Oh, mercy.
I went to this nature conservancy place in Asheville a few months ago. It’s one of those places where folks bring injured animals found in the wild for rehab. There were a strange small pack of wolves, a mountain lion, a bear, some deer, otters, two eagles, one with a crushed wing, one blind in one eye, a completely blind owl, and quite a few others. They were all well cared for, and in surprisingly nice, quite large wooded enclosures… Better than you might expect or hope for…
But there was one sad creature there that has haunted me since that day. I followed the path to the big cats’ enclosure and came to a place where there was a low gap in the hedge that surrounded the fence where the bobcats where kept. One bobcat was asleep there, against the fence, but the other was facing the fence and performing this VERY strange hypnotic ‘dance’. He would swing his head – which was very close to the fence, nose almost touching - to and fro, and his chest would follow, and he would step wide to the left with one paw, then to the right with the other, repetitively, without stop. It seemed to be a VERY tight kind of “pacing”, confined to less than two feet of space. He didn’t even turn his body around, just side-to-side, paw-to-paw. He definitely seemed entranced. In fact, my kneeling there did not disturb him, and when others saw me and came to see what I was looking at, he still did not falter. People began to hiss at him, or to other wise distract him, but to no avail. It seemed that nothing could break his pattern.
The fenced area was quite large, larger than my own house, and with trees and rocks and caves. But here this cat stood and swayed and paced, miserable, insane. I was mesmerized, too. A combination of sadness, pity, anger, deep curiosity and empathy held me there. As I sat and watched him, waiting, wishing – praying for some change, a couple passed with a baby in a pram. When the small family had gone a 15 or 20 feet past us, something caused the baby to cry out, to squeal in pain or anger (it was not a happy sound) and at that moment, the cat stopped and looked toward the sound.
He only looked away for a second, and then he turned back, his eyes seemed to re-focus on the fence, he looked – I don’t know, confused? – and then he resumed his strange dance. For as long as I was there, he never stopped. As I walked around, I kept looking back, and even when I walked up the hill and looked down over the wolf-woods, there he was, endlessly pacing.
Even if that cat were let go today, would he be able to survive? It seems that madness like that would never go away… Maybe it would be easier to deal with such madness loose, in the wild, but how far could that poor cat go before he came upon more “civilization? A chicken house, or a bad dog? Maybe the kind thing would be to put it down, to end that pacing and longing forever.
I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop pacing and longing. My own world shrank again yesterday, drastically, noticeably. The four walls – home, work, society, sanity – are shrinking and closing, so much that I feel physically dizzy and slightly disoriented. I have honestly felt that reality has shifted just a few degrees in some direction… everything around me seems slightly out of place, strange and different. Not enough for me to freak out and hie me to Broughton or anything… just enough to make me feel crazy enough to worry.
I feel bad that my friends see me as unhappy and seeming to complain so much, but what seems like complaint is not. Complaint is generally useless – though sometimes the squeaky wheel DOES get the grease… I’m afraid that there’s no grease for this wheel.
It’s not complaint, it’s warning.