Rascal

I hated to think about that terrible war which had been killing and wounding millions of men ever since the year my mother died. Here we were, safe and remote from the war, and worrying about such small and unimportant things as whether Oscar would get a whipping when he got home, and how to feed and raise a little raccoon.

Perhaps a psychologist might say that I had substituted pets for a family. I had a human family, of course—interesting, well-educated, and affectionate. But Mother was dead, my father often away on business trips, my brother Herschel fighting in France, and my sisters Theo and Jessica now living their adult lives.

We were probably as happy as anyone can be in our world.

It made me sad that I could not have known Kumlien, and walked the woods with him, learning every bird and flower and insect. I had been born too late, it seemed, even to hear a whippoorwill.

At the age of twelve he had fallen slightly in love with a pretty Indian girl, so light-skinned and delicate of feature that my father was sure she was more than half French. The Indians had moved on, like the waterfowl they hunted, and with them went the girl, whom he never saw again.

I always enjoyed these farm excursions, particularly the opportunity to watch colts and calves high-tailing through the pastures. The young of almost every species, it seemed, were glad to be alive, Rascal included.

We walked on in silence approaching the forty acres of virgin forest which Kumlien had protected from the ax. It is gone now, but it was there when I was a boy, a sanctuary and a memorial, haunted by the spirit of the gentle Swede who played his flute for the whippoorwills.

My mother had told me that seeds carry in their “memory” the whole complex pattern of stem and leaf and flower and fruit, and she had shown me how the stamens and pistils begin the seed-making process all over again. It seemed miraculous then, and no less miraculous now.

I was suddenly completely happy, in love with the loony world and with my father and Rascal. I didn’t care where I slept, or how many times I tipped out of my hammock.

It seemed a miracle that anything as young as fingerling trout or grouse chicks or my small raccoon could move along this watercourse among boulders as old as the world—the new life of this very season amid granite predating even the first life on the globe.

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber—that day on the river: transcribed in Brule water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

Then I had a sad but happy thought. If Ursa Major, the Great Bear, was my constellation, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, was by natural right Rascal’s constellation. Long years after we were both gone, there we still would be, swimming across the midnight sky together.

After a while I couldn’t stand it any longer and I went out and opened the wire door. He clung to me and cried and talked about it, asking that unanswerable question.

So I took him to bed with me and we both fell into a fitful sleep, touching each other again and again throughout the night for reassurance.

Now the trunk had been cut for rifle stocks, as had so many walnut trees that season. I found a red “writing stone” in the creek and in big, angry letters printed on the stump: DAMN THE MAN WHO CUT THIS TREE.

I looked up at my father hoping he would say something adequate, but he didn’t. So I tried to be gracious.

“Oh, Sterling, what a charming little animal.” She put an arm around me as we watched, and I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to tell her how much she meant to me.

I think she knew without words, because when I looked up she was not laughing, only smiling tenderly.

I burned my fur catalogues in the furnace and hung my traps in the loft of the barn, never to use them again. Men had stopped killing other men in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept.

It is good to remember that I was given those swift and shining skates early enough in my life so that I could use them for three happy winters. By the fourth winter I was in a wheel chair. And even when I learned to walk, I was never able to skate again.

“And then you could put it all down,” Aunt Lillie said, “the way it is now . . . case weather, the fog, the lantern light . . . and the voices of the men—hear them—coming in for breakfast. You could keep it just like this forever.”

I left the pecans on a stump near the waterline, hoping Rascal would find them. And I paddled swiftly and desperately away from the place where we had parted.