agonizing procession toward its death. There were more bloodstains on our front walkway, and indeed all across our front yard.

Later, as I hosed some of those stains off, I thought about the other deer which had gotten hung up on A.’s fence last year, another beautiful young buck who managed to gut himself on one of the spikes and hung there, head down, slowly dying. It had been difficult not to think of Jesus hanging on the cross while looking at the helpless creature.

A. and his family had been out of town on vacation, and no one knows how long that buck had been hanging there before someone found him. None of the neighbors who were there that day had a gun—we keep all our family firearms out at Madroño—and eventually we called our local veterinarian, who finally came and administered a lethal injection. We carefully lifted the dead buck off the fence, and a man from the city parks department took the body away.

Deer have been living in close proximity to us—and sustaining us—for centuries. They are associated with Artemis/Diana in Greek and Roman mythology, and four stags feed on the world tree in Norse mythology. St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, supposedly saw a crucifix on the head of a stag he’d been pursuing, and St. Giles (depicted above), the Greek hermit, lived with a doe as his only companion. The indigenous Huichol people of Mexico make offerings to the Deer of the Maize and the Deer of the Peyote, and in Shinto, deer are considered messengers to the gods. In Austin, many of us are accustomed to virtually tame deer foraging in our gardens. But the deer that died on A.’s fence, like the countless dead squirrels, raccoons, possums, and deer we see on our roads, remind us of the violence inherent when urban, automotive humanity impinges on wild (or even semi-wild) nature, or vice versa.

It’s silly to think that without us these animals’ lives would be free from suffering, pain, and terror; they all have numerous natural predators and parasites, after all, and those predators and parasites don’t go out of their way to kill humanely. (Sometimes I think it ironic that humane derives from the Middle English word for human, but the fact is we do have a choice in how we kill the animals we use.) And Madroño Ranch is, after all, in the business of selling bison meat, one of the requirements of which is first killing the bison, and we do derive income from hunting leases during deer season. But there’s something about the useless and prolonged horror of the way these deer died that hits me very hard. They weren’t shot for their meat; instead, mutilated by a symbol of human territoriality, they died slow, agonizing, gruesome deaths—victims, in effect, of our notions of private property. Where’s the redemption in that?

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael E. McCullough, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
Martin: Glen David Gold, Sunnyside

I spent last weekend at the ranch planning a new garden—or, rather, watching our dear friend Glee Ingram, an Austin landscape designer; Steve Diver, a horticulturist with Sustainable Growth Texas; and Robert Selement, Madroño’s redoubtable manager, plan a new garden as I poked at bugs, stared at the sky, and occasionally said, “Huh?”

Despite me, we made good progress. Using Glee’s initial design, we flagged the perimeter of a beautiful labyrinth-inspired shape. We thought about armadillo-, feral hog-, bison-, and raccoon-proof fencing (ha!); permaculture; gates and traffic patterns; rainwater collection; hoop-house placement; compost systems and leaf corrals; how to integrate the activities of the residents of the adjacent Chicken Palace; planting fruit trees as wind barriers; and soil and amendment ratios. We (well, some of us) got really sunburned. We felt that we’d really earned that cold beer on the porch as we watched the afternoon light turn golden while scores of swallows dove and swooped around us.

If this makes Madroño sound like Paradise and us like laborers in Eden, well, that’s what it felt like. At the same time, however, these things also happened: I watched a hungry red-tailed hawk flying low over the Chicken Palace, hoping for yet another carry-out chicken dinner. I awoke at dawn’s first glimmering to operatic squawking from the Chicken Palace but, unable to find a flashlight, had to wait until it was light to investigate. (Robert has killed more rattlers this spring than in his seven previous years at the ranch combined.) In fact, there was a dead hen, but we’re not sure what killed her; she may have been egg-bound. During my morning perambulation on the road above the lake, a dozen buzzards wheeled just overhead. I couldn’t smell anything dead, nor could I see the focus of their activity, but I remembered the shrieking white-tailed doe I’d heard at this same spot last spring. It was a heart-stopping noise. I glimpsed her thrashing through the underbrush on the cliff below me but was unable to find her again when I returned with reinforcements. Paradise it may be, but Madroño’s beauty is woven with the warp of nature’s potential and actual violence.

A good friend emailed me after my last post, saying, “I have read that if all the ants were eliminated from the planet it would cease to exist. My thought is that if all the humans somehow disappeared the earth would flourish.” I’ve had that thought as well, but I also think that, with or without us, earth’s flourishing has always involved violence and suffering. Predation, disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, and drought preceded human enviro-tinkering and will continue once we’re gone.

Given that humans are part of the natural order, it’s also a given that we will engage in violence. My definition of violence is idiosyncratic and personal: I define it as existing on a spectrum involving the imposition of one being’s (or group’s) will on another being (or group). So when you order your lollygagging child to stop staring at the ceiling and put on her school clothes, you are, according to my definition, moving into the realm of violence, albeit at the lowest possible vibration. If, as in this case, the imposition of said will is done to enable or assist the flourishing of the one imposed upon, maybe you get a free pass. I’m not sure about this. Nor am I sure how to word my definition to include violence against self, surely as invidious and terrible as violence against another. And of course violence is not restricted to the physical realm, nor is it directed only against humans. Our species’ casual, thoughtless violence against the natural world is relentless.

Unique to humans in this violent world, however, is the capacity to restrict the reach of our violence. Christians and Jews have been commanded to do so in no uncertain terms (as have the followers of virtually every faith tradition; it’s just that I’m most familiar with those two). Repeated several times in the Pentateuch is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” often misunderstood as an incitement to violent retribution. In fact, the point of the phrase was to minimize violence, not incite it; the loss of an eye could not be redeemed by murder. Leviticus 19:18 is even more to the point: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself….” Jesus thought this a good enough line to use in the Sermon on the Mount, and reinforced it by instructing his followers to rein in their violent tendencies even more tightly: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Human violence against nature is less of an issue in the Bible, as the capacity to inflict permanent damage on our world wasn’t ours at that point. But scripture does specifically address the correct treatment of animals; they were considered part of the community and were to enjoy a Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10).

Restricting the reach of violence requires recognizing its ubiquitous footprint. I see its size 7 1/2 tracks all around me: in my sarcasm, in my imperious demands that things be done my way, in my constant consideration of my own comfort, in my need to have reality ordered in a particular way. Having spent the last couple of weeks in my garden at home, I’ve become aware of the arbitrary nature of life and death: what have those cute little flowering clovers ever done to me that they should be so unceremoniously yanked up? And don’t get me started on pill bugs.

Gardens are great places for contemplating unsolvable mysteries. How else are you going to keep your mind occupied when pulling weeds? But I think there’s a deep and distinctive link between restricting our carbon footprints and our violence footprints. When we accept that our flourishing always comes at the expense of someone or something else’s flourishing, it’s hard not to be humbled. What better place than a beautiful, infuriating garden to watch such a serious drama play itself out?

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

A Very Long Time Ago, my mother brought home a Peter Max-style poster with this quotation from Henry David Thoreau: “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Each time we moved, its reappearance was an indication that I was home again despite the bewildering newness of my surroundings. Thanks to this poster, I associated “wilderness” with “home.”

During our recent and ongoing Thoreau binge, I discovered, disconcertingly, that the poster has it wrong. The quotation comes from Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” initially delivered as a (very long) lecture in 1851 and published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. “I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil,” he begins. Walking is civilized humanity’s entrée into nature, but Thoreau’s notion of walking is highly particular: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering….” For Thoreau, to walk in nature was to be a pilgrim, a “sainte-terrer,” simultaneously seeking the holy land and already graced: “It requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker.” Clearly, according to Thoreau, hoofing it to the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread does not qualify as walking.

Nor does walking have anything to do with exercise or taking a break. Walking requires attention. “[I]t is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses.” Rather, he says, “you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” (That’s a joke, I think, but even if it’s not, it ties in nicely with Martin’s post from last week.)

Thoreau found that his preferred direction for a walk was almost always southwestward. “It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient Wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon…. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” There is something specifically American in his way of walking, and he predicts that walks through the American landscape will form the American soul: “I trust that we shall be more imaginative; that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas.”

He has nothing against civilization, culture, education, the arts, but he felt that they all rely on something unexpected: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Here is where this Thoreauvian saunter has led us, gentle reader—back to that poster. In Wildness, not wilderness, is the preservation of the world.

I think the distinction is enormously important. “Wilderness” implies an external state; “wildness” is as easily internal as external. Thoreau didn’t want to erase human culture; rather, he sensed that it required wildness, both psychic and physical, in order to flourish.

In one of those beneficent coincidences, I put down Thoreau’s essay a couple of Sundays ago and discovered an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” The article described a somewhat inchoate field of study in which a clear link is made between human mental health and the health of wild nature. Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, has coined the term “solastagia” to designate “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault… a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.” A growing number of psychologists agree with Albrecht’s assertion that there is a direct connection between environmental degradation and mental illness. One of them calls not just for intact ecosystems that include large predators but for a “re-wilding of the psyche,” a term perhaps more appealing to poets and transcendentalists than to funders of academic research.

It’s an interesting proposition. What does a re-wilded psyche look like? In his book Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, David Quammen muses on the merits of what he calls “alpha predators,” among them lions, grizzly bears, Nile crocodiles, reticulated pythons, and white sharks. He considers mythical creatures as well, particularly Leviathan as he appears in the book of Job. In examining this uncomfortable perspective on humanity as meal instead of master, Quammen wants us to consider the crucial role this perspective has played “in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world.” In short, it’s important for us to know ourselves as part, not masters, of the food chain. Why? For the same reason God beats Job over the head with questions about Leviathan: who can tame such a furious beast? Can Job? Duh, no. The man-eaters remind us of the life-promoting necessity of humility. As dangerous as they are, the destruction of man-eaters, or even their relegation to zoos, would be more dangerous: we might thus be further encouraged to behave as if we were masters of the universe—a time-tested guarantee for misrule if there ever was one.

A human psyche that resonates with, or trembles at, the roars of actual alpha predators is likely to be awake in a particular way, awake to its own contingency. (If you haven’t read Mary Oliver’s “Alligator Poem,” now is definitely the time to do so.) Years ago, walking in the back reaches of Madroño Ranch, Martin and I heard the unmistakeable scream of a mountain lion. I’ve never reentered that canyon—especially when I’m alone—without taking a deep breath.

So back to the misquotation. As much as I love that old poster, and as vital as I think wilderness is, I think Thoreau got it right. Without access to wildness, without knowing the necessity of bowing before it, we cease to be fully human. And if we can’t fully inhabit our humanity, what home is left for us?

What we’re reading
Heather: John Pipkin, Woodsburner: A Novel
Martin: Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., Lincoln, Life-Size

Since we’re in the early planning stages for our first Madroño Ranch bison harvest, I’ve been reflecting on issues of carnivorocity, which my spell-checker tells me isn’t a word. It suggests “carnivorousness” instead. But I prefer my neologism because it retains echoes of the ferocity that undergirds all meat-eating.

I have been a happy meat-eater all my life, with the exception of my senior year in college, when I chose to be a vegetarian for financial and life-style rather than ethical reasons. Although I still eat meat, I’ve grown increasingly troubled by the system that produces most of it in the United States, and no longer eat meat at most restaurants or from supermarkets.

In some ways, I think that vegetarians may be more evolved than meat-eaters. According to Genesis, all creatures—not just humans—were vegetarians in the beginning. God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in it for fruit. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’” (Genesis 1:29–30). Thus modern vegetarians are hearkening back to their Edenic roots, to a human dominion over nature that reflected the aboriginal harmony and mutual respect among species—unless, of course, you happened to be a green plant.

But the story became more complicated, as good stories always do. As punishment for various transgressions, God sent a flood that only Noah and the passengers on his ark survived. In thanksgiving, Noah built an altar to the Lord and made of every clean animal and bird (although this was before the laws differentiating clean from unclean) a burnt offering. When God “smelled the pleasing odor, he said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…’” (Genesis 8:21). From that time on, humans were given animals for food, with the stipulation that they should not eat flesh that still had blood in it.

Complicated? My goodness, yes. Eating meat is God’s concession to the fact that something in the original balance of the world has been thrown out of whack—and that the smell of cooking meat is profoundly satisfying. Those who can resist the lure of barbecue are made of sterner stuff than God! The line between vegetarians and meat-eaters is the line between self-identified utopianists and realists—or between utopianists and people who don’t think about the issue. I tend toward the utopian end of the spectrum. So why do I eat meat?

In his fascinating book The River Cottage Meat Book, British chef and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out that scripture has been used to justify the most heinous acts, including the abuse of animals for human consumption. He finds the “commitment to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals at the hands of humans… to be morally superior to the commitment to ignore it.” But he also finds the pro-vegetarian argument based on the desire to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals unconvincing. Animals inevitably suffer, even without human intervention. He points out that “dying of old age” rarely occurs in nature, and that wild animals are quite likely to end their lives as food for something.

Eating meat is a reminder that we belong to the system over which we exercise dominion. We are not above the law that ordered the universe; we do not lie outside the natural order. Not long ago I took a cooking class from Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, one that took a chicken “from gallina to pollo,” as our daughter Elizabeth put it. We started with two live roosters, which we were to kill, pluck, and clean. After Jesse showed us how to hold a rooster upside down—which disorients and calms it—he put it headfirst into a lopped-off traffic cone and slit its jugular. The whole business took ten seconds or less per bird and was strangely intimate, giving me an insight into some of the labyrinthine dietary and purity laws in Leviticus. Surely we are meant to eat meat with a profound awareness of the sacrifice that doing so entails. As usual, no one has said it better than Wendell Berry:

What we’re reading
Heather: George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
Martin: Richard Price, Lush Life

I sometimes find myself feeling a little defensive about the Texas Hill Country. Martin, a San Francisco native, and I drove across the country via Texas after we graduated from college in Massachusetts. Somewhere around Bastrop, I said, “Well, we’re at the eastern edge of the Hill Country.”

“Really?” he said. “So where are the hills?”

Okay, so our hills are a little stumpy and our landscape a little scruffy, and most of the fauna (and much of the flora) will scratch, sting, or bite you. But at least we can proudly boast that nobody’s got more feral hogs than we do.

Hogs are always lurking in the background of life at Madroño—and frequently in the foreground as well (and yes, those are some of our very own hogs making their way across a creek in the photo above). They’re smart, secretive, social, fierce, and remarkably fecund; a sow can have two, and sometimes three, litters of eight a year. Robert, the ranch manager, figures that his wife Sherry shot the Madroño heavyweight title holder, which tipped the scales at about 400 pounds, and they can get significantly bigger than that. They have no predators other than humans, whom they generally leave alone. Dogs, however, they consider fair game. These hogs are expert at slashing their tusks in an upward arc, where they can easily intersect a dog’s jugular or stomach with deadly results.

One fall day a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law Daniel and I, along with his doughty dog Mojo, were walking along the top of the property. Mojo is an unspecified breed, maybe part wolverine, low to the ground with a long heavy coat, and utterly fearless. The minute he heard porcine snorting in a nearby cedar brake, he charged, even as Daniel and I screamed for him to stop. For the next few heartbeats of eternity we yelled and listened to the invisible fight as it receded down a draw. Sure that Mojo was a goner, we trudged sadly downhill to break the horrible news to my sister Isa—Daniel’s wife—and their young children.

So when Mojo popped out of the brush halfway down, he received an ecstatic and extended hero’s welcome. His ruff was stiff with pig spit; his thick fur had saved him from what were doubtless multiple tusk slashes. Many dogs aren’t so lucky.

Here’s one good thing about hogs: they make delicious sausage. Here’s another good thing about them: they’re omnivorous, eating even snakes. Here’s a(nother) bad thing: they love grubs, especially if those grubs are under wet grass. Carefully tended yards can look like a demonic rototiller has let loose its evil fury after a rain or a watering, the grass torn up and plowed under in great sheets (see below). Robert once got so furious at the persistent destruction of the lawn he’d tended so carefully at the lake house that he vowed to sleep there until he’d hunted the culprits down. After four nights and increasingly plaintive appeals from the family he’d abandoned, Robert admitted defeat. “Those pigs outsmarted me and whupped my ass in the lake house yard,” he said ruefully. “It was a humbling experience.”

Clearly, hog tales running the gamut from slapstick to philosophical will be a recurrent theme of this blog. Share your hog tales with us—and check back for more.

What we’re reading
Heather: Graham Swift, Last Orders
Martin: Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Blair, Identity Crisis

]]> http://madronoranch.com/?feed=rss2&p=292 7