About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez Page B

when he notices my knitted brows. The fish owl, which once guarded the entrances to Ainu villages, has godlikequalities, he emphasizes. To meet it in the woods today, he says, is to rekindle the ancient relationship of interdependence between man and animal. The bird’s aura is still imposing, he tells me, an encounter with it electrifying.
    Ten of us—Mr. Taketazu, his wife, two of their children, two of his eldest son’s friends, myself, the translator, and, later, Naoki and his father—all have supper in Mr. Taketazu’s study on tables set up for the purpose. I fall out of the conversation. Early the next morning Naoki and I are to travel south across the Konsen uplands and along the Kushiro River past Lake Toro to a great marsh. On the northern fringes of that marsh we might see Japanese cranes,
tsuru
, in their first mating rituals of this season. That night we’ll fly back to Tokyo from the city of Kushiro.
    As I brought the pieces of fresh fish to my mouth, the crisp vegetables, I recalled the storm surf pounding in from the Sea of Okhotsk, the twirling descent of bright fall leaves along the road, the soles of my feet burning on Mount Iō. I imagined
kuma
, the brown bear, moving through forests on a path indicated by an older Ainu’s expressive hand.
    At the door where we stand to say good-bye, I try to make my gratitude to Mr. Taketazu clear, not simply for his hospitality but for his bearing as a human being, his compassionate attitude toward animals. When I finish speaking, Mr. Taketazu holds up a gift in the half-light of the hallway—a fish owl’s speckled primary feather. I extend my hand toward the perfect form.
    I follow Naoki and his father through the darkness to where the car is parked. The smells of farmed earth in the damp, cool air are familiar and comforting. I try to imagine the books I will send to Mr. Taketazu, ones with the wildlife drawings of Olaus Murie, or with stone lithographs of the polar bear and bearded seal from the Inuit at Cape Dorset, or the portraits Karl Bodmer made of Blackfeet men with the white fur of the ermine wound up in their hair. I imagine him finding all this in his mailbox one day, like a flock of birds.
    I put my hand to the cold chrome of the door handle. For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It hasmade it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. One travels as far for this as one does to stand before a wild brown bear, or to put hands on the enduring monuments of a vanished culture. Here, in an owl’s long flight feather, is the illiterate voice of the heart.
Arigatō
, I say, quiet gratitude to the heavy night air of Hokkaido.

3
ORCHIDS ON THE VOLCANOES
    F OG, MELANCHOLY AS a rain-soaked dog, drifts through the highlands, beading my hair with moisture. On the path ahead a vermilion flycatcher, burning scarlet against the muted greens of the cloud forest, bursts up in flight. He flies to a space just over my head and flutters there furiously, an acrobatic stall, a tiny, wild commotion that hounds me down the muddy trail, until I pass beyond the small arena of his life. Soon another comes and leaves; and afterward another, tiny escorts on a narrow trail descending the forest.
    I had not expected this, exactly. The day before, down below at the airstrip, I’d looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, In this slashing light there will be no peace. How odd now, this damp, cool stillness. Balsa and scalesia trees, festooned with liverworts andmosses, give on to stretches of grassland where tortoises graze. Blue-winged teal glide the surface of an overcast pond. The migrant fog opens on a flight of doves scribing a rise in the land, and then, like walls sliding, it seals them off.
    Beneath this canopy of trees, my eyes free of the shrill burden of equatorial light, my cheeks cool as the underside of field-stone—I had not thought a day like this would come in