The Hare and the Bear

By Patrick J. Walsh

As I walk by, unaware of their doings, a small group of animals gathers in an open patch of grass in the woods, a short distance from the edge of the paved road in the park.

They are discussing their upcoming spring play — a rollicking presentation based on The Knight's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The largest of the group, obviously in charge of the production, is a small bear. He surveys the collection of dramatis personae and, in a quiet aside to his assistant — a large hare — he begins to run down the list of roles and the animals necessary to fulfill them:

"So we've got the owl to play Theseus and the ground hog for Aegeus, and the three deer for Palamon and Arcite and Emily —"

"Yes, yes," the hare replies, impatient. "But I've already told you, it's not the character roles you have to worry about. I'm worried about the background players — like for instance, who will play the magical forest creatures who scurry away when the trees are cut down for Arcite's funeral pyre?"

The bear replies with a sigh and a wave of his paw — a gesture that, while unintentional in its effect, nonetheless causes the hare to dodge quickly out of the way.

"Not this again — again with the trees?"

"Well it's important," the hare persists. "It makes a huge impact on an audience, how the background is constructed. If we're going to have magical creatures and trees being cut down, we need to think about that."

"All right, all right. So who do you want for the trees?"

"Well it depends on what kind of tree —"

Growing impatient, the bear brings his paw down heavily on a small clump of wizened sod, sending a loud ‘whump’ off echoing among the slanted rays of sunlight scattered through the woods.

“Okay then,” he responds, obviously trying to stay his annoyance, “what kind of tree? For instance?”

For his part, the hare responds with the first small sign of a smile, the corners of his tiny mouth quivering slightly as he asks:

"Well, a dogwood, for example. I mean, who can we get to play a good dogwood? What sort of an animal will be willing to play a dogwood tree?"

Utterly unaware that he is being led toward a punchline, the bear wearily re-traces the hare's rhetorical question in the sprightly wind of the lovely spring afternoon:

"I don't know… what sort of animal would make a good dogwood tree?"

Tittering slightly while taking a beat — and carefully moving himself several steps away from his much-larger friend — the hare responds:

"Well… a dog would."

And somewhere, some half a mile or so away, I stop suddenly in the midst of my walk, certain that I hear something… something, oddly enough, that sounds sort of like a large hare, laughing hysterically, and a small bear, moaning indulgently.

As the sounds fade, I wonder how I’ve come to think of Chaucer and his Tales, as I wander along the edge of the woods, eyeing the rough bark of the dogwoods on this fine sunny afternoon in the park.

* * *

Did you know?: The oldest existing reference to the dogwood tree in an English language manuscript is found in “The Knight’s Tale,” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales (although it is referenced therein in various iterations by its earlier moniker, the archaic “whippletree,” or as “cornel,” which is a variant of the scientific name for its genus, Cornus).

© Patrick J. Walsh

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The Hawk

By Patrick J. Walsh

There is a short bridge along the path of my daily walk; it parts the lake in the park at a point where the water is at is narrowest, dividing the upper and lower portions of the pond with a picturesque waterfall.

On a typical day, as I start across the bridge, I place my foot carefully on the first wood plank. I begin as close to the near side as possible, so I can measure out the distance each day from one end of the bridge to the other. It is normally nine long strides the first time across, unless there is ice or snow or slippery rain.

On subsequent crossings, it is often a step or two more, as my stride shortens and my breath quickens with the exertion of my exercise.

On one recent day, as I approached the bridge, a sudden commotion in the brush on the near lower bank startled me out of my normal routine. I turned slightly, trying to locate the source of the disturbance; I had a vague intimation of upward motion.

Then, as though risen out of some ancient lyric once warbled around a primitive campfire in the halcyon days of a younger time, there appeared a bird — a large bird, proud and solemn in its shift from the moist bank to the thin limb of a tree, some ten or twelve yards from where I stood.

Although my inner balance was momentarily set askew by the sudden manifestation of feathers and flight, my presence within the sweep of his vision seemed not to matter in the least to him.

...there appeared a bird, proud and solemn...

His indifference briefly brought to mind the spectral namesake of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven:

“Not the least obeisance made he; 
not an instant stopped or stayed he;

but with mien of lord or lady, 
perched above my chamber door, —”

— but this was no mere specter, nor gothic emblem of despair; and perched not in the sad den of mourning, but instead resplendent against the blue sky and the high clouds on the bright sunny day in early Spring, this bird in the park was the majestic icon of ideas too big to grasp without a great deal of thought.

Among my initial reactions, there was the assumption, for whatever reason, of his being male; and I also assumed, despite the paucity of my knowledge of the subject, that he was most probably a hawk. To me he simply looked like a hawk, as a hawk would appear in my imagination if I were to conjure an image based on memories of having seen such a bird in the past, in a book perhaps, or maybe on television.

Not that any of my assumptions or curiosities — what sort of creature he was, or why his sudden appearance immediately aroused in me the aura of poetry and the aromas of summer days in childhood — were of any concern to him, of course. He was simply living proof of the wisdom of Providence in the establishment of a bulkhead of contrasting experience and abilities between human beings and the creatures of the air and water and woods.

Even now — as I recall the wonder I felt as I looked up at him, he perched high above me in the tree, me imagining the sensation of his gliding effortlessly along the edge of the air on the trailing path of a warm wind — even now, I am aware of a certain sense of divine humor at the thought of my being the superior being in the system whose circumstances gave rise to our unexpected encounter.

And still I ponder, while he has no need of thought, as he makes his way effortlessly forward...

© 2012 Patrick J. Walsh

Other Essays in this Series:

• A Walk in the Park

• Encounter in Autumn

• The First Warm Day of Spring

• A Walk Beneath the Dripline

Encounter in Autumn

by Patrick J. Walsh

A sliver of moon hung baldly in the sky, straining a weak fusillade of light through the moody blue and pale remnant of white that wrestled for the final moments of the fading day. He searched the trees along the water’s edge; darkness gathered, and marshaled itself for the approaching night.

... a mesh of tree branches made the bare moon appear
even more lovely for the effort it took to see it clearly ...

Up a small slope, through a dense field of scrub, his mind wandered backward even as he progressed toward the road and the return to the car, and the drive home. In the gathering dark he fancied a shadowy image of Beowulf, and wondered at the thought of Grendel passing behind him in the shallow stream -- but it is a quite shallow stream, he argued; and it is quite quiet -- I can hear nothing roiling around in it -- as he moved onto the path’s final approach to the paved road.

But there was yet an odd feeling in the stillness of the woods. Quiet for a brief moment, he wondered what possibly could be disturbing the calm of the mild evening, with its weak moonlight and pleasant musk of fallen leaves... Then, chuckling inwardly at his own strangeness, he returned to his pace along the last of the path, with bits of branch and leaf crackling beneath the soles of his boots at each footfall.

And there she was: as if formed instantaneously out of the ether of the night, the precise epitome of nature’s finest grace. Still retaining the fine brown of her coat despite the lateness of the season -- perhaps because of the mild weather, he reasoned -- there stood a small deer. A doe.

She was tiny, for an animal of her kind, and yet still the size of a young horse. He often joked, when driving with friends along the back roads and coming upon a sudden gathering of deer: ‘look -- little horses’ -- and yet now, alone in the woods, with her frozen mutely on the narrow path, between him and the paved road homeward, he wondered anew at just how large a presence even a tiny deer can establish in the distinctive setting of her natural surroundings.

She stood, simply, staring. At first he thought to take another step toward her, perhaps leading her to turn aside; but he was brought up short by the gentle curve of the bones of her cheek and the dignified mien he thought he perceived in the way she studied him across the ten or so yards between them.

So he stood as well. And they each waited, quiet, the stillness of the night enveloping them.

He wondered: was there some way to move her along -- she had obviously been headed into the woods -- without frightening her, or causing her to feel threatened... but how exactly did one communicate any intention, good or ill, to a creature whose understanding of humans was even more limited than his knowledge of the inhabitants of the woods?

He looked up again at the thin crescent above the treeline, through a mesh of tree branches whose haphazard framing made the bare moon appear even more lovely for the effort it took to see it clearly -- and he was struck with an idea.

Taking care to step softly, he turned himself halfway around on the path. Facing entirely away from her, he listened; at first hearing no sound at all other than the suddenly apparent exhalation of breath through his own nostrils.

And then a slight rustle emanated from somewhere behind him on the trail, and a dainty but definite step, followed by another, and then several more...

When the fading sounds indicated a respectable distance between them, he again turned forward, and was relieved to see his way clear all the way to the opening onto the paved road.

He moved quickly, stopping only once, briefly, to see if there was any trace of her left to be gleaned from the darkness. Finding none, he moved on, to the road, and the car, homeward.

© 2011 Patrick J. Walsh

A Walk in the Park

By Patrick J. Walsh

Sometimes when I’m writing about several separate things at the same time, they all kind of end up running together in a sort of literary mashup.

Lately the strings that have come together have been the result of some fiction I’ve been writing; some poetry I’ve been reading; and some prayers I’ve contemplated while wandering in the park near my home.

The park is really interesting this time of year. Where there was ice just a short while ago, and slush even more recently, there is now mud -- a silty brown mix of wet, discarded dirt, gravelly mixed with broken bits of blacktop and stones disturbed by the flow of the frozen water melted, and discarded shards of bark that have been withered off the trees by the harshness of this tumultuous winter.

When I walk, I sometimes have no choice but to slog through the mud at those stretches in which the pavement is covered or missing, and the sound of my boots plucking through the wet mush makes me chuckle. It is a funny sound, and a welcome distraction from the chill that still clings as the last gasp of this past winter struggles to hold off the encroaching spring.

Where there was ice and slush… there is now mud — gravelly mixed 

with shards of bark withered off the trees by this tumultuous winter…

This was a hard season for many of the people I love. Their difficulties recently led me to some of the cherished reading of my youth: John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” from “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.”

A regular feature of high school and college curriculums, the famous passage of this work is probably familiar to anyone interested in literature or poetry:

“No man is an island, entire of itself... any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

But there are also other elements that have struck a chord with me lately, and which seem particularly appropriate to the winding down of the long winter season.

There is, for example, the beauty of Donne’s imagery of our lives as leaves in a divinely authored book:

“...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language... God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...”

...and there is the poet’s somewhat startling idea of the value of suffering:

“Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors ...for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction...”

As I walk along the tree-lined passages of the park, moving each day a little closer to a time of longer light and the charity of warmness in the wind, I think about Donne’s view of affliction and amend it a bit.

In my wishes for the well being of all those who are suffering -- those close to me, and those whose trials I know of only from the accounts of others -- I hope that any ability any of us may have to “borrow” some measure of their misery, through sharing or support or prayer, might help to relieve some of the sting of that suffering.

If such borrowing cannot stop the progress of illness or injury or even death, I pray that it might at least make the passage through misery a bit less painful for those who are hurting. That has been my prayer throughout my walks this winter, and now with the burgeoning promise of spring in the very air around me, it is transformed into an audacious hope for better days -- for those in whose struggles I share, and for that great unknown mass of all humanity, in whose afflictions we are each, and all, involved.

© 2011 Patrick J. Walsh