Encounters with The Four Kind

Encounters with the Third Kind: Cat, Dog, Rain
? 2003 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

In the encounters between humans and animals there are three Kind. The
First Kind.
which are the most common, are the animals we kill. The Second Kind are
the animals,
very rare, that hunt Human Kind. The Third Kind are domestic animals
that we keep as
pets. There is no Fourth Kind. Those animals are extinct.

* * *

Crawfish, even his wife called him that, found the cat shivering and
soaking wet at the
back of the dock where he kept the aluminum skiff he used to go
fishing. Obviously the
cat had fallen in, or someone had thrown him in, and somehow he'd
managed to climb
out on his own. Crawfish opened the door to the pickup, they looked at
each other for a
couple of minutes, and Crawfish said, "Are you coming, or what?" The
cat didn't have to
be asked twice and sat there hanging onto what was left of the
upholstery with all his
claws out as the truck went down the road, the blue fenders clinging to
the chassis by the
rust, Crawfish not even trying to get her out of first until the rutted
dirt finally met the
tarmac.

"I'm calling him Toughguy," Crawfish said.
"Why don't you call him divorce," said Mary Louise.
Mary Louise did not like cats.
"What was I supposed to do?" Crawfish said. He still had his fishing
hat in his hands.
"You should ask about stuff like this," Mary Louise said.
"I am asking now," Crawfish said.
"You should ask before."
"Well I didn't anticipate - "
"You should also of asked Ruckus."
Ruckus was the dog.
"I'm going to bed," Crawfish said.
"Not in my room your not," said Mary Louise and took her tea into the
sitting room
without bothering to turn the light on. When she was really angry she
preferred it that
way. She listened to the strange, almost musical rhythm the boards made
beneath
Crawfish on his way upstairs, the way they had ever since that crane
came down on him.
It was only days before the mill closed for good and she knew that
although he never said
so, he was always in some degree of pain. It was times like this she
wished she hadn't
given up smoking. Ruckus came over to the couch and put his head on her
lap. She sat
there stroking his head in the dark and somehow, it did not surprise
her when she felt the
thump on the other cushion. The dog stirred a little, as if he'd raised
his eyebrows the
way he did when he knew you were talking to him but didn't quite get
it, and exhaled.
The clock struck. She'd promised Mrs. Taft she would move those rose
bushes tomorrow
before the party, after she finished the wash, and that meant an early
start. She would
have gone up herself now except it was advisable to put Crawfish in his
place every once
in a while, and it did not pay to miss an opportunity. She heard the
cat begin to purr, a
deep, rolling rumble that went well with the rain plunking dully
against the tin roof. She
put her other hand out, and Toughguy leaned into it showing her where.
"Some
Toughguy," Mary Louise said, and closed her eyes.

Encounters with the Second Kind: Zambezi
? 2003 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

The animals that hate us - and there are animals that hate us - do so
for cause, and are
smart enough to remember what it was. Humans hunt hippopotamus for
their meat and
teeth and for the hell-of-it. The hippos all know this. When they come
for you it is not
because they are hungry. Walrus, although they will eat you, are in
this category
whereas for polar bears and crocs it is simple hunger, and the
unchallengable knowledge
of superiority in their realm, that drives them. Also that you are
about the right size and
shape and perhaps, flavor. People who tell you of their peaceable
encounters with
grizzlies do not make those claims for polar bears. Those who tried
have already been
eaten. This is true, as is the story which follows.

* * *

The River was huge and flat and deceptively calm. An elephant, an old
bull, his tusks as
thick as trees was grazing quietly on one of the rafts of water
hyacinth. The River
dispersed between the rafts in narrow channels, suddenly incognito, its
enormous breadth
not so much divided as absorbed. The elephant did not notice the boats,
or ignored them.
They were glad of this.

The boats drifted through the choking green and into the small courses,
the canoers
feeling secure now in the closeness of the banks. The guide did not
share in that
perception. The water below was opaque and yielded nothing. From his
heavily loaded
canoe, its freeboard barely above water, the guide could not see beyond
the marsh grass
or above the banks, and he did not see the pod until they were much too
close. 'HIPPOS
TO THE LEFT! EVERYONE HARD RIGHT!'

The English woman and her daughter were in the last canoe. The daughter
was steering.
She panicked and went straight into the pod. The guide paddling
furiously against the
current was yelling 'Other way! Other way!' when he felt the canoe leap
under him. The
hippo breaching beside the canoe had been, like him, only startled.
Then it got angry. It
bit the canoe in half.

One of the clients was coming for him. The others were screaming, he
could see their
mouths were open but for some strange interaction of adrenaline and
shock he could not
hear them, and for a long time he could not understand what they were
upset about. He
never heard the croc either but when it took him he thought, 'Oh,
that's what they were
so upset about,' and the croc went into a death spin, and dragged him
down. This too took
place in complete silence. There was no pain, and perhaps because of
that no more fear,
as if the whole thing was a play that he was watching from some tiny
catwalk anchored
far above the stage. Unexpectedly, this perception of liberating height
became a
breathless crushing depth. Then, at the last minute before he would
have blacked out he
saw the silver surface of the river coming toward him and he was back
in the world,
awake, and alive. There was a canoe alongside him now and although no
words would
come he was smiling, and when he reached up to haul himself out, he
only had one arm.

Encounters with the First Kind: Riddle
? 2003 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

The first Kind, in the final analysis, is every Kind for there is no
longer any living thing
we are not able to destroy, including our own Kind and the womb from
which we came.
The capacity is permanent and certain. The question is what we will
do.

* * *

"Look!" Leah said, "it's a -"
She turned to Tilli.
"Mom!" Tilli said, "there's a skunk on the birdfeeder!"
"Hardi, har, har."
"It's there all right, Lois," Leah said. The 'Lois' was an
afterthought. Leah had recently
asked her parent's what their names were, and she was practicing.
"What's the skunk's name?" Lois said. She closed the drier door and set
the dial to
"Incinerate." Nothing in the house was safe since Tilli bought the
labeler for her science
project.
"No really really," Tilli said.
"It's a raccoon, not a skunk," Lois said.
"It's starving," Tilli said, "I'm getting the cat food."
"What if Murray comes back?" Leah said.
Lois could see the teats hanging down on the raccoon's belly. She
imagined the dry little
mouths; Murray had been missing almost 2 months.
"When Murray comes back, Sweetpea, we'll get some more," Lois
said.
"Raccoon!" Tilli said gently, and the raccoon climbed down off the
feeder and looked up
at her, and Tilli poured half the bag out the window.

Apparently the raccoon did not see very well because it was eating more
by feel than
sight.
"It has paws like hands," Tilli said and Leah whispered, "and it's got
babies."
"How did you know that?" Lois asked, immediately wishing she
hadn't.
Leah just pointed.
She heard Tilli inhale, and then she saw them. Tiny paws, a little
bandit face poking up
between them, and another face, and one more, and another, squeezing
under the lowest
rung of the deck rail or flopping over it, fur fluffed out like kittens
and hardly more
steady than that on their feet. There were five of them. Lois threw
down the rest of the cat
food and they watched them eat.

"I can't believe, married to me, you did that," David said.
"David calm down."
"When? After it comes through the screens some night and eats one of
the kid's hands
off? Or after they get rabies?"
"Who got rabies?" Tilli said. She was just outside the doorway with
Leah behind her.
"What are you guys doing up?" David said.
Tilli shrugged.
"Honey, Daddy thinks the raccoons aren't happy here. That's why they
were so hungry.
So in the morning, he's going to catch them - "
"Don't hurt them!" Leah said.
"It's a 'live trap' Sweetpea. It won't hurt them one bit," Lois said,
meaning it.
"That's right," David said.
"Do they go to another house?" Leah asked.
"He kills them," Tilli said and Leah began to cry.
"Tilli! Daddy takes them to a beautiful spot out in the woods, where
they can roam and
be safe - "
"What are they going to eat?" Tilli said. "They'll starve. Or get eaten
by a coyote."
"Like Murray," Leah sobbed.
Lois looked at David, who was looking at his shoes.
"Daddy catches them, in the live trap, so it doesn't hurt them," David
said. "Then he
takes them - "
Leah's eyes were red and her mouth open just a little, all her
attention turned toward him
now. He glanced at Tilli, the way people do when they don't want to but
can't help
themselves. He did not look at Lois at all.
Lois started to say something -
"- Daddy covers the cage," David continued, "so they think it's night
and they fall asleep,
then he - " Tilli was leaning away from him, her jaw muscles working.
It reminded him
of that time when he was teaching her to ride a two-wheeler and she
broke her arm. She
didn't cry then, and she wasn't going to cry now.
"Daddy what?" Leah said.
"I put the cage in the water. And they drown."
Leah let out a wail
"What is wrong with you!" Lois said, and Tilli ran and Lois followed,
scooping up Leah
on her way out.

He heard the back door slam. Lois' car started. He waited for the horn
- she always
tapped the horn before she backed out - and he went to poke around in
the frig. Since
Lois had gone back to her practice, part-time, he'd taken over the
shopping. She said he
shopped like he was provisioning for war. When you opened the door you
couldn't even
see the light go on. Despite which he always forgot something. There
was maple syrup,
but no blueberries. He'd been promising pancakes. Sunday. Early. A
surprise - if he
wasn't living in his truck by then. He looked at his watch. He had
maybe ten minutes to
get to the farm stand. The phone started to ring. He figured it was
Lois on her cell and let
the machine get it. It was someone about burial insurance. Yesterday it
was timeshares,
reverse mortgages, and free buses to the casinos. He knew it would help
if he took his
parent's names off the phone, but his father'd left his mother on, and
he'd left them both.
It wasn't until the voice switched to Yiddish that he realized the call
was personal. He
couldn't find the cordless, ran upstairs, caught the word "Partizaner"
and in English,
"reunion," ran back down and the voice said "Probably the last time"
and hung up,
without leaving a name, or number. Now he had five minutes.

The lights were out when David got home and Lois' car was in the
driveway, the engine
still warm. She'd taken them out for pizza probably. He found her
sitting in his place at
the kitchen table with his cold dinner in front of her in a covered
dish.
"We could just chase them away," she said. She wouldn't look at
him.
"You fed them, Lois. They're not going anywhere and you know it."
"So they won't go anywhere. We'll deal with it."
"Deal with it? I'm the goddamn Animal Control Officer! How's that going
to look?
How am I going to deal with it?"
"I guess we'll all find our own way. Goodnight," Lois said.

There was one Sam Adams left and he cracked it and went out on the
deck. There were
no stars, just the faint glow that lingered late that time of year
where the sun had gone
down. Across the marsh, one of the low-pressure sodiums on the town
landing came on,
blinked out, came on again, the initial silvery light finally giving
way to a sickly
industrial orange, overwhelming the twilight. The air was thick enough
to swim. He
tipped up the beer, finished it, wished he had another. Dog catcher. He
shook his head.
Should've volunteered for something else. "Fireman," he said out loud
and put the empty
down on the deck, and saw the raccoon.

The raccoon was near the copper basin they put out for the birds. There
was water spilled
all around it and he realized she'd been there all the time. She was up
on her haunches,
her paws dropped down at her sides and he knew if he moved she would
run but that if he
didn't she would continue to stand there, waiting, as if she had a
question, one he could
not make out. He stared back at her, his eyes fixed in their sockets so
that they took in her
whole face rather than any part of it and it seemed to him as if the
raccoon was also doing
this, looking at him all at once, like two mirrors suspended opposite,
an echo at the speed
of light.

Encounters with the Fourth Kind: Sight
? 2003 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

The creatures that have vanished leave traces, of their flesh,
imprinted in stone and
opalized bone, but not of their Being. Studying dead things we can
protect the difference,
us from them, the artifact as fragile as the lie.

* * *
In the winter they jacked deer. No one bothered them back there and
there did not seem
to be any reason not to. They hardly had to leave the porch. The meat
went straight into
the deep freeze, the one hidden in the big shed behind the green
Packard Coupe his
father'd found in a barn. When the freezer was full, they stopped. The
Packard was still
there. Generations of mice had made a warren of the rumble seat and
weather, creeping
through the siding and the holes in the roof had rusted off most of the
color. The freezer
was there too, long past any use.

The hunting itself he'd never cared for, never liked loud noises or the
taste of gamy flesh
he'd come to associate with poverty, the odor that went with butchering
a fresh kill. He
seldom fired the Purdy his father let him use, never hit anything when
he did. The recoil
was too much for him, into his 20's he never weighed more than 115
pounds. He went
though, even after he was old enough to say no if he'd wanted. He liked
it out there. They
both did. It was the only frame, drunk or sober, in which his father
was contented, where
all the pieces fit. He had seen his father, many times, point to the
tree line two miles away
where, after a minute, or five minutes, a ten-point buck and his harem
would come
cautious out of the wood to browse. Or his father would turn, suddenly,
his face skyward
framed by a low crescent moon and a meteor would crease the sky from
one compass
point to the other, the stardust dripping from its trace, like tears.
Once, when he was
eight, he thought he had it figured out. "You're an Indian," he said.
And his father
narrowed the huge black brows that cantilevered from his face as live
as caterpillars and
said, "an Irish Indian." When he told them that at school they laughed
and then they beat
him up. His father was waiting for him, like he knew. "Be tough," he
said, "or be
nothin'." Not that they ever talked. It would have startled the
game.

The heavy plank across the narrow end of the river was mossy under his
feet and he
scrambled over like a tightrope walker almost on his toes. It had been
a very wet spring
and summer, right into August and the mosquitoes had been ferocious.
Last night it
suddenly dipped to the fifties and in the morning, first time since
winter the crows had
been his wakeup, the calls of the songbirds having vanished all at
once. Fall would be
early, but if the bugs knew they didn't give a damn. As soon as the sun
was down they
came on in clouds. The only relief was a stiff breeze, out in the
marsh, clear of the lee.

He made his way in no particular direction, letting the land lead. He
heard the chime of
leaping bait falling back to water, the rustle of tall grasses at
river's edge gone early to
seed. Through the worn canvas of old shoes he felt the broken burrows
of mouse and
mole where the weasel had been. On the bank of a meander he found the
blow-holes of
fiddler crabs, the track of herons, stalking, the shallow prints
impressed in the clay like
fossil leaves. He traced them with his palms, barely touching. Here too
deer had come to
drink, hooves sinking deep in soggy ground. He plunged his fingers in -
Buck. Big one.
Must've just missed him - and Tha-Dumpf! That first leap breaking to a
run, the woosh
of parting water... He smiled. No one taught him to read sign like
that, by feel alone nor
to know the birds in flight by sound, owls great and small,
hummingbirds followed to the
nest only by the beat of their wings. No one ever showed him. It was
all on his own.
There was not a living thing he could not find or follow, even
now.

There was always a certain reluctance toward returning. He'd never
needed more than a
couple hours sleep and there was always the problem of what to do.
Especially now. He
used to have his carving, the work was always in demand and he could
sell as much or as
little as he wanted. He had few expenses, no vices. Once he'd wanted a
wife and a garage
filled with bicycles and baseballs and in old age the sound of a
familiar car in the drive,
sons and daughters come home for Christmas through all that snow with
children of their
own. He'd mourned like a swan, for years. In time, the life he'd lived
and the life he
could have lived became equivalent. He was as at home out of doors as
in, he wanted for
nothing. It was like the carving, really. Some of them he sold to keep
the others - the red-
wing in the bedroom on a basswood reed, the beak, the lilt of the body
so right he was
sure he'd heard it call; the kestrel he had over the door, it's breast
ruffled as if in a high
wind; the bittern by the fireplace, shock still, half-hidden in a
thicket of spartina carved
from grapevine, one stalk at a time, the family of raccoons made from
one single piece of
oak that lived in the kitchen cupboard. Once he dreamed they had all
run away. He woke
with a start and closed all the windows. Now unfinished work covered
the old dining
room table, the wood vise clamped to the top showing rust. The cuts on
his hands no
longer healed. Last year he'd dropped a block of ebony on his foot and
they had to take
off three toes. There was no insurance. He'd already sold most of what
he never wanted
to part with. Closing the windows had not helped.

He stood up, wiped his hands on his kerchief. The mud had the smell of
sulfur in it. Not
unpleasant, an old smell. Glacial. 10,000 years? Mastodon roamed here.
What was that
like? What was it like to them?

He felt the trunk, prehensile, moving as if with its own mind, the
mobility of it
and there were nostrils on the end, he could flare them, and tiny
whiskers, as
sensitive as eyelashes. Breathing, the air seemed big, like inhaling a
night sky.
Seeing, the dark came alive, an intense polarity of reddish
black-and-white. He
swung his head, measuring the great curling tusks, following their root
back
nearly to the roof of his skull. But what stood out most was how
fragile
everything seemed to him, boulders seemed hollow, trees as tender as
grass, rivers
were like puddles. He felt cold wind against the shag of hair on his
hide and
turned, expecting to see a wall of ice but there was none, only his own
self
drifting back to himself.

He was coherent, knew he'd either taken too much insulin or not enough,
but he was not
prepared to let it go for that. Somewhere below the bones were talking,
leading, as sure as
a compass, as directed as a shooting star. Planets wheeled above him.
Mars once close,
had kept its distance for 60,000 years. Now it was back, as if it had
never been away. He
closed his eyes. Somewhere beyond the tree line a carillon tolled the
hour of prayer,
telling him even though he could no longer see it that day was coming
and soon
everything would be light.

7