It is the size of a child, pelting through the forest with great dexterity. Quadrupedal but galloping with synchronized fore and hind steps. My concern is not this gentle, slender creature — whose mass, velocity, volume and weight distribution are crystal clear in my mind — but rather the imagined force or creature that set it running.
In the dead of night, with no other sounds around, this unseen animal passes me just as I am lying in a tent beside my son, listening ferociously as I do for about two hours out of every night I spend camping. Usually I hear nothing but the loons and the lapping lake.
This time it is Grand Lake, the Algonquin Provincial Park site where Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson painted The Jack Pine (above). They’ve marked off as a historic site the vantage point from which he painted it, though my father disputes its location. The next morning, we paddle back past the point near which my son and father capsized in a microburst on the first afternoon, while I soloed too high in the water, making an easy a target for the fierce winds. It had almost been a relief when thunder rumbled and I had an excuse to drag myself onto the nearest rocks and seek out my drenched relatives.
Driving home we approached a juvenile deer on the road, still dappled with spots, its head all ears, but with no mother in sight. “There it is,” I thought. “That’s the animal that ran past us last night.” I have no training in tracking. I am not a hunter, nor particularly experienced with animals. But my ears had given me a full accounting of this animal, and seeing it was the most casual and sure recognition of an object met before.
Investigating this phenomenon led me into the world of psychoacoustics, where scientists stand out of sight and drop balls from various heights. Subjects then draw circles to indicate the size of the balls (quite accurately, it turns out). Likewise, wooden doweling dropped on a hard surface gives us all the noise we need to estimate its length.
For the identification of animals by sound alone, we need to venture into bioacoustics, such as this charmingly impassioned defence of a sasquatch footstep recording. Maybe that’s not the finest example of the field, but the point is that we have this incredible ability fully formed even though we can go for years in our built environments without noticing it.
All this to say that I was really impressed with evolution that day. Far from drunk, evolution was whip smart and stone cold sober when it designed our auditory perception. Now if I could only switch it off every now and then, I might get some sleep in a tent.
Image: The Jack Pine (1916-17), Tom Thomson (in the public domain)
Title from “The Children’s Hour”, by Longfellow