Odd Encounters

With

NatureTrue Stories by Mike Finley

Copyright © 2013

The very short stories in this booklet are all true, and they all involve some encounter with a thing of nature. I was a zookeeper at Jungle Larry's Safari island for five months in 1967, caring for a wide variety of creatures. Poets are supposed to be at home with nature, but I have often found it pretty bizarre. I considered writing these as poems, but the stories want to sound true, and I do not want to gum up the works. Some of these stories are simply inexplicable, but I'm telling you, they really happened just this way.

Table of Contents

The Probing...................................................................13Muskellunge..................................................................14Giant Porcupines...........................................................17Sun Dog.........................................................................18Orca...............................................................................21The Mississippi.............................................................22Bison..............................................................................25Snapping Turtle.............................................................26Jungle Larry...................................................................29Pack of Wolves..............................................................30Serpent...........................................................................35Pelican...........................................................................36Hamadryads...................................................................38Pythons..........................................................................41

The Probing

In the winter of 1980 I took a late night train from New Haven

to New York City, just for a day. I arrived in the city around 5

am, and wandered over to Central Park. I sat on a stone bench

next to a stone wall, took out my notebook, and began

scribbling thoughts. Suddenly a giant pneumatic tube uncoiled

in front of me and blasted me with warm, stinky gas. It was

the trunk of an elephant, kept just inside the stone wall. The

thing was alive and tipped with bristly spikes. Though the

outside was dry, the interior was steamy and drippy. It smelled

like elephant lung. Afterward, I would need several paper

towels to rub the goo off my face – never an easy thing to

obtain in New York.

MuskellungeSeptember 1979, Rachel and I are canoeing. It's cold and we're not getting along and we're tired of Knorr soups. Rachel wants walleye, I don't really fish. A seaplane is taking off from Moose Lake, hitting a six-pound muskie, which drifts directly to where I am sitting on the rocks. I am not happy about the way the fish came to be mine, but I fry it in margarine and we both acquire its power.

Giant PorcupinesThere are two giant porcupines on Safari Island in 1967, a big female and a small male. The male is N'kruma, who longs to mount Lamumba, but she won't allow him near. But she does allow me into the pen, sidling up to me, cheek first, so I stroke her from front to back, pissing N'kruma off. If he had his way, I would be so perforated.

Sun DogThirty eight below in Minneapolis, blue sky. Suspended over the Washington Avenue bridge is a sun-dog a hundred miles high, an erect beam of light created by the cold. It looks like a laser blast coming down from heaven. It looks like Jesus will be with us momentarily.

OrcaShamu was the first orca captured live. Like with Lassie, the Sea World franchise continues to use the name after the original dies. I am in Aurora, Ohio, leaning over the pool, seeing bushels and bushels of chartreuse sea-snot. I turn to tell my companions, and the Ohio version of Shamu sees me, doesn't like my attitude, head-fakes, and I am engulfed in all that goo.

The MississippiMany mornings I have watched the mist rise off the winter river under the lock and dam. This morning I also see about three thousand empty plastic gallon milk-jugs bobbing downriver. I thought to myself, there must be a story to that.

BisonI'm 17, and high, and laughing with a girlfriend around midnight at the edge of the Wooster, Ohio. public golf course. Beyond a wire fence we make out two shapes in the darkness, a mother buffalo, lightly stamping her front hoof, and beside her a silent calf.

Snapping TurtleBeau and I are walking Pike Island in spring, and come across a mother snapper laboriously shoveling sand from the pathway onto her two leathery eggs. I hold the dog back – those jaws could snip a baby's arm. And I think about the tough eggs buried where people will walk now – protected by two shells.

Jungle LarryI meet my employer in 1967 on the second floor of a repurposed junior high school building in Medina, Ohio. He houses his wintering animals in the classrooms. He has his right arm up an ostrich's rectum, reaching for an orange juice can the bird had swallowed and is having problems processing. Larry reaches upward and obtains the can, the bird reaches back and snaps at him, and Larry holds out his greasy hand to me to shake.

Pack of WolvesDogs and wolves are said to have the same DNA, so I often walked my standard poodle on cold mornings by the back wall at Como Zoo, where two great wolves lived for twenty years. Their eyes are blue, and they are beautiful, their bodies are larger than any wolf in nature. I wonder what they think of my lucky pet, stepping freely through St. Paul. I wonder if they would harm her. But when the dog approaches the fence, all three lift their heads back and howl.

SerpentWalking through the Chequamagon Forest in north central Wisconsin in midsummer, a young snake crosses our path. It is tan and brown. There is no doubt that this wild Wisconsin creature is a boa constrictor.

PelicanRachel and I hike to the waterfall on Willow River in the Wisconsin state park. The waterfall is a series of three cascades, each one wider going down, like a wedding cake. Suddenly there is a squawking above us, and a white pelican crashes into the second cascade, is completely immersed by the tumbling waters, shakes it off, and leaps back into the sky. It was like the bird lost track of where it was going.

HamadryadsOur zoo had two baboons and one was in estrus. Customers were complaining, so Larry staked them out apart from one another. The male, Basa, reached desperately for Loma and after three days of frustration leaped up and hanged himself on his chain. The widowed animal was curtained off, and we were told to avoid her, and that the hamadryad could attack and kill humans. Two evenings later I was raking the area, and she reached out from behind the drape and grabbed my wrist, pulled me to her traveling cage. A co-worker ran for help, but Loma pulled me to her, and brought my hand close to her face, and began picking at the pores of my skin, pulling out salt flecks and putting them to her tongue. She was grooming me as if I were her mate.

PythonsI had many odd adventures at Safari Island, but the most traumatic involved two large snakes, a rock python 20 foot in length and a reticulated python 27 foot in length. These snakes were so huge they spent their days collapsed in a pile of themselves in a glassed-in building we called the snakatorium. One night, after the zoo shut down, Larry and B'wana Walt and myself undertook to feed two piglets to the two snakes. The pigs were sensible enough to be alarmed, squealing and honking at the silent slithering presence in the room.The plan was to cut the pigs' throats, pry open the snake's jaws, and coax the freshly killed bodies into the snakes' digestive channels. My job was to hold the piggies while Walt cut their throats with a bread knife. The little pigs cried piteously as I held them. I will never forget that sound, or the feeling of the warm blood washing over my hands and arms and onto my shirt, where it quickly cooled. What struck me was how out of kilter it was, these $50,000 snakes who had no zest for life, being force-fed these $3 creatures who wept desperately to live.

Mike in the porcupine pit, 1967.