Natural History

Each story is a mix of fact and fiction and centres on one element of the natural world, exploring the ways in which that creature or plant has been utilized by human society. These are stories about the ways in which we have interacted with nature in the past and how, as we go forward, it is clearly time to rethink that relationship.

BELLADONNA

666 BCE

The Devil’s garden is primarily a shade garden. He lets the witches look after many of the plants because he is, after all, more than just a gardener. But the Devil appreciates that there is balance in all things. Without sunlight there would not be shade. Without good there could not be evil. Without the cultivation of life, the snuffing out could not be fully appreciated.

The only plant the Devil tends himself in his vast garden is the plant that holds life and death within its very form—Belladonna, or deadly nightshade. By the act of its growing it is about life, but every part of the plant is poisonous. A terrible death ensues for anyone who eats the glistening black berries with their toxic seeds, or the bell-shaped purple flowers that precede the berries, or the pretty five-sided pale green leaves.

The witches like to make a paste from the plant and rub this into their skin. They hallucinate flight, dipping and soaring on broomsticks, through a night sky of their own making.

The Devil looks out at his prized plants from the trough of water where he washes his hands. Tonight it is Walpurgis Night, the witch’s Sabbath, and they throw a magnificent ball to mark the occasion. He has never missed a Sabbath. It is the only night of the year he leaves his beloved Belladonna unattended, and he is always a little anxious about doing this.

What the Devil cares for bears his name many times over. His Belladonna is also known as the devil’s herb, sorcerer’s cherry, murderer’s berry, witch’s berry, devil’s cherry, dwale, naughty man’s cherries.

The Devil dries his hands with his fiery breath and turns towards the house. Something so powerfully poisonous will be safe for one night. He wonders what shirt he should wear to the ball. He is always so popular on the dance floor.

 

1035 

The soldier stands upon the hill and looks down into the camp of the invaders. He does not worry about being seen by the Danes. Men who have just discovered they have been poisoned are not interested in anything beyond themselves.

It is a cool morning, this morning the marauders will die. The soldier can feel the spit of rain on his face, the spill of wind keening in from the sea.

Last night a boy crept down the hill and into the camp of the Danes and poisoned their water with Belladonna. Now the enemy soldiers are showing the signs of the poisoning. The first thing that happens is a complete loss of the voice. Then there is a bending back and forth of the body, like the stem of a flower being jostled in a breeze. This bending is accompanied by rapid movements of the hands and fingers. Some of the men have fallen to the ground and the flailing looks like swimming from the top of the hill where the Scottish soldier stands. An army of men, silently swimming through the dirt.

All that remains now is for the soldier to tell the rest of his men that the poison has taken effect, and for them to ride down the hill and slay those Danes still alive.

But the soldier hesitates. He did not approve of the poisoning. It seemed such an unfair way to win a battle. He is a soldier, and he takes some pride in a fair fight, in showing courage on the battlefield. What courage is required to kill men who are already dead?

This is all Duncan’s doing. Since he laid claim to the crown last year he has been intent on vanquishing all those who oppose him. He has tried to kill Macbeth, who has a more legitimate right to the crown, and he has attacked and slain any outsiders who are a threat to his reign. Only a year into his rule, and he is proving to be one of the most violent and bloodthirsty monarchs there has ever been.

It is true, thinks the soldier, that the Danes were invading—but even though Duncan is locked into a long-standing battle with the Norse and the Danes, this doesn’t make it right to poison them.

Any defiance of the King will mean the soldier’s death, and the young man is not prepared to die defending the enemy. The school of fish below the hill has stopped swimming, lies beached on the dark earth, a few still fluttering with the last of their life. The soldier turns away from the sight of the dead men, turns back towards his own living army.

 

1450

The women have used more of the drops than they meant to. One drop per eye would have been sufficient, but the women are young and wealthy, given to excess in all things, and one drop per eye just seemed, well, not nearly enough.

It is the latest fashion craze, to dilate the pupils with Belladonna. The warmth of the eyes accentuated by the drops gives a woman a more pleasing feminine countenance. The word belladonna is itself Italian for “beautiful woman.”

But dilated pupils, although making the eyes beautiful, also make them extremely sensitive to light. The six women who have just put the drops in their eyes thrash around the drawing-room of the country house, blindly clawing for the curtains so they can close out the bright sun that burns through the holes their eyes have become.

The berry of the Belladonna plant is as dark and oily as the pupil of an eye. The women were impressed with this. Each remarked upon it as they ground the berries into juice. They all wanted eyes that dark, that lovely.

And now, all they want is to find the drapes and pull them closed, to find the relief of darkness, the way an eyelid moves to cover the eye in sleep.

RACCOON

It was understood that the President preferred the company of animals to humans. Those of us who worked for him were tolerant of the various dogs and cats that occupied the White House. We tried to pretend there was nothing wrong with Mrs. Coolidge’s white collie, Prudence Prim, greeting each guest at the garden parties in a straw hat adorned with a maidenhair fern and a green ribbon. Even the birds, Nip and Tuck, and Do-Funny could be ignored, although it was a bit disquieting to see the South African Oriole, Do-Funny, eating food directly from Mrs. Coolidge’s mouth, or joining in when she was whistling a tune from another room.

All of the pets and all of their attendant noise and needs could be borne because, despite their number, they were all domestic animals. But everything came undone when a wild animal was let loose in the White House.

Her name was Rebecca. She was a raccoon that had been sent to the Coolidge’s as a present, to be a part of their Thanksgiving dinner. According to the Joy of Cooking, she would be delicious blanched, filled with a bread stuffing and roasted in a moderate oven. Instead, the President felt sorry for her, named her, and let her have the run of the White House, where she terrorized us all.

Rebecca had very distinctive likes and dislikes. She liked silk stockings and would chase after any woman who was wearing them. If the hapless woman hadn’t managed to escape the raccoon, Rebecca would rip off the stockings with her tiny, human-like hands.

Rebecca also liked baths, and playing in the bath with soap, making bubbles. She liked to unscrew lightbulbs and unpot plants and run screaming through the White House corridors like a banshee. She did not like discipline, or being caged in her treehouse surrounded by wire mesh that the President had carefully built for her on the grounds of the White House.

Calvin Coolidge rarely spoke or smiled. Those of us who worked for him nicknamed him “Silent Cal.” He was said to be shy, but really I think he just wasn’t that keen on talking. And once you got used to it, the silence was a relief rather than a bother. A man who speaks too little is always more interesting than a man who speaks too much. I thought it cruel of Dorothy Parker to make that remark when Mr. Coolidge died in 1933, just four years after leaving the Presidential office. Apparently when she heard of his death, the writer quipped, “How can they tell?”

Rebecca was free in the White House, but outside she was kept on a leash. Every night, without fail, no matter how busy the day and how pressing the matters of state, the President would walk Rebecca around the grounds on her leash. I would sometimes see them leave, the raccoon weaving out in front of Mr. Coolidge like an untrained dog as they crossed the lawn. Once I heard the murmur of the President’s voice rise up to the open window in the room where I was working. He was talking to the raccoon as they wandered through the summer evening together, his words lost to me, but the tone light and energetic. And it occurred to me that perhaps the President liked the raccoon so much because he felt a kinship with her situation. He felt on a leash every day in the White House, and only free to roam every night in the dark and green of the summer lawn. As President he was just as much out of his element as the White House raccoon, and Rebecca’s presence served, daily, to remind him of that.

 

AMERICAN BULLFROG 

It’s not my idea of a good time, but it’s a job. a small job, for the weekend of the festival, but I’ll have more money at the end of the weekend than I had at the beginning, and that’s what counts. Being a college student is a poor business.

The hall is crammed with tables and each table is loaded with shallow trays. The trays are full of water, and submerged in the water are the frog legs, dozens in each tray. It is my job to take the frog legs from the water, coat them in batter, and throw them in one of the deep fryers that line half the kitchen. Someone scoops the cooked frog legs out of the fryers, and someone else tosses them into cardboard boxes with fries and coleslaw.

Each boxed dinner is sold for nine dollars. People eat outside at picnic benches, and afterwards, at the end of the day, those of us in the kitchen will walk around in the woozy light of the midway, gathering up the garbage and dragging the bags round to the front of the community hall to be piled up against the side of the building. When I was a child, I liked the festival. I liked the excitement it brought to our small town. I liked seeing all the cars lined up outside the fairgrounds with the out-of-state license plates. I found the cheesy frog merchandise and signs funny.

But every time I plunge my hands into the water and grab hold of the slippery frog flesh, I cannot help but think of the creature that it was, how it sang confidently into the darkness of the river bank, how it burrowed into mud, or stretched out across a lily pad. Each time I pull the legs out of the tray it feels like I am catching the frog all over again.

At the end of the three festival days, 80,000 frog legs will have been eaten. That’s 40,000 frogs. And while the frogs used to be local, now there aren’t enough bullfrogs in the area to supply the festival, and the frozen frog legs are imported from Indonesia. Joshua, who sometimes works at the deep fryers, told me that the French, who also like to consume frog legs, have effectively eaten all of their country’s frogs.

My hands are cold from the water in the trays. The hall smells of grease and vinegar and sweat. A warm breeze drifts through the hall from the open doors and stirs the green crepe paper chains looping down from the ceiling.

When I was a girl, my grandmother showed me how to catch frogs by laying a red tablecloth on the riverbank. Frogs like the colour red, and I could simply spread out the tablecloth and wait for the frogs to hop up on it.

Now I could unroll an entire red carpet from the riverbank to the main highway, and there would be no frog traffic. It could be that in my lifetime the frogs will disappear completely. We will have eaten all of them.

How to stop something that is in motion? From my physics lectures I know that Newton’s first law of motion states that “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion….” It is natural for objects in motion to resist any changes to that motion. This is what momentum is, and it is very hard to stop something that has momentum. For the frog leg festival to come to an end, it will need to meet something of equal and opposite force.

Really, I don’t want to be thinking about this. I just want to do my job, earn some money, and head back to school next week. But it is hard to stop thinking about something once you have started. Thoughts in motion also have their own momentum.

Joshua is working in the kitchen today. When I bring over the next tray of batter-dipped frog legs, he is retying the bandana around his forehead. Standing over the deep fryer is a much hotter job than mine.

“Do you think it’s wrong?” I say, as I pass over the tray of frog legs.

“Yes,” he says, without me having to explain, and this is the moment that changes my course.