My little poodle has recovered wonderfully from his wounds after the coyote attack of 12 days ago. He even insisted on returning to the evil field today, with the leash on, of course. In the aftermath of that attack I was amazed by the generous care of a woman in my RV park who used to be a veterinary technician.
Then it got better: another woman who used to live here heard the news of the attack. She is only five feet tall and weighs about a hundred pounds; but if I had blocked the door, I think she would have knocked me out of the way on her way to cooing over the little poodle. When she lived here, we barely acknowledged each other's existence.
This recalled the opening of Arthur Schopenhauer's dreadful essay On Women, which nonetheless started well with a quote from Jouy: "Without women, the beginning of our life would be helpless; the middle, devoid of pleasure; and the end, of consolation."
Nature was certainly erupting that day, if you are willing to see homo sapiens as an animal species. The women displayed an assertiveness that was almost violent. No wonder people living thousands of years ago, who were in much closer contact with real (non-pinup calendar) nature, made a goddess of Mother Nature. And I was part of it: I took a weapon to the grassy field on the next walk with my larger dog, Coffee Girl. It must have looked foolish to anyone else, but it provided me the delicious fantasy of burying that weapon in the skull of the coyote.
Something that a couple people said irked me greatly; they said that, after all, he (the coyote) was here first, and so they hoped he wouldn't be killed. "Here first?" What did that mean? If they wanted to trot out that cliche for an attack in the zillion-acre wilderness area a few miles to our north, fine. But this attack took place on private property in the city limits.
For some reason this got me thinking about the movie Dances with Wolves, starring Kevin Costner (yuk). After so many years of full time RV travel, how did I neglect to visit the hilly South Dakota grasslands where the movie was shot? I rewatch it from time to time and try to focus on the cinematography and John Barry's soundtrack. The script is dreadful. Consider these immortal words of the protagonist:
"I'd never known a people [the Sioux] so eager to laugh, so devoted to family, so dedicated to each other. And the only word that came to mind was 'harmony.' "
When will the environmentalists of the world hire a new prose stylist? Still, the movie viewer can be thankful that Kevin Costner didn't rattle on about how each cloud, weed, or rock was 'sacred to the Native Americans.'
But just when I decided that the movie's script had no hope, they fooled me. The Sioux and the Pawnee had a battle, and the Costner-character volunteered to help his hosts, the Sioux. After the battle he said:
"It was hard to know how to feel. I'd never been in a battle like this one. There was no dark political objective. It had been fought to protect the lives of women and children and loved ones just a few feet away."
Is it not amazing that the Hollywood liberal-weenie who wrote the script had enough of a connection to real nature -- not coffee-table book nature -- to see that violence was a legitimate part of the DNA of male homo sapiens?
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