{"id":13368,"date":"2021-05-13T22:21:12","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T05:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=13368"},"modified":"2021-05-14T08:26:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T15:26:48","slug":"a-childs-world-of-animals-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-childs-world-of-animals-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Child\u2019s World of Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Spike, a Queensland<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Part Three<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At 10 or 11, we graduated to\u00a0do more of the shooting\u2014with more of the same repetitious caveats, “Never shoot\u00a0a bird on the wire.” I shot instead cottontails with another of my dad’s\u00a0ancient guns, a 1890 Winchester\u00a0.22 pump. I brought the carcasses to my\u00a0grandfather around 5 PM on weekends. He paid a dollar for each, and skinned two\u00a0or three. And my sainted grandparents fried them for dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once at 13, I shot a pregnant\u00a0possum and collected the babies that emerged alive. No need to go on. But after\u00a0that I quit shooting for six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I began noticing quite abruptly that rabbits shrieked when hit\u2014if you listen. They cry out in a shrill human-like voice. After that I quit hunting them altogether and have never shot one since. I later cursed myself for shooting any of them, even when they devoured the shoots in the young vineyard. So I mostly liked all the animals or at least liked them enough not to kill them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

One exception though: In my\u00a0teens my grandfather kindly asked me to kill flicker woodpeckers who destroyed\u00a0the barn siding. Their descendants still do. I had shot 10 or so in my lifetime,\u00a0but the holes in barn always\u00a0just got bigger. Now I mostly let them drill the\u00a0same barn all daylong and patch their damage. Why kill a woodpecker in 2021,\u00a0when they are up against the same things we are?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tonight, I walked the Queensland\u00a0heelers and saw in succession more coyotes, the two kestrels (fancy words for\u00a0canny sparrow hawks), the huge sneaky, duplicitous, conniving great horned owl\u00a0mute on an almond\u00a0trunk, as if no one can see him in the shadows (his excrement\u00a0is full of the most interesting skeletons).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pit bull, dumped and gone wild, lingers around. He should seem scary, roaming the orchards without a collar and probably not vaxxed. But when he nears us, it is more like he smells food on the dogs and wants in on it. I’ve never seen a wild pit bull who wishes to be neither a pit bull nor wild, but just one of the quieter gang. No matter, the dogs shoo him away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, presto, a rare gopher snake. He was immobile, either half-dead or faking such on the alleyway. I caught him and put him into a squirrel’s hole, so the tractor wouldn’t smash him the next morning. He even hesitated to slither in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nearby Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus<\/em>\u2014or the “plover”)\u00a0appeared out of nowhere, as if his fake\u00a0deceptive hops would lead the snake away from her eggs on the berm. There is not much to a\u00a0Killdeer’s nest. They simply lay eggs on some straw and the dirt and then patrol\u00a0about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When they see you\u00a0approaching, they squeak “kill-dee,” “kill-dee.” Then the act gets really interesting.\u00a0They hop about in front of you, quite badly faking a broken wing or sprained\u00a0leg. They think the dog, the squirrel\u00a0or the owl are stupid. (Are they?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So their enemies will mindlessly\u00a0for the nth time follow them and almost devour them (As a kid, I too always was\u00a0conned and would be pied-pipered away for hundreds of yards, always 4-feet\u00a0short of his tail, never\u00a0noticing that the speed of the hops was calibrated to\u00a0my proximity).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their idiot predators, after\u00a0millennia I guess, never caught on that if they would go in the exact opposite\u00a0direction, ignore their “I’m so hurt that you’ll probably catch and eat me”\u00a0schtick, then the \u00a0coyote and owl will always find their\u00a0bright, tasty eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I confess I like these\u00a0(often incompetent) fakers of the animal kingdom: the “hidden” owl that a fool\u00a0can spot; the “frozen” snake who got his camouflage mixed up; the limp coyotes\u00a0who never quite lead the dogs into\u00a0a full ambush; the fake Red-tails who befriend\u00a0you and then bolt; and these fake Killdeers who remind me of the high-school\u00a0linebacker, who always had a sprained ankle predictably 10 minutes before\u00a0kickoff time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sixty years have vanished\u00a0and I guess I have regressed to seven again, same place, same animals, same\u00a0story, same me, nothing more. I can’t tell whether the animals are the\u00a0great-great something of their long dead\u00a0ancestors of the 1950s, or simply\u00a0became divine and are deathless and the same creatures. This lockdown proved\u00a0not so awful in that it reminded me after a year, there is nature; there is the\u00a0soil; there is the farm. Not much\u00a0else matters in the end for us renters, who\u00a0enter and exit the stage rather rapidly. Is it so bad to come full circle and\u00a0end as you started?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bumble bees hover and buzz\u00a0the porch. My wife asked me who or what they were? I told her that the fakers\u00a0owned the place. I knew these guys, and their great grandparents to the 50th\u00a0degree\u00a0and so knew their con too. When I was five, it was the same two bumble\u00a0bees, same place, same faux menacing, some loud buzzing, same posturing pair\u00a0who would never sting you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the urbanization, the vandalism, the end of days pessimism, the animals do survive. They never leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned a lot from\u00a0animals. They move seconds before we can hear or see or smell why. They have\u00a0personalities too. Those two Red-tails follow us as we walk, soaring right over\u00a0head as if to signal, “Don’t worry, you\u00a0fools, we know you won’t’ shoot at us like\u00a0the vandals from town have. We’re guiding you home. It’s just our way of doing things.\u00a0But don’t count on us following you for too long. In the end, we can’t afford to\u00a0be\u00a0your friends.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About a month ago, the\u00a0bolder Red-tail flew about 10 feet above my head for about 200 yards. I remember Roman\u00a0omens, but forgot whether it was good or bad when the eagle flew perpendicular\u00a0or parallel\u2014whether to cross\u00a0or not the Rubicon? The surrealism was ruined when\u00a0a crow attacked him and drove him off, a nasty FW-190 turning inside circles on\u00a0a lumbering B-17.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have an older brother who\u00a0grew up here and became a writer. He too absorbed the animals and the\u00a0domesticated ones too: the rabbits in my grandfather’s cage, the chickens in\u00a0the coop, Jack the donkey and the pony\u00a0Jim in the barn, and the lassie dog. He has\u00a0written children’s creature poems, as if they were wise guy philosophers,\u00a0lizards and such. I never asked him why, but I wonder whether he too remembers\u00a0the magical child’s\u00a0garden of the 1950s, in what my grandfather (1890-1976) and\u00a0grandmother (1891-1983), the third generation who lived in this house, used to\u00a0call, “Our own little paradise out here” And it was, or at least it seems so\u00a0now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book was called\u00a0What the Lizard Said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor’s note on story version<\/em>: This is the second version of the story which is significantly different from the first that was accidentally posted May 13 @ 9:30pm. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers  Part Three At 10 or 11, we graduated to\u00a0do more of the shooting\u2014with more of the same repetitious caveats, “Never shoot\u00a0a bird on the wire.” I shot instead cottontails with another of my dad’s\u00a0ancient guns, a 1890 Winchester\u00a0.22 pump. I brought the carcasses to my\u00a0grandfather around 5 PM on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-3tC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8768,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tale-of-two-shootings\/","url_meta":{"origin":13368,"position":0},"title":"A Tale of Two Shootings","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 13, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media In August of 2014 Michael Brown, 18, 6-foot-4, 290 lbs., robbed a store in Ferguson [1], Missouri. 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