Clutch, Governor of Creek Town and its war bands
Bandit, agent of the Secret Police and double agent for the Resistance
Touchwit, artist and strategist for Mindwalker’s Resistance
A Seagull, her colleague and message-bearer
Sensibella of Pawsense Manor, Bandit’s first cousin and love interest, lady escort of Meatbreath the would-be Protector of the City
The Director of Security, a City bureaucrat with a personal militia
Drooplip and Lockjaw, procurers to the City
Clutch’s bodyguard Silverheels, a Creek Town lady
Frisk, junior sister of Sensibel and Bandit’s sidekick
Lightfinger and Sleekfoot, field commanders of the Creek Town army
The Voice of the Great Raccoon Ancestor
32
Come with me to the park along the west bank of the river because this is where the destinies of the cubs will meet their destination. Here Bandit found an outdoor café overlooking a cove near where Sensibella came ashore. Touchwit made her way through the park, guided by seagulls. This is Millennium Park. The outdoor café is called The Silver Bean.
I come here often in the summer to sit and write. From my house on the east bank, I walk downriver along a public path to the railway bridge. There’s only one track, an extension from the metropolis to the southwest. This was a busy line in the early twentieth century: five passenger trains and several freight trains used to come through here daily. Now the railway is used only to bring grain to the Quaker Oats factory, and crushed rock, a kind of feldspar, to the metropolis where it is used to make glass, ceramics and polymers.
The public pathway continues along the north edge of the railway bridge, giving a view of the river. There’s usually something special to see, even if it’s only the Kingbird who has overseen the bridge walk for several years. Once, in March, I saw a pair of Trumpeter Swans swimming along the shore ice. And I will never forget the autumn evening when line after line of Canada Geese set down at dusk. There were several hundred of them – they filled the river basin with excitement. Then at an invisible signal, the whole river rose from its riverbed in exultation. This early summer, I saw a Loon. She kept her body submerged, only showing her head and neck. Every spring, a migrating Loon will put down here. You’re asleep at dawn, and your unconscious is naked to the world. A Loon splits the dawn with her soulful, gothic call. And you wake up in tears.
On the city side of the bridge, a path leads upriver under tree branches that meet over your head. You come to a freshly cut young tree lying on the grass. Pieces of it are scattered all over the lawn, and bark is missing from its branches. This is a city of seventy thousand people, and a Beaver is cutting down a tree in its showpiece park!
It’s a short walk to the café under the trees. On this busy city side of the river, there are groups of cyclists, public school field trips, service club picnics, seniors from the retirement residence, and mothers passing time with their children.
The café patio overlooks a little harbour circled by a rocky point. This morning, a Cormorant is standing on the tip of the point holding his bill aloof at a proud angle. A female Mallard Duck facing him dozes in the early morning sun. A pair of Seagulls stand on the base of the point where they can keep an eye on the café diners. It is the still interval near the end of summer when nature rests. The work of parenting is done.
If you look east across the river, you’ll see the little halfway island where Touchwit was caught in the storm and carried downriver. The north and south islands are visible, but not the house with its chimney which is behind them. Today, there is an Osprey at the top of a high dead tree on the north island.
I want to say something about Ospreys. Though they don’t come into the cubs’ stories, they show a contradiction the cubs are facing. This is a contradiction between the needs of the river and the needs of humans.
Once Ospreys nested on this part of the river. A pair built their home on a disused electricity pole below the southern island. For the residents along the east bank and everyone who took the path across the railway bridge, the birds presented a daily domestic drama of child raising. Like eagles, they swoop down and grab a fish with their talons and take it back to the chicks who are clamouring in the nest. All morning long, then again in the evening, the river rings with the demanding cries of the chicks and the excited hunting call of their parents. Everything about these confident raptors is obvious: their nest, their young, their loud clear whistles, their splashdown on the water surface. The family drama reaches a crisis when the chicks become fledglings urgent to command the sky like their big, bold parents. For now it’s time to fly, and the children don’t know how to do it. They crowd to the edge of their platform of sticks. They look down with dismay at the water fifty feet below. They look out at their parents sweeping toward the nest, then veering away, hoping that in a sheer spilling over of emotions their children will spontaneously cast themselves into flight. The panicky screaming reaches an unbearable breaking point of fear, protest, excitement, opportunity. What will happen if they throw caution to the winds and shut their eyes and launch themselves into thin air? It’s alright, their parents call back. Do it! Join us!
Then, all at once, the screaming changes and there is one, no two, no all four children in the sky, and they are wheeling, diving, ascending as high as they dare, doing stall turns, and the morning is full of ecstasy. The joy of creatures becoming themselves.
Wilderness flows through the heart of a city. In that instant when children launch themselves into the future and turn magically into grown-ups, humans rediscover a fact of life. The meaning of wildness is ourselves.
Do we feel that joy in our own lives today? Once, on the riverbank below the wooden porch of the café, I saw a baby squirrel in the throes of ecstasy. It cavorted, it somersaulted, it scampered, it wheeled, it rolled – it tried to do all these actions at once, each freedom overtaking the last. A newborn soul surprised by its body. These are the kinds of things the river teaches.
But today, its people are dozing in the sun in that downtime between responsibilities at the pause between seasons. Mink are scampering in the bushes below me. Maybe the giant Toad will emerge and make a series of delayed hops across the patio. It may come over to your table to stare at you. Those huge, unblinking eyes. What is it thinking?
The Sparrows are thinking I might buy them a muffin. They alight at the edge of my table and cock their heads politely.
I look back to the rock at the end of the archipelago. The Cormorant has flown away. Then a Mesozoic gronk! A Great Blue Heron glides in, scaring the others off the point and occupying the place relinquished by the Cormorant. The two outraged Gulls dive-bomb it, then fly away stoically. The scene recomposes itself into an oriental stillness. The Heron gazes at her reflection in the water.
The café begins to fill up with people with pocket phones and briefcases – workers from the government Office of the Environment building that rises above the north end of the park. Built of local quarry stone and covered all the way to the top with foliage, it seems like an upthrust of the wilderness.
There are still river people, and there are fish in the river. But I miss the family of Ospreys. What made this part of the river uninhabitable for them? It might have been the adjustment of the water level to control flooding. The installation of LED lighting on the railway bridge. The percussion of fireworks on a spring night. Or a wild individual on a jet ski trying to achieve through the control of raw power his own shrunken ecstasy. This is what I mean by a contradiction. The natural world and the human world are at cross-purposes.
Every summer, this contradiction becomes acute for two days and nights. That is when local rock bands play on a podium facing a grass lawn behind the café. The lawn is filled with tables and chairs for people buying their food from a group of catering trucks and enjoying a massive outdoor picnic. The smell of cooking fat, pork, beer, buttered corn, and throat-searing sauces is conveyed across the river by the pulse of bar-room rock. The amplified pounding shakes the mud-and-stick home of the Bank Beaver. It penetrates the shoreline burrow of the Muskrat. It resounds inside the tree hole of the Owl. It translates a wilderness river into a stage for the celebration of the triumphant species, Homo carnivorus. This is the annual Ribfest and Corn Roast.
Besides the Seagulls, only one other creature took interest in this Primate self-indulgence. The Raccoons of the city.
33
“I commend you on your sidestroke. You are a tireless swimmer.”
“Thank you. It is because I grew up on the Lake. Creekers are born to the water.”
“Swimming is a good skill to have.”
“It helped me evade Name-Shifter, I can say that. I still smell his rotten breath. But you may be tired. Would you care to rest on Halfway Island?”
“No, I can make it across if we go slowly.” Slypaws rolled onto her back and looked at the stars. It was a clear sky of the sort one gets in autumn. The heavens gazed down on her fondly. “You know, it’s really quite liberating to be out here in the open yet not have to worry about Droolers and Cars. Where are we going to stay in the city?”
“I found us a place in an old tree. It’s totally pocked with burrows, and we’ll have young neighbours all around us. It’s said to be a party tree, but there are no fleas. I checked. I know you don’t like fleas.”
“I don’t.”
“The advantage of the tree is its location. It’s just off the downtown strip.”
