NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW

Animals Seen Through Childs’ Eyes

By David Frey, 3-10-08

Author Craig Childs has a gift for making even the mundane seem profoundly significant. He also has a penchant for seeking out outdoor experiences that are anything but mundane. The combination makes for writing that is gripping and poetic. With one hiking boot in adventure writing, another in naturalist essay, his latest book, The Animal Dialogues, includes some of Child’s most moving prose.

Childs’ natural habitat is the wild. Usually that’s the desert Southwest (even though it’s southern Colorado that he calls home), but his adventures recalled here have taken him far afield. The Animal Dialogues brings us along with him for encounters with predators and prey, including some that most of us would either die to have or die while we were having them.

These aren’t stories that reduce the animal kingdom to fuzzy cartoon critters. Nor do they raise animals to some sort of divinity, despite Childs’ obvious reverence. He tries to steer clear of anthropomorphism, and when he indulges, he acknowledges it. Yet it’s impossible to steer clear of it completely. The premise at the heart of this essay collection is the lessons that we can learn from the animal world. How can we learn from them if we don’t see a little of ourselves in them?

Childs seeks out wildness in his forays into some of the wildest country he can find, from the deserts of northern Mexico to the remote reaches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In the animals he writes about, he captures – if captures is the right word – that same sense of wildness. Predators kill. Prey die. It’s not a pretty world, but it is a beautiful one. Here are coyotes and camels, mountain lions and mountain goats, eagles, elk and rattlesnakes, seen (or sometimes just barely glimpsed) through a naturalist-poet’s eyes.

In perhaps the most gripping tale, Childs finds himself engaged in a sort of slow-motion dance of predator and prey with a mountain lion. Most couldn’t expect to escape alive. Childs doesn’t flinch in this close call, and in his writing, he doesn’t back away from honoring the spirit of an animal that nearly cost him his life.

“It steps to my right, coming clear around, and I synchronize myself with it. It is not focused on my knife, my body, or even my eyes. It is moving intently at some point through me, inside of me, perhaps the single point where life itself is seated. It has happened so often that a mountain lion has launched straight at a hunter or a field biologist who has a sidearm leveled at its head. The mountain lion does not stop and is shot point-blank, dead. Why is that? A coyote or a bear will know when a person has a gun, and will often behave much differently. But the mountain lion is a creature with too great a nature to see a gun or a knife. It is so focused that the rest of the world goes silent. When a lion is killed, it is a strange death, like something stolen from an animal that should be impervious to weaponry, like the Ghost Dancers who died believing that bullets could not find them.”

Childs, who has been a frequent National Public Radio commentator, first attracted widespread attention with his book The Secret Knowledge of Water,">The Secret Knowledge of Water, an uncommon meditation on the powerful effect of water in the driest of places. Much of the water he found was gathered in scattered potholes across the desert he was traversing, mapping those potholes as he traveled. The Animal Dialogues is a bit like those potholes. They are a collection of glimpses into nature that, put together, create a view of the animal world through Childs’ eyes.

For the most part, The Animal Dialogues is a reprint of his 1997 book Crossing Paths”>Crossing Paths. Several new passages have been added, his taxonomy expanded to include dogs, jaguars, peregrine falcons, ravens, deer, and a few amphibians, lizards, insects and sea creatures. If it’s a bit like a greatest hits album, with a couple new tracks thrown in to cajole the consumer, it’s hard to complain if it gives us a second chance to find some of Childs’ work we might have missed.

Part of what makes these tales so rich is Childs’ gift for finding depth in unexpected details. Discovering a raccoon trapped in a Utah canyon, the author unfolds a meditation on life and death in the wild, and what role humans play there. Amid coyotes in the Colorado Rockies, he discovers a secret society that despite his longings, he decides is better left alone.

Among the most magical episodes is an encounter with ravens in a Utah canyon. Despite Childs’ scientific inclinations, he can’t shake the sense that these birds are in the midst of a bizarre ritual to which he was not invited.

“The sky became small, canyon-tightened. I thought that soon I would come upon a handful of ravens picking apart a fallen bighorn sheep or some other piece of death the desert left out for them. I lightened my step so they would not hear me. But they did hear me. They knew I was coming, and they all stared down the canyon so that when I walked into view, I stopped in my tracks. Ravens were everywhere, a parliament of them convened on both canyon walls, shoulders drawn, wings pulled against their bodies. They were large-bodied birds, each silent, each perched on a ledge or boulder tip. No one moved, even to ruffle feathers. Speechless, I began counting, and stopped at 15, leaving most uncounted. It was a crowd. A mob.

“Each kind of bird has a name for its gathering. Geese have ‘gaggles,’ seagulls ‘flocks.’ Ravens come in ‘unkindnesses.’ Until now, I did not fully understand the meaning of the term. I swear they were scowling at me.”

Childs comes to his writing with a naturalist’s eye, a poet’s voice and often, a journalist’s sensibility. The combination makes for tales that sing with significance as he seeks lessons that animals can teach their hominid neighbors.

“Times that I have seen the animals have been like knife cuts in fabric,” Childs writes. “Through these stabs I could see a second world.”

In The Animal Dialogues, Childs cuts through our world, too, and offers glimpses into this second world through his eyes. It is a remarkable place to be.

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