She won’t meet my eyes.
I’ve stared at her long enough to make the connection real. I know she feels it because the same communication that tells her that someone is staring at her tells me that she knows it. It’s part of the magic of being Human Beings; we all know things about each other that we won’t say aloud. That’s the magic – the avoidance dance. And part of that lexicon contains this fact: electricity is not just transferred through wires, and words are not always spoken aloud.
Her eyes are downcast. I find that most women’s eyes are. Hers happen
to be focused on a paintbrush and booklet in front of her, a small watercolor
set next to her in a boutique coffee shop in NE Portland. Why am I staring? I
don’t even want to start to answer that question, but someone inside me does:
visceral sexual attraction, the need to be recognized, the need to possess something new, the need to compliment someone to be seen as kind, the need
to connect on some level with another human after sitting for two hours in traffic.
Why won’t she look at me?
The answer to that question is this: in her internal woman’s
voice – wait – not the one she mindspeaks with. I mean her Woman’s Voice; the one
that warns her of danger, that tells the stories of all the feminine beings who
have ever existed, that tells her of childbirth and rape, of solitary silent joys
and the joys of feminine companionship (so different from that of a group of
men), of the connection between mother and child and of the mysterious bleeding
nest within her - and how men don’t see these things the same way, somehow. That
voice. Voice. That wisdom, that truth.
It is this Voice tells her a story about female deer, does, on a cliff. Oddly, it wasn’t far from where she now sits, near the present-day town of Castle Rock, Washington. The story is told in an instant, in a quantum instinct, and it goes like this: thirteen thousand short years ago, there was a small herd of blacktail does. It was very early August and the bucks were separate, as was typical this time of year, nursing their velvety, forming, sometimes bloody antlers and staying in the open areas as much as was safe so as not to painfully entangle them on low branches. The does were enjoying summers’ respite before the antlers matured, male instinct took over all reasonable behavior and they began fighting for the does. At that point there would be changes in their own female bodies which would allow them to be taken, herded into groups, and bred indiscriminately. The trail the does trod took them on a ledge probably more suited for mountain goats but it led to a particularly lush field of late summer grasses fed by a mountain spring. High up on a cliff under a crystal sky the does moved single file, placing their feet carefully, moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Hundreds of feet below, the spring in the meadow to which they were traveling fed a river whose voice was audible even at this height. The Voice tells the painting girl at the boutique coffee shop in NE Portland that a cougar had been waiting this day at the end of the trail, eyes alight with lust for blood to feed life simply more valuable to the cougar than the life enjoyed by the does; namely his own. The Voice tells how the first doe walked past the cougar, who was crouching above. When she was almost past his hiding place, he sprang. The big tom’s jaws clamped on the back of the first doe’s neck while his hind legs began raking, immediately eviscerating her. Her brief screams echoed down the canyon toward the rushing river that was fed by the small spring to which they had moments before been joyfully traveling. The second doe, not quite off the precarious perch, happened to be the most naturally watchful and nervous of the bunch. She seldom missed danger, which is why she was almost always near the front of any herd. But she did miss it this time. Instinctively whirling, her footing failed and gravity did its work, sending her down towards the mighty water in a shower of pebbles and even a few boulders. The other does in the contingent were not as naturally nervous as she had been but the sudden movement, not to mention the sight of her plunging off the cliff gracelessly bouncing off its granite face, was enough to make them all, to the last, fall to their deaths at the bottom of the impossibly deep canyon. On this day, they all became a part of the story of the earth, the story of What Happened Here.
This information came to the painting girl at the boutique coffee shop in NE Portland in less time than it took an aorta to open and blood to flow through it. It carried a message.
That man staring at you, the Voice tells her, has eyes that look like the cougars’.
