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We both laugh and laugh, me sitting, her standing holding
her sides. She starts to lean against a tree, but hesitates to touch it.
This makes us laugh harder.
Finally I say, You read. . . .
Oh, yes. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described
indigenous humans as living in a blaze of reality. Maybe that s part
of what he meant.
I thought you were going to say this makes you understand
why so many white settlers ran off to join the Indians.
That, too.
She sits. We don t say anything for a while. Suddenly I no-
tice a small lizard on a rock a few feet away. I nudge Allison, gesture
slightly with my head. She sees him, nods. The lizard sits looking at
Songs of the Dead " 275
us for the longest time, then he closes one eye. He opens it, closes it
again, opens it, and scampers off the rock.
I look at Allison. She looks at me. We can t help ourselves:
we start laughing again, even harder this time than before. As I roll
on the ground, I hear Allison say, her voice squeaky through the
laughter, He was winking at us.
twenty
five
p o w e r , a g a i n
Songs of the Dead " 277
No miracles are free. Every miracle carries with it a cost,
paid to those who perform this miracle. And who is to say that those
millions and tens of millions killed by the Nazis and their wars were
not human sacrifices to placate and to nourish those who then pro-
vided miracles fog, a detonator that fails to ignite a bomb, a tele-
phone call causing someone to stand outside a room where someone
else is setting a fuse, a briefcase pushed too far underneath a thick
oak table in return? And what of the sacrifices made all along to the
God of this culture, this jealous God, this God of stasis? Could not
the entire world and her members large and small said to be the
sacrifice being made now?
Jack Shoemaker reaches one gloved hand into cage A43,
picks up the mouse, drops it into a plastic bag. He clamps the open-
ing of the bag to the nozzle of a CO2 canister, then turns on the gas.
The bag inflates, and he turns it off. The mouse from A43 gasps,
scrabbles at the smooth plastic, and begins to convulse. Jack writes
the mouse s number on the bag, opens the lab s refrigerator, puts the
bag inside, shuts the door. He walks to cage B17, reaches in, puts the
mouse in a bag, walks to the canister, and so on. Tomorrow one of
the graduate students can run the tests on the dead mice.
Through all of this it never occurs to Jack to ask the ques-
tions he asks so often of the women he kills: Where do you go when
you die? What do you think and feel and see as you die?
Allison and I try to settle back into our lives in Spokane. But
this is hard to do when we know what is coming, when we know we
need to act. There are moments like in the forest, with the trees and
the lizard, but for the most part we go through our days as though
we are wearing clothes that are too small, living in rooms too tiny to
maneuver. For about a week we don t do anything about Nika s killer.
278 " Derrick Jensen
Then Allison asks what s next.
I thought you d have some ideas.
I only knew it had to be done.
I nod.
She continues, Committing is the hard part anyway. Every-
thing else is technical.
I say, I guess the first thing is to go back to where I saw
Nika, and see if I learn anything new. We can also go to the river.
Where you saw him. . . .
Yes, there.
We go to where the apple trees are growing over the small
stream. The leaves are starting to turn. We sit. Allison reads. I try to
will the land to show memories to me. Nothing. I try to will myself
to be open to receiving those memories. Still nothing. I lie down,
close my eyes, begin to drift. I dream of rabbits and coyotes and I
dream of dreaming. I dream that when I dream, the dreams do not
come to me but that I go to them. I dream that when coyotes dream,
the dreams do not come to them but that they go to the dreams. I
dream the same for rabbits, salamanders, trees, rivers, rocks. I dream
that dreams are living beings who eat us to stay alive and whom we
eat, too. I dream that dreams keep us alive. I dream that without
dreams we die, and we die faster even than we die without other
foods, without fruits and meats and roots and shoots and leaves. I
dream that we are here to dream, and that dreams are here to come
into us. All of us. I dream that dreams hitchhike into us, and that we
hitchhike into them. I dream that otherwise sleeping makes no sense.
Rabbits need to rest, but to sleep is to be vulnerable. I dream that we
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