We’ve just been through a hot dry spell that many are joking was our summer. On these days, it’s fun to sit on the deck and watch the eagles thermal-ing skyward, like they’re having a competition to see how long they can go without flapping a wing.

During that stint last week two unrelated things happened–both of which are totally unrelated to our protagonist in this blog–but I guess that’s the fun of writing here, seeing the chaos of life through the order(?) of dogness. 

Thing one: I recently re-read Annie Dillard’s wild-minded essay, “Living Like Weasels“. (Have another cup of coffee and give it seven minutes if you don’t know it. Be warned, you might emerge changed.) In “Living like Weasels,” Annie is being Annie, the blown- out-of-your-senses nature contemplator who’s reflections on wild things are themselves wild things.

In “Living Like Weasels” she unpacks an eye-lock with a weasel and starts to fantasize about living with the weasel’s necessity. “I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”

She goes on to anthropomorphise and couple-o-morphise, in a passage I think of often. “Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? We could, you know. We can live any way we want.”

Thing two: My friend Mark posted this video of a couple of eagles who succumbed to their passion play. 

It’s always a fascinating sight to watch eagles with locked talons cartwheeling through the air. There are myths that they’re actually mating… Not so… but the aeorbatics can be part of courtship. 

Anyway, this poor couple gives another answer to how two could live… Alive, yes, but pretty beaten up by the valiant attempt to make the “mind of each everywhere present to the other” or at least the kind of grip that tries to will the impossible into existence. The good news is they disentangled, recovered, and flew again.

I remember visiting my friends Dave Hunsaker and Annie Calkins whose house, overlooking Tee Harbor and Lynn Canal, has an eagle nesting tree. They’ve had National Geographic film crews out there filming the eagles taking care of their young, building and rebuilding the nest, etc. Bringing it back to the dog blog, I’ll add that Dave says he once found a cat collar (with a bell to warn birds) in the nest. The collar was still latched. 

Since it’s time to walk Cedar, I suppose it’s time to bring the two things home to dog-ville. Our turn-around point on our daily walk, what I’ve come to call the Wisdom Tree, has a Fish and Wildlife sign on it designating it as an eagle tree. What I’ve recently realized is that not only is our Wisdom Tree protected by federal law, but under an agreement between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service, a 330 ft. buffer zone of uncut trees is to be left around each nest tree. We will protect our Wisdom Tree.

Dillard closes her essay with a bit of a weasely pep talk, riffing off the fact that an eagle was found with the jaws of a dead weasel still sunk into its neck.

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”

Cool thought, I guess, but at the moment I’m content with letting my very bones stay connected (but maybe with slightly loosened hinges) so I can keep looking for that one elusive necessity (letting Cedar’s morning detective work inspire me). I’ll stay hinged too, in order to look forward to the next opportunity to watch those dreamy thermal circles. 

Another spring mini-season to document. If the early blueberry blossoms are little chimes (or bear bells?) of spring music, s’áxt’ or Devil’s Club are the high-hat cymbals, prickly and menacing beauty flourishing into a new spring canopy.

I’ve been watching the Devil’s Club stalks since mid-March, looking for signs of change. I didn’t see much happen for about a month, except to note that the spines catch gifts of moss and lichens and leaves and snow from the real canopy, hundreds of feet above. And then just after the first blueberry blossoms tinkled through the understory, the s’áxt’ stalk I was watching took on a beautiful pink whose hue was somewhere between rhubarb ice cream and human lips.

Like Frost’s first-green gold, a hard hue to hold. It’s bittersweet–both hopeful and dispiriting– I guess, to see the bulbous “leaf scars” hinting at previous years’ spring crescendos. If O. horridus weren’t such a great Latin name for s’áxt’, I might suggest O. paradoxicus.

They’re all green now. The roots and stalk of the s’áxt’ are some of the most powerful medicine in the Tlingit medicine cabinet and for all indigenous groups in its range. O. horridus is apparently potent, valuable for everything from treating arthritis or cancer or wounds or blindness to changing bad weather to keeping evils spirits outside the home. According Lantz, Swerhun, and Turner, in Western scientific terms, “Phytochemical research has revealed that this plant has antifungal, antiviral, antibacterial, and antimycobacterial properties, and these are undoubtedly related to its widespread use in traditional medicine.” In the case of arthritis, one traditional treatment involves “whole stems used to beat rheumatic limbs as counter-irritant.” I’m not quite there yet. Maybe it’s middle age, but I see life doing something similar to many close to me these days; I guess there’s some hope in the counter-irritant approach. That sweet pink may not be our hue to hold, but we’ll somehow be stronger for the s’áxt’s in our lives? If I had any sense, I’d be hanging it on my threshold.

Tlingit folk have a variety of cultural guidelines around harvesting but s’áxt’ is to be harvested with respect and reciprocity. Eagle clan members often harvest for Ravens, and vice versa.

Apparently, the most powerful medicine is in the roots, and the mini-season of s’áxt’ leaf emergence is when that medicine is traveling up from roots, through the fragrant cambium below the spikes to the giant pricker-lined leaves. S’áxt’ protects itself in part due to the value of the protein in its leaves.

We’ve all been “clubbed” while bushwhacking at one time or another around here. Even Cedar gives a little pause before succumbing to a chomp of the stalk. Maybe I can add another trait to its value: Porky training.

The transformation from stalk to leaf, with that lovely phase of leaves emerging like fingers holding something precious, is complete, and yet another shift making me wish I could slow the passage of time. May is the month to see and feel potential. June it seems, the moment to be lush.

As I write, the mini-season’s ending. The s’áxt’ canopy has pretty much formed. The green guerrilla is in the forest room. The cymbals are cymbaling. The medicine is in the air. And Cedar, my beloved brevity editor (I know, I know, but not bad for a dog), is knocking my elbow away from the keyboard so we can hit the trail.