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Good Old Predators Are So Obliging...

An excerpt from the new book I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like.

Book Cover I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't like

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My wife is a great lover of trees. She lives by the mantra that trees are the lungs of the Earth. They are indeed the lungs of the Earth, but they are like reverse lungs: they absorb carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.

Back in 1998, we bought a shack on a long narrow lot up in the boreal forest. This shack, which we transformed into a cabin, was built on a disturbed piece of land with uprooted trees and a backyard that looked like a missile range. The destruction began with a leaky septic tank that had to be removed and replaced. Three times. The backhoes had scooped out the clay and deposited it on the top soil. It lay in greasy, grey furrows where grass, bushes, and trees used to grow. For starters, Kever decided to plant the entire back lot.

A dubious enterprise as far as I was concerned, planting trees in such a dead space. These thoughts I muttered to myself, of course. Undeterred by this war zone, Kever went on a rewilding spree. At this time, she had become a Master Gardener, and she had already learned that once a patch of original prairie or wild forest had been ploughed or scraped, it could never be reproduced in its original form. But for Kever, this was not a deal breaker. A northern forest could at least be approximated. She began by digging in plant matter, fallen leaves, compost from our kitchen, and clods of uprooted grass and sedges. She also dug in ashes from our wood stove.

 

A northern forest could at least be approximated.

These additions, along with the few remaining weeds, would break up the clay and build up nutrients in the soil. In the same year, and in the following years, Kever bought some white spruce and aspens from tree farmers. She dug birch seedlings and willows out of ditches and rescued doomed wild berry bushes from wood lots. She planted them all over our destroyed backyard and beyond. From an earlier year, we had a large bag of peat moss that somehow captured a lot of seedlings blowing around in the spring. Carefully Kever lifted these trees-to-be from the peat moss bag and planted them with the other seedlings. I looked on in bewilderment as the luckless little plants were tucked into their new homes—and in greater bewilderment as many of them began to grow. In spite of the rabbits, the poverty of the soil, and many other things that might be daunting for skeptics like myself, our back lot, and patches of soil in the front and sides of our land, began to come alive. Things grow slowly up north, but at the time of this writing, some of Kever’s trees have climbed to ten metres. Her raspberry bushes, saskatoons, bog cranberries, and blueberries have also grown to adult size, and their fruit has made our meals more tangy. The rabbits are still a challenge to some of her trees and bushes, but every few years, a lynx or two will move in and cull the rabbits. We’ve seen them on our land and caught them on our trail camera.

The good old predators, the fierce and vigilant predators, they are so obliging. They keep nature from running amok by culling animals that threaten to overgraze or overcrowd an ecosystem: mice, voles, squirrels, and rabbits, for example. Kever’s rewilded lot attracted all these herbivores within the first five years of her planting, and just when the rabbit population began to soar, Kever’s new forest attracted its first lynx.

 

The good old predators, the fierce and vigilant predators, they are so obliging. They keep nature from running amok by culling animals that threaten to overgraze or overcrowd an ecosystem: mice, voles, squirrels, and rabbits, for example. Kever’s rewilded lot attracted all these herbivores within the first five years of her planting, and just when the rabbit population began to soar, Kever’s new forest attracted its first lynx.

I have a long, if somewhat remote, relationship with Lynx canadensis. It started in 1964 when I was back in Jasper, AB, living in a tent cabin on Lake Edith. Two friends and I had hiked upstream along the upper Athabasca River and camped near a warden’s cabin across the river from Dragon Lake. When it was time to return, we hiked north along the same trail, heading downstream for Sunwapta Falls where we had left our car. About halfway along the trail, we came upon a lynx crouched in the middle of the path, effectively blocking our way.

We approached the cat and it didn’t budge, so I was granted a good long look at my first lynx. It was not particularly large, maybe fifteen pounds, a drab yellowish brown, and it seemed almost excessively furry. Its forelegs and paws were very broad in relation to the rest of its body. The ears, of course, really stood out, with their foppish black tufts.

The cat continued to hold its ground, and I wondered if it had acquired some affliction, rabies perhaps. It didn’t hiss or show its teeth; it seemed almost to be in a trance. If not rabid, was the animal defying us to take it on? Did it fear fleeing us? If it betrayed this fear by running off, perhaps it would embolden us to chase it? Was that why it held its ground, or was our lynx simply without fear, and therefore without any reason to give ground?

Another possibility was that the lynx had a litter of kits hidden nearby. Or maybe the lynx was guarding its latest kill, cached under a pile of leaves and branches. Or, was this animal too clueless to realize that the enemy was drawing near?

I may just as well have been wondering about a sphinx. We headed into the bush to give the inscrutable cat a wide berth, then returned to our trail.

 

I may just as well have been wondering about a sphinx. We headed into the bush to give the inscrutable cat a wide berth, then returned to our trail.

Many years later in Northern Saskatchewan, I spotted a lynx hunkered down in a ditch on the Hanson Lake Road. I parked on the side of the road and approached it. Nothing. The lynx greeted me with the same indifferent attitude as the first lynx had, as though I were the biggest non-event of its day. Not long after that encounter I saw another lynx just off the Gem Lakes trail, and this one also held its ground, and it blinked its eyes as though contemplating a nap. As the years went on, I also witnessed a few lynxes that did move off at my approach, including a big one a few kilometres from our cabin. I have to wonder if this more prudent behaviour from the cats that gave ground was something they had learned from early bad encounters with humans. But really, I have no idea.

Excerpt from I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like, copyright © 2022 by David Carpenter Reprinted with permission of Thistledown Press.

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Book Cover I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't like

Learn more about I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like:

David Carpenter’s collection of essays explores a city boy’s love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us—or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world? And why has Carpenter personally been both drawn to, and repelled by, so many wild animals, including alligators, wolves, cougars, spiders, black bears, grizzlies, weasels, and of course, snakes—particularly deadly rattlesnakes?

The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals—and insects!—at the heart of Carpenter’s inquiry. As a young man, Carpenter is working in Jasper National Park, and he’s lugging his banjo—hustling on his way to a paid gig—when he takes a short cut through the woods, makes a wrong turn and ends up at the dump. He looks across at some large animals. Horses? No, five, count ‘em, five grizzlies. Luckily a ranger on an actual horse leads him out of danger. He’s fishing for brook trout in the mountains with a friend, cooling their catch in a convenient snow bank. But the fish keep disappearing. He finds them cached under a nearby rock, and when he tries to pull one out, he’s in a tug-of-war with some hidden creature, small but fierce—is it a mink? Encounters like these drive the author into philosophical conjecture, into reading everything he can get his hands on about these and other creatures as he contemplates our place in the wild, and the value of the wild in our lives. These essays are essential reading for those of us who share David Carpenter’s fascination with the predators that so fundamentally shape our understanding of wilderness and the necessity to preserve it.

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