In the Company of Ravens

So I'm hiking up out of Red Rock Crossing Park, back up to Slick Rock and the Secret Slick Rock Trail, the one that got me in this fix in the first place, because I could not resist its name, or the promise it held of finding something secret, something special. The turkey vulture has given me several close passes and some of his invisible, totemic wisdom. And then two ravens hove into view.

 

I could tell they were young birds first by their voices. I haven’t been around breeding ravens in my lifetime, having lived out of their range, but this spring in the New River Gorge area of West Virginia, I heard what had to be a young raven yelling for its parents in the mist. It was a high-pitched, bleating whoop, an adenoidal shadow of the mellow toots and deep honks the bird would make later in life.

These were yelling. A lot. They took an immediate interest in me, circling just overhead, dangling their legs, talking talking talking.

 

Well. I thought perhaps that this is something ravens do in Sedona, that they don’t do elsewhere. I wondered if people hand feed them. I still wonder that. I wonder about everything I saw in Sedona. Whatever made the ravens come and seek me out, I was bursting with joy at the simple fact that they did. “Waugh! Waugh!” they called again and again, as they circled and played in the updraft over Slick Rock.

I spoke softly to them, then louder, as it became clear they were not afraid of me in the least. I remembered lying down on a clifftop at Cape St. Mary’s in Newfoundland, maybe 33 years ago, on a fine, cool, foggy, drizzly summer day, wondering what the ravens would do if I feigned death.  I got my answer through slitted eyes as they quartered lower and lower. Finally I heard the soft plop of a raven landing on the turf just a few feet behind my head. I got an instant, primal image of that hefty black beak plunging into my eye socket and sat up flailing, a human windmill. I was doing that GET ‘EM OFF ME ROSIE thing Humphrey Bogart did in “African Queen” when he dove down to fix the prop on their leaky old boat and came up covered in great fat leeches.  Shudder!

I never knew the raven’s true intent in landing behind my head, but I wasn’t going to risk an eye by letting him show me. Why else would he land there? Curiosity, certainly. But maybe because he thought I was dead, and tasty too.

This was an altogether different thing. The energy coming off these young ravens was playful, benign, almost doglike. They wanted to see what I was up to. They wanted to know if I had anything for them. They wanted to play with me.  I was laughing at their antics, as one kept ducking his head between his dangling legs in flight.  It reminded me of a kid riding a bike hands-free, just trying to impress whomever might be watching.

I began to make a game of trying to photograph the two against good backdrops, and, as I do with all my animal and bird subjects, I talked them through it. “Ahh. Red rock. Goood. Nice one. Let’s try that again!”

“You are BEAUTIFUL! Well, after a good molt you’ll be even more beautiful. But what a start you’ve made!”

I could see the pink corners on their mouths that told me they were youngun’s. That, the dull brown matte juvenile plumage, and their high teenage voices were the tipoffs. I wondered if adult ravens would behave this way. I never got the feeling they’d been hand-raised; no, they were truly wild, just unafraid, bold. 

“This is nice, but do you think you could fly over by Cathedral Rock for me? You’d look so good against that backdrop!”

To my amazement, they turned and beat their way over to the Rock, circling against it. I don’t think they spoke English. I think they picked up on the picture I had in my head, on the pure electric communication passing between our minds. I was visualizing a picture of them against the Rock, and I think they saw it in their heads. I also believe they were enjoying my enthusiastic reaction to their antics. I think it perfectly possible that they knew I was photographing them, and wanted to put on a good show for the camera. Ravens don’t miss much. Their eyesight, the things ravens must notice, put us humans to shame, make us look like we’re moving through life with our eyes closed.

 The ravens returned from Cathedral Rock and flew at eye level and what felt like arm's length, back and forth in front of me. By now, they certainly knew I had no food for them. I barely had enough water for me. But I was headed for my car, and all would be well.

Finally they landed.

Their shadows on the rock--were they enjoying them as much as I was?

All of it. The communication we shared, the simple but obvious joy in each other's presence. 

Their finding me was like coming upon someone in the middle of nowhere, and saying Hello! Hello! How's it going? Where are you from? You'd never do that in the grocery store. But out here, meeting someone is special.

 I felt I was in the presence of someone, perhaps people I knew, in raven form. The birds' interest in me was too intense, too friendly, too joyful to be anything other than directed. By whom, I could not know. I might guess, but I'd never know.

All I knew is that I felt accompanied. 

Entertained. Loved, even.

Not alone.

If that be your only message, ravens, it was received with joy and great humility. 

What an honor this was, to be for a little while in the company of ravens. 

Dakota Miracle

There are still white bison in Jamestown, North Dakota. They're in a big enclosure at the National Buffalo Museum. As you're driving along Highway 94 headed west you can sometimes see them, if you're very lucky. I'd never seen them from the road. My friend Ann Hoffert, who drives there all the time, has never seen them from the road. 

So I'm coming out of Fargo and it's very late, getting dark, and I'm trying to make it to Carrington, 2 1/2 hours west if you go 75-80 mph. I'm exhausted and discombobulated and I've had things coming at me to accept and deal with that I simply can't. I've hit a wall. 

Out of habit and hope I search the hills around the Buffalo Museum as I roll along in my little white rented Ford Fiesta, hungry and tired and wrung out. 

And there on a ridgetop is White Cloud, the albino cow bison who is so famous she has her own sign on the highway. She was born the day before Phoebe, on July 10, 1996. She, too, is 17. The perfection of seeing her, when I'm missing my kids so much, overwhelms me.

I can hardly believe it. I want to take a photo of her. I pull over, hesitate. Should I run across four lanes of highway with my big camera? The way my luck has been running, I would likely end up a spot of grease on I-94. But I grab the camera, bide my time and dash across, in between roaring semi's. It's worth it to me to see White Cloud again.

She's really white, and looking healthy and beautiful. I remember her twisted little horns from the first time we saw her in 2008.

I'm so grateful that she presented herself to me this evening. I needed her. I look up from the viewfinder and someone is coming up over the ridge. Someone I remember.

I'd last seen him with his mother, White Cloud, in 2009 when he was a half-grown calf. You can read that post here. 

 He is no longer slab-sided or spindly. He is magnificent.

I cannot believe that Dakota Miracle has come up to meet me.

I start crying again, this time in joy and disbelief, and I can't stop. I feel these bison were waiting for me. I'm sure of it.

I try to be quiet so as not to alarm them, but fail. Miracle is curious, and he looks straight at me. Which moves me even more. I've never had a bison pay the slightest attention to me. They have always seemed above noticing a mortal. These white spirit bison, even more aloof.

Woman, why do you weep?

I've been here, waiting for you. The prairie is waiting for you. 

Go out in the wide open spaces. Look up at the sky. You don't even have to look up--look straight ahead, all around. At your feet. The sky arches over you. 

Breathe the clean wind, hear the meadowlark and the longspur, listen for the sparrows you love so much. Nature heals you at home. Here, even more. You'll see. The prairie is big medicine.

He walked past the World's Largest Bison.

And stopped to turn a kindly ice-blue eye my way. 

You have a long hard journey ahead of you. I hear that in your voice.

 In time, all will be well. Go now. I will watch over you.

Liam and the White Bison

Liam loves bison. The bison is his favorite animal, and has been since he first saw them in North Dakota when he was little. Bison help him tap into the prairie landscape and Native American history.
White Cloud and this year's calf, who carries her albinistic genes...

And my little towhead has embraced the Native American reverence for the rare albino bison, and the white bison has become his spirit guide. Some kids have superheroes or the Incredible Hulk; my boy dreams of white bison. There's a symmetry to that which pleases me, especially since you can't tell a child what to dream of; he must come up with it on his own.

He watched the bison through a spotting scope for quite awhileand then let Phoebe have a turn while he called his friend Will in Ohio to tell him the amazing news that he, Liam, was standing before not one, not two, but three albino bison in Jamestown, North Dakota!

It was hard for Liam to convey to someone who's never dreamt of white bison what this meant to him. Perhaps his snow-white hair makes him feel a kinship with them the rest of us can't. He's a pale rider.

So I have found him a little turquoise deerskin pouch, and in the pouch is a carved white bison fetish, and a tuft of hair from the white bison at the Buffalo Museum. We got it by reaching through the chain link and grabbing it off some weedtops. He wears the pouch with its precious inclusions around his neck, and tries very hard not to take it off and forget where he put it down.



Liam's spirit pouch has already been forgotten in a pocket and sent through the wash once, and everything is fine, except that the wool no longer smells so deliciously of bison.

Liam asks me often if it's OK to have a favorite animal that is so rare. At a Montana museum, he saw and was deeply moved by an exhibit on the extermination of American bison. We reassure him that bison are still very much a part of the American landscape, and their numbers are rising again.
Even the white ones, the powerful and sacred ones.