Last night I paddled back to a nearby corner of the lake to where the perch have been schooling this year, dozens and dozens of them of all sizes. They huddle just off the nearby lily pads knowing if a big bass comes cruising by, they can swim for the cover of pad stalks and shallows. I cast the smallest streamers I have, looking through the surface glare with my polarized lenses to see the tiniest ones near the surface (most willing to grab at the all-white, easy to see fly), and below, right along the mossy bottom the larger ones hover, some the size of a small bass, finning lazily, hunting crayfish, nymphs, dragon fly larvae. When they all rush away—you don’t see this; they are suddenly, simply not there—a big smallmouth bass is sure to fin past turning its red eye toward anything perch-like. On a whim I recently caught a smallish perch, watching the whole thing carefully through the surface as he rushed at my fly then stopped then rushed again when I gave it a twitch-rest-twitch, like urging a kitten to strike a piece of yarn, then yanked him out toward the deeper water, far from the sanctuary of the lily pads, and sure enough a bass of remarkable proportions incarnated from the depths to inhale it whole. I held on. The tiny, 14 hook would never grab hold—and I didn’t want it to. I was conducting an experiment only. Do the bass eat these perch? How big a perch will they eat? How big a bass will emerge? Answers: Yes. Big. Bigger than I had ever imagined.
Last night, though, I thought I might try to just catch some perch, to kill and eat a few. They are delicious. The lake is clean. All I had as a main course back at the cabin was some shredded cheese, maybe a tin of sardines.
The perch were there, as they have been all summer, but more spread out, and in the early evening light difficult to see, even with my fancy new prescription polarized glasses. I caught a few small ones, far too small to consider filleting, barely as long as my hand. One I let swim around for awhile just to see if bigger quarry were about. Then they vanished. Then a half dozen loons surfaced, erupting into song.
I call it “song,” but that’s not the right word. It is more like conversation, incantation, Gregorian chanting, Mongolian throat singing…. Loon calls coming nearby move in and around and through you, reverberating. They touch hidden strands you didn’t know resided in you, vibrating something deep within you. They urge you to go searching through your inner lexicon for adjectives—mournful, soulful, penetrating, haunting, eldritch (thanks Hawthorne), echoey, undulating….but none of them will quite do. Loon calls—and they have a whole quiver of them—escape adjectival summary. When there are many of them, up to a dozen lately as they prepare for migration, they call and respond, each voice slightly different, as if they are engaged in some primordial-cosmic squabble—and perhaps they are.
I set my fly rod down and pointed my cellphone loonward. The recording is a paltry approximation of the way those sounds struck my ears.
As suddenly as it began it ended, and the loons vanished away beneath the black sheen of the now glass-flat surface. I heard them again late, late at night, half in dream, more distant, as I often do in the pitch dark, moonless Adirondack nights, but it was a different call. A gentle-almost cooing or murmuring or uttering (again, no words will do).
This is also the hour of the hoot owls, and this year for whatever owlish reason they have been particularly vocal, noisome even, chortling and screeching in between their signature hoo-hoo, hoo-hoooos. Often more than one is there, and if it’s not too late, the warm bed’s grip not too difficult to wrest myself from, I’ll wander out into the forest following their calls. Several times now I have stood directly beneath them, peering up into the blackness, working to attach another sense to their callings. Like the loons, I feel I am eavesdropping on a language I cannot ever know, though at times it seems I can almost capture the essence of what’s being said. And their voices, like loon calls, are meant to carry across great spans of wilderness to be heard, to be responded to. I have to resist a preternatural urge to call back to them.
My dog, Charlie, a goofy-aloof, forever-toddler-like Gordon Setter is terrified of the owls, and when they come, the suddenly dinosaur-like hairs all along his back rise up, his eyes widen to owl-like proportions, he snarls and belts out his own response, and shaking all over, crawls into my lap.
He is less fearful when the coyotes prowl, a litany of shrieks and whooping, screamish-howls, near-barks, yips moving by so quickly, their en-masse bellows dopplering away, gone so soon you wonder if you really heard them at all. With these he raises his ears, utters a low approximation of a wild growl, realizing in some simple, dog-like way the sorry consequences of his domestication. We have even more of them in Connecticut. I see one occasionally standing alone along the rock ledges behind my house, or that one time standing right alongside the window of my office, staring yellow-eyed into a blowing snow squall as big as what I imagine a wolf to be. Two of my cats have vanished thanks to them, and we no longer let the remaining ones outside, but I hold no grudges, and when I see one, as I did just the other day on a long bike ride, sauntering—that’s the only word for it—mid-road in a development of large, expensive homes, I again admire their single-mindedness, that they can sustain their wildness even in the heart of tame American suburbia.
While most wild songs we are fortunate enough to hear come in the low light of pre-dawn or dusk or awaken us from sleep, the Adirondack raven prefers to raise its voice midday, all day long. Until recently, I thought they were one-trick ponies, their signature screech-caws (yells, really) all they could muster. At the cabin, they will frequently sit in a nearby pine and continually chastise you like an angry road-raging motorist you have just cut off. I will sometimes look up at them, human eye to small black raven eye and forcefully ask “what?”
Earlier this summer, I discovered ravens possess a far broader range of vocalizations. After a short portage into a favorite fishing pond, I heard something unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Here, my cache of words fails me almost utterly. The sound was a kind of loud chortling-clicking-clucking, directionless, everywhere. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It seemed as if I were on the inside of an instrument I’d never heard before, the vibrations of whatever were being plucked or blown or pounded radiating all around me. I managed a brief recording that does far less justice to it than my other recordings, but it was enough for the Merlin bird ID app to identify it as a raven (thanks Cornell ornithology).
I learned it was just one of many of a remarkably varied spectrum of raven sounds. From here, thanks to the Internet, I learned that ravens can even learn to speak human words, that they are extremely intelligent, and if one works hard enough to befriend them with food offerings and patience, they can become quite social with human beings—which makes me wonder if their often relentless, seemingly mocking caws might even be their way of testing my mettle.
I have yet to discover what to use to lure a raven close, to span across to at least one wild creature whose words for now convey only primitively expressive, unpronounceable meaning, but I have tried, and I like to envision a day when one will listen carefully to my voice, stare intently, tilt its head sideways, ruffling its gleaming black feathers, two-foot hopping close, then imitate my dull, flat, un-wild human sounds.
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So nice to hear North American wildlife sounds. We get very used to the sounds round here but I forget that it will be unusual listening for someone around the world. Those loons though, I wonder if that’s how they got their name? Over here we call crazy people who drive recklessly at night ‘loons’.
This is wonderful Arnie - thank you for sharing such magic!