A Prairie Escape

Thousands of blog readers are requesting, no demanding, I continue the amazing story of my journey from ferality to running a prestigious psychiatric institute, and though I hadn't wanted this humble endeavour to focus on me, I do understand their interest, as most people still stumble blindly in the dark when it comes the their fourleg brethren, the majority actually doubting that there are indeed men and women among them, many prominent and even famous, who were raised by animals. My life is devoted in large measure to combating this prejudicial attitude, part of which suggests, sadly, willful blindness, and another part bald incredulity. I excuse the latter and condemn the former. Period.

Who, you may ask, are some famous people who were raised in a fourleg home? Given my profession and the fact that many patients at the Balzac Institute have ferality in their background, I shall only share the names of celebrities who have outed themselves, in person, in print, or by legend. In no particular order, these include:

1) Romulus and Remus, historic founders of Rome, and raised and suckled by a wolf.

2) Beatrix Potter, brought up by the hedgehogs Josiah Thumpleton Crotchtitty and his wife, Penelope Higglety Pizzleberry-Crotchtitty.

3) JK Rowling, nursed by a griffon and nurtured by a phoenix.

4) Rudyard Kipling, improbably raised by a cobra, a mongoose, a tiger and Penelope Higglety Pizzleberry-Crotchtitty.

5) Wyatt Earp, armadillo parents.

6) Jane Goodall, had a sea cucumber as a governess.

7) Cameron Diaz, coyote mother (yes!).

8) Jimmy Carter, a pair of turkey vultures captured him as an infant and raised him in their nest.

9) Fitty Cent, racing pigeons sheltered him in their coop.

10) Charles Nelson Reilly, entire childhood spent with peafowl.

I could provide you with another three-score celebrity names but won't, as it isn't germane to this posting. I'm procrastinating sharing my personal story with you, as the memories are as bitter as a wormwood and quince smoothie. But my personal mission statement is "No fear!", and so I must plod on.

After crucifying Seminole, my father, I left the house and ran naked through the streets of Sourdough toward the Sourdough River, which bisects the town into what some local wag named the "Left Bank" and the "Not Left Bank." The names stuck, unfortunately, thanks largely to students at the town's two colleges, which occupy prime riverfront territory, Melancthon College on the Left Bank and Lost Souls College on the Not Left Bank. My entire confrontation with Seminole took little over ten minutes, so it was still barely after dawn, a time coyotes refer to as "treetop sun" for the obvious reason of where the sun resides at this important time of the day: young coyotes nurse then, after which they fall sleep. My coyote mother, Ki, always loved treetop sun, when the air was crisp, the shadows long, and creatures of the night crossed paths with creatures of the day, some returning to sleep while others stirred and rose. Ki often composed poetry in the early morning hours, chanting it in her lovely warbling voice. While a translation fails to do justice to the oral complexities of her spoken verse, I offer one of my favorites below, which I call "Sparrows":

Chittering they fly so free,
Over land and over tree.
Flapping wings they take to flight,
How wondrous is their aerial sight!
While mud-bound stays the coyote,
Emburrowed must our tenure be.
Yet we fly, too, when we perceive,
The sparrows flitting o'er the leaves.

I'm crying as I write this, at the memory of my dearest mother, Ki, killed by a twoleg trapper. What would she think, were she alive, of my murderous intentions toward Emmeline, Seminole and Claude? Forgiveness is the sole commandment of the coyote moral universe, expressed usually as: "Forgive your neighbor as you would yourself, for everyone fucks up a lot."

So I let Ki down, probably, by my actions toward my twoleg family. We'd talk about them through my years of loneliness on the prairie, as I watched Ki's litters come and go, my own siblings with whom I'd play, and over whom I'd watch, and though I was older than my brothers and sisters chronologically, my own development was perforce slower, given my species and our protracted human childhood, and Ki forbade me from leaving before I was ready, I had so much to learn about life as a coyote, and so few instinctual resources to draw upon to help me naturally that Ki feared, with good reason, I'd simply die on my own, and on occasion she'd broach the possibility of my returning to the twoleg world once I was of mating age, despite the sly looks I'd get from a few of the girls from the burrows around us, Greet and Lala in particular watched me with deep aching lust shimmering in their eyes, and Ki would chase them away, fangs bared and dripping, fangs snapping. "You musn't donk those bitches," she'd order, and I obeyed Ki as I never have any being before or since—that is, until I met my beloved future wife, Whiski Rae Shamrock, MD, who could insist I extinguish a burning brand by thrusting it up my fundament, a command she's issued me more than once, only to stop me right before I fully comply, much as YHWH stopped Abraham from plunging a knife into his son, Isaac's, chest.

I adore Whiski Rae's bossiness, as I find it sexy, much as I admired Ki's take-charge attitude, though not for Oedipal reasons, but because it kept me alive. The very best example I can offer is my escape from Sourdough after attacking Seminole. As I noted above, I ran immediately to the Sourdough River and dove in, I was a good swimmer and the heat I felt was like a grass fire, not heat from the day, which hadn't yet built, but heat from passion's furnace, in my case the passion of hate and revenge. I swam into the river's main channel, where the current was swift and the river a good eight feet deep. The water cooled me at once, and I felt my limbs loosen up as I drifted through the heart of the town, allowing only my face to surface, lest the assorted loiterers on the river's banks spy me and shout Huzzah! But I needn't worry, for I could tell that the few twolegs who were up and about were already mired deep in the day's relentless minutiae, their brows furrowed in pointless contemplation of their mean and sorry existence. My temptation was to roll onto my back and relax completely, my arms and legs floating as though weightless while I pondered the bottomless sky above and tried to think past all that blue. Although I'd lived the life of a coyote for nine years, I hadn't been cut off from the human world completely, as I'd sometimes sneak into Williston, North Dakota, the closest town to our burrow, and watch television through some family's window. Thus I was familiar with a little of the news of the day, and was especially interested in the moon landings, which had occurred some five or six years before. I knew the names of the first lunar explorers, Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins, and I even sent them a fan letter, recalling dimly how to spell and mail things, much as I occasionally sent hate mail to my twoleg family, addressing them as "The Poopheads," which was the sole scatological rebuke I remembered from my human childhood. To my delight the three astronauts, or more likely, their lackeys, sent me a signed photo, which I hung in the burrow above the ledge I'd dug for himself below our home's family room. For a return address I used the communal P.O. box shared by the area's coyotes, as several of them enjoyed buying dog sweaters from L.L Bean, the prairie winters being severe, and paying for the garments with stolen checks I'd complete for them . Greet's father fancied the Casco Bay polo shirts as well, and often trotted about wearing a pink one, sometimes even sporting a pair of Madras shorts he favored when the lesions on his rear end festered and ran, as he was very vain and hated to be seen in such a state.

But anyway: I didn't dare relax my guard until I left the town's environs, which didn't take long, Sourdough being small. I stayed in the river until I reached a little county park a few miles from town, then swam to shore and, after scanning the grounds for twolegs, stretched out in the long grass and let the sun beat down on my face and slept, surrounded by the sound of the rushing water, the calls of yellow-headed blackbirds, bobolinks and coots, and the distant whine of traffic on a county road. I was hidden, more or less, by the tall grasses, which also absorbed some of the water that beaded up on my greasy filthy skin. The peace of nature infilitrated my very core, and I felt an incredible rush of understanding rattle my soul. My soul! I was an avowed atheist and rationalist, unusual for a fourleg, especially one raised by coyotes, who are mystics to the bone, they believe in the Great Meadow, as I've mentioned, an idea that appeals even if I don't believe it myself, but they are also fond of the teachings of St. Theresa, Hildegaard von Bingen and Teilhard de Chardin, or the bastardized corruptions thereof told by my one sworn feral enemy, Claudetta Jean Tomattino, who at fourteen escaped the convent of Our Precious Lady of Weeping Sores in Sioux Falls in the midst of a roaring Great Plains blizzard, running shoeless through the mounting drifts, abandoning her wimple and habit for the thin shift she wore underneath, a vision ostensibly compelling her to escape into "nature," she expected Hildegaard to protect and succour her, instead she slowed and staggered and fell shivering into the deep snows, spent and frightened, her whimpering oddly coyote-like, leading Skuse the Grand to leave his comfortable burrow and investigate, he found the poor deluded girl and dragged her from the storms into his home, where his wives, Neetz and Woofle, licked and cosseted and nursed the trembling novitiate, who recovered by and by, then flourished, she remained with her adoptive parents until their deaths, then stayed in their den and took a series of coyote lovers, mating openly and loudly with them in violation of every tenet of fourleggedness, her egregious disregard of this more abided chiefly because she was a superb if dishonest storyteller, she convinced many coyotes to embrace the inexplicable and seek within it special messages and epiphanies that appealed as if a narcotic, indeed there was something addictive about her, she grew tremendously fat off of antelope marrow, brains, kidneys and liver, spending her days in shady repose under a tremendous cottonwood tree on the banks of the Niobrara River, eating and receiving oral pleasuring from a series of rank young male coyotes, Ki despised them and she hated Claudetta Jean, warning me away from her on our annual trips to South Dakota to visit relatives, which she needn't, I found the fat nun contemptible, not because of her lewd corpulence, which was merely disgusting, but rather her mystical maunderings, which struck me as being ad hoc, cynical, manipulative and frankly dumb. I had in fact intended to kill Claudetta Jean, as she threatened to destroy the coyote community in the Dakotas, dozens of young males in particular were drawn to her for obvious reasons, she was large enough to accomodate the urgent humpings of six at a time, provided each first bring her a freshly killed pronghorn, she'd spout her puerile blather to the legion panting acolytes lolling at her feet, worn out by their erotic exertions and unquestioning of her philosophies. But I was spared the role of executioner when she choked to death on an enormous gallstone lodged in one of the hepars she'd downed. She was in her fifties by then, toothless and weighing nearly a quarter-ton, and though gone her influence continues, if attenuated with the passing generations, there is still much pointless talk of the soul and the numinous and the possibility of sudden revelation through a self-induced emotional delirium. Bah!

I slept for hours that day by the river, the deepest sleep of my life, satisfied I'd castrated my brother and fixed my father to a cross of thorns, and that I'd indirectly tormented my mother through the sufferings of Claude and Seminole. Yet when I woke to the hooting of an owl and saw the dark sky reaching towards me there in the rolling countryside, a fat moon bruised and bright above, its face mottled but proud and refusing to look away even once during the past three billion years, unflinching as it regarded, and was regarded in turn, by its showy blue overseer, I felt ill, my throat raw, my scalp and groin itching, my limbs exhausted, a fever burning my brow, my lungs rigid and dense, the breath slipping from me, and a sharp pang of terror seized me by the scruff and shook me rudely. I was dying! I had intended to kill, and now was being killed myself, by what I had no idea, were Ki still alive she might be able to diagnosis me from the stench of my breath, the taste of my urine, the aroma and consistency of my stool, her veterinary skills were celebrated, creatures came from all around to attend her healing clinics, there was amnesty for all within eyeshot of our burrow, the fattest chipmunks could come with impunity to be ministered to by my coyote mother, though were she to come across them an hour later while hunting she'd break their little necks without mercy, this was understood by all species, the arbitrary nature of rules saying this is fine here but not there, or you can do this in this way but not that, for no more reason than order must be imposed, anarchy benefiting only the cagiest and strongest, those crafty enough to get away, quite literally, with murder, while all else goes to hell all around, until eventually the utter and complete collapse of critter culture comes with the sudden, avenging force of a volcanic explosion, or more insidiously in the manner of some grave and unstoppable epidemic, the whiskey shits, say, which eradicated over ninety per cent of Great Plains coyotes back when the Toadbellies first populated the prairie, this being the coyote name for European twolegs, referencing the sickly pale hue of their skin, and their intestinal malady which was likely cholera but was colloquially named after the intoxicant the Toadbellies introduced to our land. Damn them, and damn me for being their descendent!

How long I lay shivering after I slept I can't say for sure, but I believe there passed at least three treetop times, during which period I could neither eat nor drink nor even move, other than roll first to one side, than to the other. I was concealed more completely than I had realized at first, for occasionally visitors roamed the park, teens, mainly, to party and to mate, and at one point five or six peace officers to search for me. How did I know this was their purpose? They came close enough that I could hear them, and in the case of one heavyset fellow with flame red hair and an unkempt moustache, see him. How he couldn't see me I can't fathom, for I could see the reflection of myself frozen in fear in the lenses of his oversized mirrored sunglasses. Yet the deputy seemed to perceive nothing even as he peered seemingly right at me, his breathing stertorous, the buttons threatening to pop off of the cheap brown uniform shirt that barely covered his proud hard belly and fatty chest. I lay very still, willling myself not even to breathe, as the cop chewed the inside of his lip and hummed to himself a tuneless ditty, and sang a little as well, something about muskrats copulating, a song I later learned was a pop sensation of the era, obviously written by someone who'd not witnessed such fornication directly, as I had myself, there was nothing romantic about the fast and mildly gruesome screwing of two water rodents, who are tasty, admittedly, I'd eaten many a muskrat myself, some of whom I'd killed while they were in the midst of their outlandish and perfervid coition. Muskrat love indeed.

After the lawmen left I determined I must again move on. I now suspected I had both distemper and mange, and knew if I were to survive, I'd need to make my way to a ranch outside of Dickinson, North Dakota, and see Dr. Ken. Dr. Ken was a man of legend and mystery. He was a fourleg by way of California, where a cougar killed his parents, then abducted the young Ken who grew up to be a medical doctor, a veterinary surgeon, a dentist and a notary public. Now is not the time to recount his story, which would take a thousand and one postings; instead I will merely note that all wild creatures between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains know that if one of their young needs health care, he's the man to see. When Ki had an especially tough case, she'd summon Dr. Ken using the Coyote Express, which permits the rapid transmission of messages in emergencies through serial yipping. But I had no such service available to me now, for the Express didn't extend into Minnesota. Instead I would have to steal a car or a truck and drive myself westward.

You may wonder how I knew how to drive, given that I was only seven when Emmeline and Seminole cast me off. The answer is that I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent, often going to a truck stop off the interstate, which coyotes call the Hard River, and sneaking into idling vehicles whose owners had run into the store to pay for gas or buy some pork rinds and condoms. I was always a watcher as a boy, and possessed a photographic memory, and I'd slip behind the steering wheel and close my eyes, imaging what Emmeline or Seminole did when they drove, then opening my eyes I'd emulate their actions. In this way I learned, by and by, how to operate vehicles with automatic transmissions, though the intricacies of clutching and shifting eluded me, and I sometimes stole a car and would drive for hours at night, often with several of my friends aboard, they seemed fascinated by this exposure to twoleg culture, and enjoyed especially listening to the radio and, even more, watching the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth.

I pulled myself to my feet, flush now with a fever, the sweat coursing down my flanks in steaming rivulets, the day's heat high and the air drenched with humidity. The last thing I wanted to do (excluding another hearing of the deputy trilling "Muskrat Love") was move, yet I had no choice. I mustn't die, so I must see Dr. Ken. I decided that trotting might be easier than merely strolling, and found I had a little more strength than I expected, so I ran down the lane leading out of the park in search of a car to steal. I had run only a few yards when I rounded a bend and dove immediately into a ditch. A sheriff's cruiser was pulled off to the side, but the officer wasn't in sight. I waited for a minute and heard, in the distance, loud chewing interspersed with a few strangled snatches of that hideous song about the schtupping rats. I climbed from the ditch and headed toward the noise, dropping to all fours to keep close to the ground. There lay before me a gentle hill I surmounted, atop which I spied some grazing cattle, several of whom were lowing plaintively, while the rotund redheaded flatfoot was himself on hands and knees eating grass with obvious relish and enthusiasm. Fatso was a fourleg!

There is a signal we fourlegs have which permits us to identify one another, irrespective of which kind of animal raised us. I hurried to the deputy, tapped him on the shoulder, and immediately identified myself to him as belonging to the feral community. He rejoiced to see this and signaled me back accordingly, and we fell into an easy and warm colloquy, talking for hours, he explained to me that his twoleg mother, who was an orphaned milkmaid on a dairy farm near Brattleboro, Vermont, was impregnated at age fourteen by a vile herdsman who then fired her, giving her $75 and a one-way bus ticket to Waxahatchie, Texas, in the Big Bend country, where his brother ran a livestock inseminating service. This latter man was an outright psychopath who mainlined sheep dip and smoked jimson weed, and the pregnant young girl lived in terror, as the addled inseminator spent hours describing to her how he'd skin and eat her baby at its birth. He had fashioned a pair of leg cuffs linked by a stout chain, which he affixed one end to her ankle and the other to his. The chain was only a dozen feet in length, so she effectively shadowed him everywhere, including to the outhose, where he'd sometimes fall asleep. This shitter was quite literally the worst place she'd ever been, as it housed rattlesnakes and tarantulas and black widow spiders, and the feces overran the pit and spilled onto the dirt floor, she'd stand on her tiptoes for hours lest the droppings besmirch her bare feet, waiting for her cretinous master to snap out of his druggy reverie and leave the shithouse, his habit then was to do tai-chi for an hour, then fix a large breakfast for himself of calves brains and waffles, offering the poor pregnant girl only what food he couldn't eat, which she must lick off his plate like a dog.

My new friend, whose name was Y. Z. Newell, was only two weeks from birth, and he apparently kicked like a chorus girl in his mother's womb. This rendered impossible standing for hours in the outhose, and in frustration and fear she searched her captor's pockets and extracted a folding knife with which she calmly and precisely slit his throat, his eyes opening and meeting hers in terror and incomprehension before he slumped over and died in a fountain of blood. Y.Z.'s mother waited for the blood spurt to stop, then heaved the dead man head first through the crapper's hole until only his legs were visible, as forked and spindly as a turkey wishbone, and fled into the night.

"Guess where she ended up?" Y.Z. asked.

"Where?"

"Dr. Ken's clinic. That's where I was born."

"But how do you know of Dr. Ken? And how did she get to his clinic?"

"Coyotes led her."

"You mean...?"

"Yes. Coyotes raised me. Mother fared poorly after she gave birth, and was an invalid for years before she died of kennel cough when I was twelve. The Deenkera clan cared for her as though she were a sister."

"The Deenkeras outside of Pierre, South Dakota?"

"The very same. My parents were Reever and Skraw."

"My God! We knew them! Skraw was a dear friend of my mother, Ki"

"I have heard of Ki," Y.Z. said, smiling. "Perhaps we met at some coyote convocation."

"It's possible, though I don't remember it."

"Me either," said Y.Z. "What I do remember is how to get to Dr. Ken's clinic. You need to get there ASAP, as you look like death's leftovers warmed over. I'll take you there myself."

"That's extraordinarily kind of you."

Y.Z. dismissed my compliment with a wave of his beefy hand. "It's nothing. Plus, it's time for my annual physical anyway. It'll be a two birds, one stone deal. Get in the squad car."

"Gladly. A question, if I may."

"Of course."

"When I saw you grazing just now, I presumed you were raised by ruminants."

Y.Z. laughed as we drove off. "Indigestion," he answered simply. "Nothing beats grass for that."

"Amen," I nodded. I lay curled on my side in the backseat of Y.Z.'s cruiser, soothed by the soft leather, and the car's gentle rocking, and before long I'd slipped back to sleep, dreaming of my boyhood burrow, dreaming of Ki.