Ursula K LeGuin - Buffalo Girls

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PRAISE FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN ANDBUFFALO GALS AND OTHER ANIMAL

PRESENCES "Ursula Le Guin, one of the most significant science fiction writ-ers of the past two

decades, charms the reader with some glimpses of greatness . . . this disarmingly informal volume of short

fic-tion ... is like a visit with one of America's most brilliant writers."

—Santa Barbara News-Press

"Refreshing . . . these stories are a strong tonic for many modern

spiritual ills."

—Santa Cruz Sentinel

"A delightful collection . . . designed to shatter your world view."

—Riverside Press Enterprise

"How wonderful to be in the hands of an accomplished storyteller like Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work

shares in that imaginative transformation of the world sometimes called magical realism, sci-ence fiction,

or fantasy."

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Ursula Le Guin . . . transcends genre and delivers a delightful collection of works. . . . The effect is a

disturbing and delicious disorientation that makes us resee ourselves and our relationship to the world.

What she does with craft and good humor will both

entertain and educate."

—Santa Barbara

URSULA K. LE GUIN is an outstanding American writer whose works include science fiction, fantasy,

young adult fiction, chil-dren's books, essays and poems. She has received numerous awards including

the Nebula, Hugo, Kafka, and National Book Awards. Among her best known novels areThe Left

Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Earthsea (a Trilogy), andAlways Com-ing Home.

NAL BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE

PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM

MARKETING DIVISION. NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, 1633 BROADWAY, NEW YORK,

NEW YORK 10019.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Goodman; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from "Original

"Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke is the translation of Ursula K. Le Guin. "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come

Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared inEpoch, edited by Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood. "Torrey

Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared inHard Words by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper & Row, 1981. "Winter

Carr. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts From the Journal of the Association of

93120.

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by Capra Press.

PLUME TRADEMARK REO. US PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES REGISTERED

TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN CHICAGO. U.S.A.

signet, signet classic, mentor, onyx, plume, meridian

and NALbooks are publishedin the United States by NAL PENGUIN INC.,

1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019,

in Canadaby The New American Library of Canada Limited,

81 Mack Avenue, Scarborough, Ontario MIL IMS

Library of Congress Cataloging-ln-Publication

LeGuin, Ursula K., 1929-

Buffalo gals and other animal presences / by Ursula K.Le Guin. p. cm.

ISBN 0-452-26139-2 (pbk.)

1. Animals—Literary collections. I. Title.

[PS3562.E42B8 1988] 88-15583 813'.54—dc!9

CIP Design and typography by Jim Cook

(Santa Barbara, California). First Plume Printing, September, 1988 123456789

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

Introduction.......................... 9

"Come Into Animal Presence" (Denise Levertov) .................... 14

I. Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight .... 17

II. Three Rock Poems .................... 55

The Basalt ......................... 56

Flints ............................ 56

Mt St Helens/Omphalos ................ 57

III. "The Wife's Story" and "Mazes" ............ 61

Mazes ............................ 61

The Wife's Story ...................... 67

IV. Five Vegetable Poems .................. 75

Torrey Pines Reserve ................... 76

Lewis and Clark and After ............... 77

West Texas ......................... 77

Xmas Over ......................... 78

The Crown of Laurel................... 78

V. "The Direction of the Road" and "Vaster Than Empires" .................. 83

The Direction of the Road ............... 84

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow ......... 92

VI. Seven Bird and Beast Poems ............. 131

What is Going on in the Oaks ............ 132

ForTed .......................... 133

Found Poem ....................... 134

Totem ........................... 134

Winter Downs ...................... 135

The Man Eater ..................... 135

SleepingOut ....................... 136

VII. "The White Donkey" and "Horse Camp" ..... 139

The White Donkey ................... 140

Horse Camp ....................... 143

VIII. Four Cat Poems ..................... 151

Tabby Lorenzo ...................... 152

Black Leonard in Negative Space .......... 152

A Conversation With a Silence ........... 153

For Leonard, Darko, and Burton Watson ..... 153

IX "Schrodinger's Cat" and

"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" .......... 157

SchrOdinger's Cat .................... 158

The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics ....... 167

X. "May's Lion" ....................... 179

May's Lion ........................ 179

XI. Rilke's "Eighth Duino Elegy" and ;, "She Unnames Them" ................. 191 |

The Eighth Elegy, from the f Duino Elegies of RM. Rilke ............. 191

She Unnames Them .................. 194

Buffalo

Gals

Introduction

ALTHOUGH I WHINED and tried to hide under the rug my inexorable publisher demanded an

introduction for this book of my stories and poems about animals. Having done introductions before, I

have found that many readers loathe them, reviewers sneer at them, and critics dismiss them; and then

they all tell me so. As for myself I rather like introductions, but generally read them after reading what

they were supposed to introduce me to. Read as extra-ductions, they are often interesting and useful. But

that won't do. Ductions must be intro, and come first, like salad in restaurants, a lot of cardboard lettuce

with bits of red wooden cabbage soaked in dressing so that you're disabled for the entree.

The kind of introduction that conies naturally is oral. Reading aloud to an audience, one often talks a little

about what one is going to read; and so for each section of this book I have tried to write down the kind

of thing I might say about the pieces if I were performing them.

As for the book as a whole: first of all I am grateful to my inexorable publisher for having the idea of

doing such a collection, and for asking me to write a long new story for it It was his request that gave me

the story "Buffalo Gals." Three other stories have not been printed in book form before, and twelve of the

poems have not been printed anywhere till now. They are not all exactly about animals. In fact this is a

sort of Twenty Questions anthology—

10JT BUFFALO GALS

animal, vegetable, or mineral? But the animals, naturally, are more active. And more talkative.

What about talking animals, anyhow?

In his literary biography of Rudyard Kipling so sympa-thetic and perceptive a reader/writer as Angus

Wilson dis-misses theJungle Books as schoolboy stories with animal costumes, and has no truck at all

with thefust So Stories. As I think theJungle Books, along with the other "children's story,"Kim, are

Kipling's finest work, and consider thefust So Stories a unique and miraculous interaction of prose with

poetry with graphics, of adult mind with child mind, and of written with oral literature—a shining

intersection among endless dreary one-way streets—so Wilson's dismis-sal of them was something I

needed to understand. Not that it was anything unusual. Critical terror of Kiddilit is common. People to

whom sophistication is a positive intel-lectual value shun anything "written for children"; if you want to

clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Pot-ter without sneering. With the agreed exceptionof

Alice in Wonderland, books for children are to be mentioned only dismissively or jocosely by the adult

male critic. Just as Angus Wilson used to dismiss Virginia Woolf uncomforta-bly, jocosely, as a lady

novelist, though he finally and cred-itably admitted that he might have missed something there... In

literature as in "real life," women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization

erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is(vide Lacanetal.} the foundation of language, the

Father Tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all these

non-men who won't learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and

chattering! But then, who are the Bandar-Log? Why do animals in kids' books talk? Why do animals in

myths talk? How come the prince eats a burned fish-scale

Introduction'^.11

and all of a sudden understands what the mice in the wall are saying about the kingdom? How come on

Christmas night the beasts in the stables speak to one another in human voices? Why does the tortoise

say, "111 race you," to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, "111 do exactly what you tell me!"

Animals don't talk—everybody knows that Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and

women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their

own. So why do we keep putting words into their mouths?

We who? We the dumb: the others.

In the dreadful self-isolation of the Church, that soul-fortress towering over the dark abysms of the

bestial/ mortal/World/Hell, for St Francis to cry out "Sister spar-row, brother wolf!" was a great thing.

But for the Buddha to be a jackal or a monkey was no big deal. And for the people Civilization calls

"primitive," "savage," or "undeveloped," including young children, the continuity, interdependence, and

community of all life, all forms of being on earth, is a lived fact, made conscious in narrative (myth, ritual,

fic-tion). This continuity of existence, neither benevolent nor cruel itself, is fundamental to whatever

morality may be built upon it Only Civilization builds its morality by deny-ing its foundation.

By climbing up into his head and shutting out every voice but his own, "Civilized Man" has gone deaf. He

can't hear the wolf calling him brother—not Master, but brother. He can't hear the earth calling him

child—not Father, but son. He hears only his own words making up the world. He can't hear the animals,

they have nothing to say. Children babble, and have to be taught how to climb up into their heads and

shut the doors of perception. No use teaching women at all, they talk all the time, of course, but never

say anything. This is the myth of Civilization, embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to Man

alone.

12.^BUFFALO GALS

Introduction ~^~13

And so it is this myth which all talking-animal stories mock, or simply subvert So long as "man" "rules,"

animals will make rude remarks about him. Women and unruly men will tell their daughters and sons what

the fox said to the ox, what Raven told South Wind. And the cat will say, "I am the Cat that walks by

himself, and all places are alike to me!" And the Man, infuriated by this failure to acknowl-edge

Hierarchy, will throw his boots and his little stone ax (that makes three) at the Cat Only when the Man

listens, and attends, O Best Beloved, and hears, and understands, will the Cat return to the Cat's true

silence.

When the word is not sword, but shuttle.

But still there will be stories, there will always be stories, in which the lion's mother scolds the lion, and

the fish cries out to the fisherman, and the cat talks; because it is true that all creatures talk to one

another, if only one listens.

This conversation, this community, is not a simple harmony. The Peaceable Kingdom, where lion and

lamb lie down, is an endearing vision not of this world. It denies wilderness. And voices cry in the

wilderness.

Users of words to get outside the head with, rash poets get caught in the traps set for animals. Some,

unable to endure the cruelty, maim themselves to escape. Robinson Jeffers's "Original Sin" describes the

"happy hunters" of the Stone Age, puzzled how to kill the mammoth trapped in their pitfall, discovering

that they can do so by building fires around it and roasting it alive all day. The poem ends:

I would rather

Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember Not to

hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear

death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

This maybe wrongheaded, but I prefer it to the generous but sloppy identifications of Walt Whitman.

Where Whit-man takes the animal into his vast, intensely civilized ego, possesses it, engulfs and

annihilates it, Jeffers at least reaches out and touches the animal, the Other, through pain, and releases it

But the touching hand is crippled. Perhaps it is only when the otherness, the difference, the space

between us (in which both cruelty and love occur) is perceived as holy ground, as the sacred place, that

we can "come into animal presence"—the title of Denise Lever-toVs poem, which honors my book, and

stands here as its true introduction.

14JT BUFFALO GALS

Come into Animal Presence

Come into animal presence.

No man is so guileless as

the serpent The lonely white

rabbit on the roof is a starf

twitching its ears at the rain.

The llama intricately

folding its hind legs to be seated

not disdains but mildly

disregards human approval.

What joy when the insouciant

armadillo glances at us and doesn't

quicken his trotting

across the track into the palm bush.

What is this joy? That no animal

falters, but knows what it must do?

That the snake has no blemish,

that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings

in white star-silence? The llama

rests in dignity, the armadillo

has some intention to pursue in the palm forest

Those who were sacred have remained so,

holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence

of bronze, only the sight that saw it

faltered and turned from it.

An old joy returns in holy presence.

—DENISE LEVERTOV

Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight

"YOU FELL OUT OF THE SKY," the coyote said.

Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched

the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt

"There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it," the

coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. "Are you hurt?"

She was all right She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn't

understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her

feel sick, but it was all right They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.

She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat

silvery and thick The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat's.

She sat up, slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.

"Did you lose an eye?" the coyote asked, interested.

"I don't know," the child said. She caught her breath and shivered. "I'm cold."

18jy BUFFALO GALS

"I'll help you look for it," the coyote said. "Come on! If you movearound you won't have to shiver. The

sun's up."

Cold lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting

busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbit-brush and cheat-grass, pawing at a rock. "Aren't you going

to look?" it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. "I knew a trick once

where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and then whistle, and

they'd come back into my head. But that goddam bluejay stole them, and when I whistled nothing came.

I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that But you've got

one eye that's OK, what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?"

The child crouched, shivering.

"Well, come if you want to," said the coyote, yawned again, snapped at a flea, stood up, turned, and

trotted away among the sparse clumps of rabbit-brush and sage, along the long slope that stretched on

down and down into the plain streaked across by long shadows of sagebrush. The slender, grey-yellow

animal was hard to keep in sight, van-] ishing as the child watched.

She struggled to her feet, and without a word, though she kept saying in her mind, "Wait, please wait,"

she hobbled after the coyote. She could not see it She kept her hand pressed over the right eyesocket

Seeing with one eye the was no depth; it was like a huge, flat picture. The coyot suddenly sat in the

middle of the picture, looking back at1her, its mouth open, its eyes narrowed, grinning. Her legs began to

steady and her head did not pound so hard, though the deep, black ache was always there. She had

nearly caught up to the coyote when it trotted off again. This time she spoke. "Please wait!" she said.

"OK," said the coyote, but it trotted right on. Shef

Won't You Come Out Tonight^19

followed, walking downhill into the flat picture that at each step was deep.

Each step was different underfoot; each sage bush was different, and all the same. Following the coyote

she came out from the shadow of the rimrock cliffs, and the sun at eyelevel dazzled her left eye. Its bright

warmth soaked into her muscles and bones at once. The air, that all night had been so hard to breathe,

came sweet and easy.

The sage bushes were pulling in their shadows and the sun was hot on the child's back when she

followed the coyote along the rim of a gu%- After a while the coyote slanted down the undercut slope

and the child scrambled after, through scrub willows to the thin creek in its wide sandbed. Both drank

The coyote crossed the creek, not with a careless charge and splashing like a dog, but singlefoot and

quiet like a cat; always it carried its tail low. The child hesitated, knowing that wet shoes make blistered

feet, and then waded across in as few steps as possible. Her right arm ached with the effort of holding

her hand up over her eye. "I need a band-age," she said to the coyote. It cocked its head and said

nothing. It stretched out its forelegs and lay watching the water, resting but alert. The child sat down

nearby on the hot sand and tried to move her right hand. It was glued to the skin around her eye by dried

blood. At the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain it frightened her. The

coyote came over close and poked its long snout into her face. Its strong sharp smell was in her nostrils.

It began to lick the awful, aching blindness, clean-ing and cleaning with its curled, precise, strong, wet

tongue, until the child was able to cry a little with relief, being comforted. Her head was bent close to the

grey-yellow ribs, and she saw the hard nipples, the whitish belly-fur. She put her arm around the

she-coyote, stroking the harsh coat over back and ribs.

20JT BUFFALO GALS

"OK," the coyote said, 'let's go!" And setoff without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet

and fol-lowed. "Where are we going?" she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek,

answered, "On down along the creek..."

There must have been a while she was asleep while she walked, because she felt like she was waking

up, but she was walking along, only in a different place. She didn't know how she knew it was different

They were still follow-ing the creek, though the gully was flattened out to nothing much, and there was

still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye—the good one—felt rested. The other one still

ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it But where was the coyote?

She stopped. The pit of cold into which the plane had fallen re-opened and she fell. She stood falling a

thin whimper making itself in her throat

"Over here!"

The child turned. She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried-up carcass of a crow, black feathers

sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw.

She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire, sprinkling something into a conical pot She

heard the water boiling in the pot, though it was propped between rocks, off the fire. The woman's hair

was yellow and grey, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare. The upturned soles looked as dark

and hard as shoe soles, but the arch of the foot was high, and the toes made two neat curving rows. She

wore bluejeans and an old white shirt She looked over at the girl. "Come on, eat crow!" she said. The

child slowly came toward the woman and the fire, and squatted down. She had stopped falling and felt

very light and empty; and her tongue was like a piece of wood stuck in her mouth.

Wont You Come Out Tonight^. 21

Coyote was now blowing into the pot or basket or what-ever it was. She reached into it with two

fingers, and pulled her hand away shaking it and shouting "Ow! Shit! Why don't I ever have any spoons?"

She broke off a dead twig of sagebrush, dipped it into the pot, and licked it "Oh, boy," she said. "Come

on!"

The child moved a little closer, broke off a twig dipped. Lumpy pinkish mush clung to the twig She

licked. The taste was rich and delicate.

"What is it?" she asked after a long time of dipping and licking.

"Food. Dried salmon mush," Coyote said. "It's cooling down." She stuck two fingers into the mush again,

this time getting a good load, which she ate very neatly. The child, when she tried, got mush all over her

chin. It was like chopsticks, it took practice. She practiced. They ate turn and turn until nothing was left in

the pot but three rocks. The child did not ask why mere were rocks in the mush-pot They licked the

rocks clean. Coyote licked out the inside of the pot-basket, rinsed it once in the creek, and put it onto

her head. It fit nicely, making a conical hat She pulled off her bluejeans. "Piss on the fire!" she cried, and

did so, standing straddling it "Ah, steam between the legs!" she said. The child, embarrassed, thought she

was sup-posed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not Bareassed, Coyote danced around

the dampened fire, kicking her long thin legs out and singing,

"Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight, Come out tonight, come out tonight, Buffalo gals, won't you

come out tonight, And dance by the light of the moon?"

She pulled her jeans back on. The child was burying the remains of the fire in creek-sand, heaping it

over, seriously, wanting to do right Coyote watched her.

22JT BUFFALO GALS

"Is that you?" she said. "A Buffalo Gal? What happened to the rest of you?"

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PRAISEFORURSULAK.LEGUINANDBUFFALOGALSANDOTHERANIMALPRESENCES"UrsulaLeGuin,oneofthemostsignificantsciencefictionwritersofthepasttwodecades,charmsthereaderwithsomeglimpsesofgreatness...thisdisarminglyinformalvolumeofshortfiction...islikeavisitwithoneofAmerica'smostbrilliantwriters."—SantaBarbaraNews...

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