Seventeen

Glassing for Poodles

How close do you have to be to a bear to count it as a sighting? Does a bear viewed through binoculars as it heads up a mountain pass count? Or does its breath have to fog the lens so you know yourself as prey and have an out-of-body experience as you pull the bear banger? At some point, an animal through binoculars is no more than an abstract statistic. At some point you have to tell yourself you are looking at a bear. What some say is a sheep on a ridge near the top of a pass on the other side of the valley could be, as someone once told me, a poodle for all they could tell.

Of all the things people take on the trail, one of the most coveted seems to be binoculars—oh, for the finely ground lens, the graphite mould—as though binoculars tucked into a saddlebag were a symbol of humankind’s eternal yearning, always reaching beyond our grasp.

A few years ago I attended a writing colony at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan. While there, I experienced a chickadee landing in the palm of my hand. The monks, with their patience and peanuts, had habituated the birds to feed from their hands. A chickadee in your hand is amazing—the way the bird darts into your palm, a clean and muscled weightlessness, the tips of the beak spearing the halved nuts, then the body lifting with a purr of wing takes me a bit outside of myself. The first time one landed, I lurched. But that’s what I kept wanting, that ping of unexpectedness. So I braced myself again and again, wanting to feel the whir of something wild.

In Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness, Don McKay says there is “the sudden angle of perception, the phenomenal surprise which constitutes the sharpened moments of haiku and imagism … we encounter the momentary circumvention of the mind’s categories to glimpse some thing’s autonomy—its rawness, its duende, its alien being.”

In Tim Lilburn’s Living in the World as if It Were Home, he writes of a deer who appears to know Tim is watching him. The deer returns the gaze—“Their look seems a bestowal,” he writes. “I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen.” Lilburn seems to speak to a desire to be himself subsumed, made part of something else. As if to receive the gaze of a non-human animal makes us feel, for a moment, a part of their world, a bit less exposed, self-conscious, which is magical in one way but is, in another, perhaps one more manifestation of our acquisitive soul, our yearning to make everything a part of us or for us to be a part of the other. “The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer’s look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing ourself, remains.” In other words, or at least this is my interpretation, if we feel like a deer, then we are the deer; we are no longer the human.

Binoculars compress distance while keeping a distance. Binoculars provide us with an opportunity to observe a wild animal without it knowing it is being watched. And maybe that is the closest we will ever get to allowing a wild animal to remain itself: being far enough away so that it doesn’t know we’re there, and is therefore still wild, its behaviour unchanged by us.