Page 106 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

He put up no fight as she slipped the noose over his head, worked it down past one

foreleg, then the next. Slowly, she drew it tight.

“That’s it,” she murmured. “Thattaboy.”

She lifted the raccoon as gently as one can with a noose on a stick, and deposited him in

the cage. Latching it shut, she slid it into a dock in the back of the van. When she closed

the doors, she did so carefully, with scarcely a sound.

You see what happened there? From vermin to living (dying) individual in one short,

bushy tale. Stories have the power to make us alive to one another—that is, to all

“others.”

When we write and read biodiverse narratives, we foster bio-empathy—a crucial

undertaking in an age of extinction that could very well include our own. In her naturalist

masterpiece, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard lays out the necessary work: “We

must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and

describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the

swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”

ENDNOTES

1. To be precise, the scene captures an April morning near Forks of Credit, Ontario. It is
an exact digital reproduction of a portrait that existed in the museum from January 1935

to 1980, when it was taken down. By remounting an old display, the ROM is perhaps

making the point that this was one historical moment’s vision, one engineering of truth—
not nature per se but another era’s perspective of nature.

2. There are different ways of minimizing difficult knowledge in museums. Avner Segal