Eating Stone Read Online Free

The birds lift in raucous honking, giving sound, more than sight, to follow. Coyotes begin to yip and howl from the distant benches. I hear the geese bank a low turn over the Mercedes and fly in the direction of the river.
    Can they see in the dark? Will they find the water before they bash their heads on the wall of sandstone on the far bank? The cliffs loom black and solid against a pale lemon sky. I put my trust in them. The geese tuck in their white chin straps and fly, carrying with them a bird the color of fresh snow.
    Each time I look into the eye of an animal, one as “wild” as I can find in its own element—or maybe peering through zoo bars will have to do—and if I get over the mess of “Do I eat it, or viceversa?” and overcome any problems I might have with an animal's animality, or, for that matter, my own, I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily unmercifully confused.
    There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come.
    The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.
    The human body wants safety. The human mind longs for satisfaction—pleasure, love, affinity, experience, imagination. Whenever I tell people that the human mind, the imagination, depends on animals, they give me a stuffed teddy bear.
    I suppose that being handed a vicarious imagination stimulant is better than being handed a live cheetah. Real animals, animals as beyond the reach of our dominion as they can be in today's world, no longer figure in our lives. Our distance from them, the thinkers say, has left us with the anguish of missing the wild that is no longer in ourselves. Peering into the lives of creatures not similarly deprived soothes some of this emptiness. Attention, for all its potent sensitivity, may be the spark that rekindles imagination. It may save a listless mind.
    For British writer T. H. White, as I learn when I read while out watching bighorns, a mind activated by beasts was a rescued mind. White averted mental disasters by keeping a proximity to animals and sustaining a voracious appetite for knowledge.
    Described by biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner as “chased by a mad black wind,” this “hermetic and sometimes cranky man” wrote more than twenty-five books. He was an illustrator and cal-ligrapher. He translated medieval bestiaries. He painted, fished, raced airplanes, built furniture, sailed boats, plowed fields, and flew hawks at prey. Late in life, he made deep-sea dives in a heavy old suit with a bulbous helmet, which made him look like a Zuni mudhead.
    New skills “aerated his intelligence,” Warner tells us. For his 1955 translation of a twelfth-century bestiary, he taught himself Latin. Through a character in one of his novels, he hinted at himself. “The best thing for being sad,” the character says, “is to learn something.”
    Much of White's knowledge of the natural world resurfaced in his teaching—he was for many years a schoolmaster—although greater experts in his subjects accused him of smattering. “But smatterer or no,” writes Warner, White “held his pupils’ attention; their imagination, too, calling out an unusual degree of solicitude—as though in the tall gowned figure these adolescents recognized a hidden adolescent, someone unhappy, fitful, self-dramatizing and not knowing much about finches.”
    He wore scarlet. He was “nobly shabby.” He drank, he said, “in order not to be sober.” He kept owls and paid his students to trap mice to feed them. Fed, the owls perched on his shoulder as he sat under an apple tree, speaking to him in little squeals.
    He wrote a story about geese and geese hunters, one of them a “mad general” who said one