well, jessie, as i was breaking out of the the city into the catskills, approaching the great stone dam with my band of earth liberationists and various forest animals that have joined forces with me in the interests of protecting their habitat (the most important of which are the bears–the mission is of their utmost interest as it interrupts the spawning of the salmon (this is not applicable to the black bear as they rarely need protein but they do work in solidarity with the other bears) and they have strong forearms which are useful for throwing boulders, though that is not to discount the help of the deer, hare, hawks, argentine ants, and raccoons and woodchucks and squirrels. any animal that could not provide brute strength at least added to the numbers and made the whole thing a spectacle that would at the very least inspire a feature film which would bring attention to the entire cause) we all halted our procession as a hawk cawed out for us to slow down and reassess the dam.
we noticed a small white figure perched atop the massive stone. we slowed down, silently approaching to discover a small westie standing upright, head held high and beady eyes looking at the hundreds of us all at once. behind him a wire-haired terrier appeared, pawing its way to the westie’s side and assuming the same position. when we were all still, all looking at the two mysterious dogs with an inexplicable reverence, silent–completely silent– the terriers took turns barking in some dialect that confused the wild animals but seemed to resonate with meaning to some of earth liberationists that had spent much of the time earlier in their lives working with domesticated animals (it was later i realized that wild and domestic animals speak a slightly different language, humans are more inclined to understand domestic animals than wild animals are. Though despite my humanity I could not entirely understand the two small dogs, perhaps my skills are minimal, or it was possibly at this time that i was devoting my attention to tending to a robin’s broken wing and trying to calm down his poor wife who was concerned about the future of her baby chicks–she dreaded watching them grow up without the lessons only a father robin could teach: singing the songs of spring, finding and judging the richest greenest breeding grounds, leading the other robins in migration).
The westie and the wire-haired terrier barked in high notes and low notes, with a strange rhythm that imitated the paws of a pack of wolves beating the earth in pursuit of an antelope, with a melody that howled like the highest ranking wolves and whimpered like the lower ones. their barks echoed through the woods, they bounced off the trees, off the backs of the raccoons, off the giant stone dam and off my shoulders, off a buck’s left antler and off his fawn’s raw hooves, off an old hare’s chipped tooth and off an earth liberationist’s hemp backpack. it is unclear to me whether this could be attributed to the makeup of the dam and the landscape itself, or perhaps the dogs had something supernatural about them.. but the latter became the most believable explanation–would you believe it!–as their words suddenly became understandable to all the humans, to all the wild animals, to any domestic animals that crept their way into our troops or were brought along by some of the humans (my friend’s gerbil, ferdinand, being one of them, who was sitting on my shoulder completely still for the first time since we had met), even to the trees and bushes and rocks and pebbles and moss, even to the dead leaves.
“we are the guardians of the dam and
you may not believe us creatures of flesh
and blood and white fur and poor
hunting skills and loyalty to the
industrial humans who consume and waste and hate and give
birth to more beings who take more from the earth
than they give and we understand that
the salmon cannot spawn as they once had
(the bears roared at this, even the black ones)
and it is not that this giant stone
dam gives us any pleasure in its physical
form, the rugged stone
hurts our paws which we can feel in our tiny dog
hearts were made for frolicking in soft wet yards and
trotting over soft smooth concrete, and the
decimated river makes us cry, makes us
wish we were like our ancestors, ancient
wolves, wish we dug dens in the woods to nurse our
pups, instead of holes in the yard to hide a small plastic
toy, wish we chased rabbits through mazes sprouting
with thick bark and large rocks and creeks and rivers and
streams and cliffs and squirrels and deer and more rabbits and
mice and owls and soft dirt, mud, dead leaves, no
man made paths or water fountains or parking
lots
but to let you destroy this dam would makes no wolves
of us, would go against our other instincts that
have led us to becoming the guardians of this dam”
“dogs, i see you
on sidewalks and patches of trimmed grass as i
fly over suburban yards
and college campuses eyeing squirrels and rabbits
[the squirrels and rabbits all twitched in unison]
with nylon strings about your necks attaching
you to a human, some of you walk alongside them as
partners, some defy them as they take no heed of the pain
cutting accross their necks as they launch themselves
at the squirrels only to be drawn up on their
hind legs and yelp against the restraint of the
string (and i am sympathetic but rejoiceful
that the rodents will be my lunch instead)
[the squirrels twitched three times each]
and others feel the same pain as they refuse to walk
while the humans drag
them in some direction”
the hawk squawked: “and you mean to tell me..”
the sun shifted its position, slid across the skydome, from slightly above the tops of the trees to directly behind the hawk. it raced a few lightyears closer to the earth, so the hawk was set on fire and we all were overwhelmed with heat and began to sweat.
[us humans and all creatures who understood electricity wondered out loud about the necessity of civilization as a perverse love for air conditioning and electric fans and freezers and ice cream overcame us for a split second until a salmon splashed out of the quickly evaporating river and flopped, slapped, padded, snapped, gurgled, choked, sang, bellowed, loved, and died in the arms of two sensitive rocks. the taller of the two rocks stroked the salmon's head and our grief directed out attention back to the mission at hand, the dam, the earth we wanted to defend, derrick jensen, and the obstacle (or could we call it a test?) put forth to us in the form of two small adorable little dogs. then our attention went to the hawk and she smiled and though the sun could have set us all on fire according to some scientists and text book writers and studious young humans we all felt cool.]
the hawk continued. “..you two small white beasts are guardians?!”
she screeched with indignation until her eyes widened and the bears raised their bear eyebrows and i wondered what they had just realized when she said
“unless you two could not have
been born domestic dogs
and you two probably dont
even want to be
wolves”
[the wolves rolled their eyes, except one who was playing with clovers and was being silently reprimanded by his mother]
the dogs look at each other, smile, they dance, they are indeed not normal dogs. we all knew that though. we all sensed it when we saw them on the dam, but i’m sure most of us probably did not wonder about their birth.
taking the hawk’s speculation into account, i waited for the dogs to change shape. they only blinked. the wire-haired terrier smiled and licked her paw. a young human’s cat’s universe expanded as she realized it was not only cats who lick their paws.
the same dog-song came out of their mouths as they barked:
“we are the guardians of the dam
let no beast touch it, animal or human
we are guardians just as the hawk is a hunter of
small mammals, just as its claws could do no harm to us nor
our breathren”
[the hawk spit on the dogs, the spit evaporated in the heat]
“just as our fur is white, just as the sun is yellow”
[it seemed grey to us]
“just as we stand here, just as we sing the dog-song now for
all creatures to hear, for all creatures cannot
defy the guardians by force
and if you wish to bring down the dam
you cannot do it with force”
the militant liberationists felt the rhetoric against pacifism bubble in their throats but the way the dogs sang was so loud and so melodic and so catchy they could not interrupt it
the hawk smiled “and i still believe
you are not truly dogs”
and the bears finally spoke (it was a spectacle, of course, because bears rarely speak, i think)
“the guardians may be any creature or being or thing of lack of things, it doesn’t matter.” a grizzly bear looked up at the dogs: “why defend the dam? and what do you wish we would do?”
a sigh of relief came from the impatient and busy animals who wanted to ask this from the very beginning and regretted sitting through the speeches when they had a winter to prepare for.
the dogs paced back and forth along the top of the dam, wincing as their paws hit sharp bits of stone, but not removing their eyes from the animals. they did this for a few minutes while i thought to myself how terrible of a writer i am, then finally they spoke:
“you must speak to the dam”
we all took turns speaking to the dam but it responded to no one. it was still–of course, it was stone–but even the rocks that spoke to it received no response. one fox cub thought the dam had said something to him, but it was just a baby bee in his ear.
the foxes yawned and scowled and shuffled and grew impatient. we wondered if all creatures had spoken to the dam, i wondered if foxes were really sly and cunning like folktales said they were, or if they were just always bored. ferdinand, who had yet to try, crawled down off me, hopping onto a hare (remember they were crouched low on the ground, so it was not much of a jump)’s back, creeping onto its head, using its little paws to leap onto a nearby raccoon’s head. he hopped from animal head to animal head, pausing to bow at the recently passed salmon, winking at the yawning foxes, kissing the bear whose head was hurt by the hawk’s talons, saluting the hawk, and finally leaping into a small hole about twice the size of his body in the center of the dam.
he sang his own gerbil song, which sounded much less like a song and more like a hundred exploding airconditioners and the stomping of fair trade vegan shoes on the street and the squishy sloshy sound that wet earthworms make as they work through compost and bob dylan tuning a homemade guitar made from recycled wood and fire and rain. the dam shook at the noise. the westie and the wire-haired terrier, wise and supernatural as they seemed, were as surprised and stung with fear as any mortal creature could be. the dam rattled and shook and croaked in a rhythm that complimented ferdinand the gerbil’s performance. and the deer, who had been silent and still through all the speeches and songs and changes of climate, cried and bawled and sighed along with the music. the rabbits stood on their hind legs, the hole where ferdinand bellowed with love (and freedom? liberty? equality? unity? humanity or spirtuality? understanding? environmental sustainability? progression? symbiosis? positivity? rainbows and kitten fur and soft bi-colored flower petals?) expanded–small cracks emanated from the hole and cut through the rest of the stone dam, more cracks formed from these ones, and more cracks formed from those. they made their way through the damn’s smooth face, breaking the stone apart, drawing black lines in certain directions, with a sense of purpose and in a gerbil rhythm, so as to create a line-drawing of a nose right in the center of the dam.
the cracks continued, drawing (under the nose) a mouth, then (above both images) two big apologetic eyes. ferdinand took a bow and hopped out of the hole and onto a bed of moss as the water from behind, at the high end of the dam, burst and roared and gushed and bawled and blew its way through the tear ducts drawn in the eyes. and the westie jumped onto the right eye’s stream of riverwater tears and the wire-haired terrier hopped onto the left, as they rode the tears down the dam and turned into water. then, parts of the dam itself turned into water, while other parts turned into salmon (derrick jensen, who was swimming with his dog all the way in california, smiled and worked out a new book in his head, sherman alexie scowled as he felt as though someone was copying off of him again, you (jessie) probably remember when your barista gave you coffee on the house and you could hear the rockie mountains giggle at you and wondered what had just happened).
the river began recovering and growing, it reached for the hawk which was still on fire and put it out, it whipped the sun back into place, and it poured itself into every human’s water bottles and laughed and smiled with everyone, even the people who laughed and smiled with evil intentions or while counting money or dead puppies.
nothing was left of the dam except for a small piece of stone which shot up and careened through the hot mass of air where the sun had been sitting and watching and landed on the moss beside ferdinand and then formed itself into a gerbil of neutral gender and nonexistent sex with whom ferdinand immediately fell in love. i questioned whether or not life was really like a disney movie as the two went swimming together in the river squeeking at each other (happily?).
the foxes yawned and went home to sleep or to find something more interesting to look at. the other animals resumed their animal lives except for a few select animals who went on to become speakers and authors (animals, i learned, scrawl things into trees and dirt with their claws or teeth and this is analogous to human writing) and activists. ferdinand and his soulmate grew tired of swimming eventually, and were tired of avoiding the bear claws that tried to catch the salmon, and came home with me (as i was tired of seeing so many things and having to write about them). the world continued being itself, of course, and the sun pretended it had never moved. i told this story to most everyone i knew, all of whom believed me and suggested i post it online for you and everyone else to hear, and thus it has been done and i leave you to reflect on what happened, perhaps considering that it happens all the time all over earth and even on other planets that permit it.
