The Last Word On Nothing

Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people walk along it, there is the occasional rollerblader or rollerskier. Myself, I run.  

I enjoy my morning runs on The Burke. I think of them as Nature Trots. I’ve seen all manner of things, in all seasons, in all years. Raccoons, coyotes, moles, enormous rats, shrews, mice, bats. A couple of mountain beavers, even.

Me being me, I focus on birds. The Burke can be pretty lively, being for much of its length a greenbelt of sorts. Lots of chickadees and bushtits and nuthatches and warblers and sparrows and the odd vireo and other small flitty things. During the shoulder seasons I watch for migrants, like hermit thrushes on their way to or from the mountains. I’ve seen dunlins from time to time, a whimbrel. The list could go on and on.

Sometimes I see examples of the fraught territorial overlaps between the human and the non-human. Once I watched a nuthatch try to excavate a nesting cavity out of a metal rainspout, hammering away in vain. And one dark fall morning I was attacked from behind by a barred owl. Feeling the sharp shock of its talons on my scalp, I yelped and flailed until it let go and flew up to a tree. It then proceeded to chase me for another quarter mile, while I alternately sprinted from it or threw myself to the ground when it swept overhead.

Of course there are other animals, a domestic menagerie I’ve gotten to know quite well as well. Dogs I dodge while their owners blithely attest to their friendliness, cats that eye me from their vantages. Some I see only once or twice, but others have become features of The Burke. Characters, in their way.

The other day, I was nearing the end of a run when I saw one of those characters, a smoky gray fluffy cat. This cat often paces up and down the trail, sometimes following walkers. The rest of the time it sits off to the side of The Burke, staring into the trees and shrubs. Today, however, it was pacing across The Burke with its back to me. It was hunched in, shall we say, a suggestive manner. As if it were carrying something. Oh no, I thought.

I jogged over and saw the cat was holding a song sparrow in its mouth. It stopped on the trail’s edge and dropped the sparrow to the ground and chewed on it, spitting out some feathers. I was enraged and rushed forward. “Get out of here!” I yelled. The cat bounded away.

I knelt and considered the sparrow. Its eyes were closed but it was still alive, barely, its wings and legs tremoring. Maybe, just maybe, if I cradled it I could get it home and then to an animal shelter and then someone could help it. But as I was thinking these magical thoughts, the sparrow shuddered and died.

I picked up its body. This was a sparrow I had probably run past who knows how many times. Where be its songs now? I hated that I could appreciate just how delicate it was, the filigree of its gray and brown feathers, the smooth stoutness of its bill. Because it was dead. Because it was something after death.

The cat watched all of this from the edge of a fence. Seeing it, I was flooded with the sensation that I should Do Something. That I should act in some way, profoundly, to right this terrible wrong, and also prevent future wrongs. (For surely this was not the first time the cat had killed something.) But what could I do? Stuff the dead sparrow under the cat’s collar and send it back to its owner? Bang on the door and shout at the owner, really given them a piece of my mind? Write a manifesto full of devastating logic and vicious turns of phrase against letting cats run outside, and then nail it to the gate?

I had a sense of all the good it would do. One time elsewhere on The Burke, my wife, daughter, and I came upon a baby bunny a cat had recently mauled. It was lying under a shrub, breathing its last. Someone had wrapped it in a dishtowel and propped its head against a yogurt carton they had filled with water. Next to that were some blades of grass and one or two baby carrots. From the scene we inferred that someone had found the bunny and was trying to help it. Who that Good Samaritan was turned out to be the cat’s owner, who came out while we were gaping and half-apologized on her cat’s behalf. She assured us this sort of thing didn’t happen “too often.”

“My daughter is always yelling at me for letting her out,” she said, presumably of the cat, “but she likes to be outside and…” She trailed off when she saw our expressions, mumbled something, and went back to her house.

People can be hard to reach, in other words.

That left the cat. I didn’t like the amorphous anger that was hardening into a violent urge, so I set about intellectualizing the incident, which is how I sometimes soften the world so I can stand to be in it. In conflict were my ecological and animal rights beliefs, with the dead sparrow lying in the uncanny valley between them. Ecologically, outdoor cats are a menace. Many, many, many small creatures come to grief in their maws. But was the cat—this cat—to blame? It was just a cat being a cat. A fantastic killing machine, sure, and one that could take advantage of the fact that it lived near some better than average sparrow habitat and had an owner who wanted it to get some fresh air. But that the cat was skilled at being itself was hardly its fault. Plus everything else that makes modern life so complicated: landscape changes and ecotones and animal madness and the ethics of pet ownership (I say this as someone who lives with two cats) and all the rest of it, circling a sparrow’s undeserved fate. I wish I could say my contemplations helped, but I’m a crummy philosopher. Before long the pale cast of thought had devolved to a mere recitation of folk sayings. Might makes right and If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, etc., until I eventually landed on one that brought some small measure of illumination: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

None of this brought the dead sparrow back to life, though. I didn’t want to leave the body and walk away, because I couldn’t bear the thought of the cat desecrating it any more than it already had. Eventually I buried the bird in a shallow grave. This is stupid and pointless, I thought as I stepped back from the tiny mound and dusted off my hands. Then, powerless, and humiliated by that powerlessness, I ran the rest of the way home.

I didn’t see the cat for a few days after that, which was just as well. But a week or so later there it was, crouched along the side of The Burke, staring across the trail into the shrubs. No doubt waiting for its next victim to offer itself up.

I trotted over to the cat, stopped in front of it, stood over it. “Shoo,” I said. The cat ignored me. “Get out of here,” I said. The cat glanced up at me but didn’t move. “Pssssst!” I hissed as vehemently as I could, flecks of spit flying. It was the pssssst! that finally did it. The cat got up and galumphed a couple of yards and looked back at me. I took a menacing step towards it to drive the point home. It jumped into rhododendron and clawed its way about two and a half feet off the ground. Then it got stuck in the branches and gave up and turned and gazed at me in a How much longer must we continue this? kind of way.

Ah, hell. I felt like the worst kind of bully. I knelt and tch-tch-ed and held out my hand. The cat jumped out of the rhododendron and came over and rubbed against my leg, purring. Its fur was soft but mostly for show, because underneath all that fluff was a surprisingly thin and bony body. The cat had a nick in its right ear. I saw, too, that it had a collar. I took it and turned it around, finding a nametag. The nametag said Earl.  

“Earl,” I said. “So you’re Earl, huh?”

Earl kept purring. He flopped over and showed me his belly, which I duly rubbed while he twined around in the dirt in what seemed like ecstasy.

I petted him for a couple of minutes and got up to leave, but not before I gave him as stern a look as a I could. “You be good, Earl,” I said. He just blinked at me. He could make no promises.

Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History