Helen Hoover - A Place in the Woods

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC .
Published June 23, 1969
Reprinted Nine Times
Eleventh Printing, January 1985
Copyright 1969 by Adrian and Helen Hoover
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States byAlfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneouslyin Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Part of the foreword appeared in Defenders of Wildlife News.
Copyright 1968 by Helen Hoover.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-76217

eISBN: 978-0-307-83144-6

v3.1

To all the people

who asked the questions

I have tried to answer here.

The writing of this book takes me back through quite a number of years and I see our early days here with the broadened vision that distance brings. I know now that what happened to my husband and me here could have happened in many other locations in the North Woods of Minnesota, or in any other place where such boreal forest stands. I realize that many people influenced our lives in one way or another, far too many to bring into this narrative. I am quite sure that a blow-by-blow account of our experiences would bore the reader beyond hope after a few pages.

So I am writing of a Village and a Trail and a Lake and a Lodge, which may bring us just a little closer to people who have other villages and trails and lakes and lodges of their own. I am using Hilda and Sven, Jacques and Johnvery real people although these are not their namesto stand in the place of many who did so much for us. And I am telescoping events that weary even me when I recall their ambling and disconnected sequence.

The series of misadventures that beset Ade and me during our first month here came with such regularity that they now hold an aura of the ridiculous. The obstacles that we struggled to overcome have dwindled to minor incidents against the forest background. I now see that our lack of communicationsand fundsbrought us deep awareness of the strength and courage to be drawn from the steady renewal of the forest, and gave us the many hours we spent enjoying and learning to understand, within our human limitations, the living creatures who shared the land with us.

Those limitations are very real because there is as yet no way to communicate more than superficially with other species, or to understand their mental processes. Thus we cannot know how an animal thinks or why he behaves as he does. We can only believe, and such beliefs range all the way from the conviction that animals are capable of abstract thought to that which sees them as mere puppets, jerking about on the strings of instinct. I cannot accept either of these ideas, again within my limitations of human thinking: the first because abstractions are almost always thought about in words or mathematical symbols, which animals do not use; the second from my own observations during the past dozen years.

I believe that animals are acted upon both by instinct and by thought of their own kind, the proportions of these varying with species, individuals, and the circumstances of their environment.

Two bugaboos related to these beliefs haunt authors who write nonscientifically about animals. I should like to explain my thoughts on them, in the hope that this may lead to a better understanding of both my wild friends and me.

First, there is anthropomorphism, whose complex definitions can be boiled down to attributing human characteristics to animals. This always seems backwards to me because the animals came first and we might better be concerned with how much like animals people are, rather than the other way around. Aside from that, attempts to show that human observers cannot be certain of the meaning of animal actions may produce a piece of writing overloaded with apparently, as if, and similar terms, which are often superfluous. Apparently, for instance, is ambiguous, because it may mean either certainly or seemingly, but even when used to mean seemingly it is usually unnecessary because everything seen by anyone is apparent to him. For example: A man gave me a friendly smile. This means only that his smile looked friendly to me. Actually, it might have been the pre-election smile of a weary politician or the professional smile of a confidence man. Again, we use apparently with really astonishing contradiction. People who study birds know that their feathers do not contain blue pigment but that the blue color seen by the normal eye is an illusion produced by light reflecting from brownish-gray pigment. However, they do not say the apparently blue jay although this would be correct. On the other hand, I have read, The bobcat apparently yawned. It is hard to imagine how anyone who saw any cat yawn could be in doubt about what the animal was doing, and yawning is not a function reserved to humans, anyway.

So, if I say, The fawns played happily together, or The hare, terrified, leaped away from the step when I opened the door, I mean that is how it looked to meand in these cases I may well be right. But if I say, The hen glanced apologetically at me, I am deliberately amusing myself with the idea of an apologetic hen. I doubt very much that anyone would take this seriously, whether he does or does not know some chickens personally, and to carefully explain that the hen really wasnt apologizing verges on an insult to the readers intelligence.

The second trap is teleology, the ascription of purpose to nature. Here again contradiction lifts its head. A great many people believe that there is purpose in the creation as a whole, but become indignant at the idea that any animal but man may have purpose. Purpose, which carries the feeling of determination, may be too strong a word as not even many human actions carry purpose. Intention seems a better word. In any case, the evidence of my eyes tells me that wild creatures, aside from or in combination with instinctive behavior, do have to make choices, especially when strange elements, such as people, enter their world. They often move in patterns, but they develop special patterns in special situations. Let us consider Old Harry, the begging woodpecker.

In the spring, when bears begin to amble through our yard, we bring in our suet feeders, both to save them from being clawed to bits or carried away, and to discourage the bears from hanging around our buildings. One particular male hairy woodpecker refused to be thus mulcted of his suet. Every morning he settled on a cedar branch that overhangs the cabin door and set up a din of squawks and squeaks. If Ade went out with a feeder, Old Harry flew ahead of him to the proper tree, waited behind the trunk until the feeder was hung on its nail, and then had breakfast. If Ade opened the door and went back in or walked to the tree without the feeder, the bird flew to our kitchen window and proceeded to thump and bang and take the sill apart fiber by fiber until the suet was supplied. (And there were no insects in that dried and painted windowsill.) Try as I may, I cannot believe that Old Harry did not intend to get his suet.

Now and then, no matter how wary I am, I find myself tangled up in both teleology and anthropomorphism. In The Gift of the Deer