Preface

Rick Bass

I'm fortunate enough to live in one of the wilder places in the United States, a million-acre valley in northwestern Montana: the Yaak Valley, on the border with Canada, home to more bears and wolves than people. It's a low-elevation mountainous rainforest, seething with vegetative diversity: not unlike some of the country depicted in Shen Shixi's work. And my informal study of the wild animals I encounter on my near-daily walks through this wildest country--coming to learn what habitat each species prefers, and the way each species has accommodated a fit with a particular aspect of the forested landscape-has impressed upon me what a powerful relationship exists between place and life, in all species, including our own. I'm reminded of the words of Vaclav Cilek, who wrote, “A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.”

What's striking to me about the stories of Shen Shixi and Ernest Thompson Seton is the degree--the depth--of the relationships in the animal worlds these two cultures have observed. What many readers will fix upon immediately is not just the observations of animals making conscious choices, but of the style and manner in which those choices are made: sometimes impulsively, other times after long premeditation, but always, gracefully rather than with the herky-jerky tortuosity of ambivalence that can attend to so many of our own efforts at decision-making; at doing the right thing, the hard thing.

We are speaking, then, of morality.

In The Elephant Grave, the powerful elephant king in battle with a rival is overcome by compassion, and misses the chance to administer a coup de grace. In King Boar, a powerful boar, with a complicated moral debt toward the man who raised and saved him, yet who later tries to kill him, nonetheless brokers a truce.

Recent generations of man--what we could refer to as contemporary society--have constructed a culture that counsels each general, with increasing vehemence, that animals are not sentient beings; that the only law of nature that exists is the simplified rule of tooth and claw, a crude and unsophisticated version of survival of the fittest.

(The generalized shorthand of this idea has led to so much misery upon our own tender species; and who, might we ask, is truly surviving-whatever that word means--and who is not? And what is the quality of that life, those lives, lived under such a one-dimensional black-and-white regimen?) For surely there is more to life than merely drawing each next-day's breath.

And in this simplistic idea of “survival of the fittest”, which is stated with greatest insistence--that man is set so far apart from all other living creatures as to bear no responsibility whatsoever for his treatment of other animals, nor for the actions--in every gesture, every choice--that affects the homes and habitat and lifeways of all other animals.

We are told that we are separate from all else in the world but ourselves, and we wander then at the great loneliness of the soul that has taken seat in us, across these last several generations, and spread, then, as if in a dark garden.

About the interspecies relationships that surprise us, in both Seton's and Shen Shixi's stories: a reader might understandably spend too much time marveling at the cross-border, cross-boundaries, between man and the other animals, as well as marveling at the depth of the bonds--call it love, call it fidelity--between individuals of the same species, particularly among the more-evolved animals, and the mammals with larger brains. We read these stories--Seton and Shen Shixi--with such fascination and hope that perhaps the gate that separates us and our loneliness from the rest of the world might, in these stories, be swinging open--that we may not even ask ourselves Why, or How (one tends not to question good fortune, only bad); we might ask ourselves, “What is the reason for the existence of these things--loyalty, affection, honor, and even love, across the perceived gulf between species?”

The answer, I believe, is the landscape itself: the common point of attachment, the one thing all species share. This is so obvious that I think we overlook it. And I think also that however we treat the land-shutting ourselves off from its blood rhythms; treating it with the disrespect of inattention, and harming it, with realizing we are harming ourselves--is how we treat other animals, human and non-human.

Can attentiveness to nature--paying attention to the direction the wind is coming from, carrying some delicate scent--make us better people? I believe that it can.

Time and again, in Shen Shixi's stories, there are consequences to men's actions. In the chilling Hound of Doom, a dog's owner abandons the loyal animal and, as in the case of King Boar, reverses the relationship, seeking to kill that animal which he previously cared for and nurtured--his hound, Striped Eagle. And yet, in the moment of truth, it is the hound who is loyal, seeking to save the man who is no longer his master, but now, a partner of sorts: a partner in obligations and responsibilities, moral and otherwise. In this regard these stories are vital to our future: not just to help reform our attitudes to the natural world, but to understand more fully the strange darkness within us, but also the capacity we still retain for light, within those same personal interiors.

There is another element at play, in Shen Shixi's work. So much of his prose concerns the dynamics of herd animals, and addresses, at a deeper level, the value but also perils of flock or herd behavior. In many stories, such as Imprisoned Boars, rebellion is costly; when it occurs, of necessity, not all survive. Imprisonment--the predictability if not solace of captivity--is desired, by many. To these individuals, freedom seems as mythical, capricious, and fantasy-laden, as a double rainbow, and as intangible.

In many of Shen Shixi's stories, I'm reminded of the great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev--specifically, his classic, A Sportsman's Sketches-in which the protagonist-narrator wanders the rural countryside at harvest-time, observing with the acuity of a natural historian not just the lives of animals--in this case, his quarry, the birds he hunts--but the intimate lives of peasants living more closely to the earth than anyone. (The work of the great French writer, John Berger, possesses this same clean, elegant aesthetic).

“The late rice had been harvested. There was only stubble in the fields.” So much is said, mood-wise, in these two short declarative sentences, and the senses are engaged fully: one of the primary preconditions to art's, and storytelling's success.

If there is a gulf between mankind and animals, between humans and nonhumans, why does communication exist between us, still, if in reduced fashion? By what mechanism might they--we--still share this world?

And if the answer for this unifying factor is, as I believe it is, the landscape shared between all species, then what a second kind of loneliness, loneliness upon loneliness, and all the worse for the terminal nature of this: for if we lose the wild landscapes that begat this continuity between all beings, then we lose all future hope for gaining or regaining both the ease of that larger love, as well as the fantastic intensity of it.

Certainly, the hearts of these stories--and the basis, then, for the integrity of the relationships between man and individuals of other living beings--is animated, guided by wildness.

In Seton's Lobo, King of the Currumpaw, the wolf-protagonist, Lobo--nemesis of the ranchers who pursued him, trying to vanquish him and the wildness he represented--was synonymous with the curves and elements of his desert landscape: “The part of the wolf-hounds was merely to hold the wolves at bay till the hunter could ride up and shoot them, and this usually was easy on the open plains of Texas; but here new feature of the country came into play, and showed how well Lobo had chosen his range; for the rocky canyons of the Currampaw and its tributaries intersect the prairies in every direction. The old wolf at once made for the nearest of these and by crossing it got rid of the horsemen.”

Although the two writers' perspectives on the dissolution of boundaries in the human-animal relationship is similar, though I find it quite interesting that many Shen Shixi's writings, where animals' actions and choices seem more fantastical rather than merely “humanized”, pull in more of the human community. In story after story, a protagonist is responsible not only to a non-human animal, but to the protagonist's human community, which, typically, is upset, even threatened, by the intimacy of the animal-human relationship. In King Boar, the entire village is threatened by the back-and-forth turmoil between the boar and his ex-master.

Again and again, these are stories of morality.

Near the end of Wild Animals I Have Known, Seton states the coda of both men explicitly, “have the wild things no moral or legal rights? What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow-creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?”

It should be obvious to us, and a point of great concern that the extension of this trend is leading us ever-more into a condition where we treat not the most silent or marginalized of beings first with the disrespect of inattention, followed then by the easy exploitation that is associated with disrespect and, attenuating further, embarking further along this path, violence. It is no mystery.

Seton, more so than Shen Shixi, seeks in some of his stories not just to observe and chronicle the actions of species different than our own in such a way as to seek to maintain or even repair, bridges between the two, but to push on deeper into anthropomorphism, so desperate was his desire to crack open the closing-hearts of mankind that he perceived even then, in the late 1800s.

Seton does not out-and-out represent the grouse, Redruff, as possessing the sentiments of a man, woman or child; and yet he is firm in his insistence that wild animals--perhaps more than many of our lost wandering, or sleeping selves--have a code of joy, code of life--an exultation for life so strong that again it becomes the foundation for a kind of moral code, perhaps the ultimate yet most basic code: responsibility to self, yes, but connectedness to others. “No natural impulse is without a purpose,” writes Seton. “The mother grouse's knowledge of healing”, he writes--describing her maternal care of her brood-- “was only to follow natural impulse.”

And yet: joy, of the kind in which any of us might luxuriate:The mother grouse and her brood “all went cautiously up the stream, and in a sandy bank, well screened by brambles, they lay for all that afternoon, and learned how pleasant it was to feel the cool powdery dust running between their hot little toes. With their strong bent for copying, they lay on their sides like their mother and scratched with their tiny feet and flopped with their wings, though they had no wings to flop with, only a little tag among the down on each side, to show where the wings would come. That night she took them to a dry thicket nearby, and there among the crisp, dead leaves that would prevent an enemy's silent approach on foot, and under the interlacing briers that kept off all foes of the air, she cradled them in their feather-shingled nursery and rejoiced in the fullness of a mother's joy over the wee cuddling things that peeped in their sleep and snuggled so trustfully against her warm body.”

Over-written? In today's context, yes, absolutely. And yet: do creatures other than ourselves, with their senses so much more keenly tuned than ours, feel the world and its pleasures and sorrows--its moments--exquisitely?

Surely, and absolutely.

There is a responsibility in this knowledge.

This, then, is the work of two deeply moral writers, and enduring, for that, and more timely than ever.