Yesterday I helped my best female buddy Holly at the Cohoctan Fall Festival (Cohoctan is a tiny little village near Prattsburgh, and it's name is apparently a Native word which means "log in the water.") She had a jewelry booth which we left her mom Robin in charge of most of the day, while we ran around and looked at other folks booths. There where hundreds of official booths and even more yardsales going on. Holly wanted me to see a booth selling mostly animal skins; the hides of otters, bear, wolves, foxes, coyotes and more. We began examining the skins, petting them and talking about the various softness of the different animals. The booths' owner gruffly asked us to stop stroking the skins; he said we'd make all the hair fall out.
"Did you trap and tan these yourself?" I asked, already knowing from the way the man had snapped at me that these wheren't good enough quality to have been hand tanned.
"No," he snapped, "I buy them...." To make his booth look "authentic," he had traps laying on the table next to some of the skins.
Something about that didn't sit well with me. I felt as though, if the man had been able to say "yeah, I go to Quebec six months out of the year and live in a little cabin on a trapline.." I would have been more ok with him selling the skins of animals who are endangered in some places. But because this man simply purchased them from someone else, and didn't have a relationship with the animals whose skins he was displaying on his table, I didn't like it.
On the way to the festival, I'd stopped to pick up a roadkill squirrel. It sat in my car all day while I was there, but still smelled very fresh when I got home that night, so I butchered and ate it for dinner. As I was cutting it apart in my backyard, throwing guts into the tall grass for coyotes, letting blood spill onto the earth at my homestead, praying that I'd be able to give back to the earth as much as she gave me; well, something incredible happened. I had one of those rare moments when everything in the world seems at peace for a moment; as I felt the chill of fall on my cheek, the bloody little body in my hands (he was a very young squirrel and I said a little apology to him as well as I held him), as a prayer ran through my mind "Oh Mother Earth, please accept this gift of blood and guts...may coyote or some other wild animal apprieciate the guts I don't eat...may I fully appriecate the parts of this squirrel I do eat and the skin I use.." With all of these elements, I felt a peacefulness I've rarely felt before; something in my soul said "daughter of earth, you are moving down a good path of respect and reverance; keep it up love, and teach your children the same...so that the earth may be restored.."
I'm not trying to brag by writing about this, but I do believe there is something important about showing the correct amount of respect for each life we take/use or alter for our own benefit. The man selling furs at the Fall Festival didn't seem to care that the animals he was selling where in fact, animals. I could tell, by the way he talked to me, that they where little more then profit to him. I'm not sure people should sell animal skins at all, but if they do, I think they should at least be the one who killed, skinned, prayed to, and tanned the animal by hand. When you hold a dead animal in your hand and pray, something powerful happens and you feel linked to that animal; you can see how old it was when it died, you look at it's wounds and think about if it died quickly or slowly, how much pain it felt, you can tell by the leanness or the fatness of it's body wheither it got enough to eat or not. Sometimes momma animals have full nipples or pregnant bellies; I say a little extra prayer for the babies who died. Sometimes I find roadkill babies; for them I pray the most.
When you start learning like that about animals, you develop a relationship with them. Now, when I see squirrels out in the woods, I can tell many things about them and their lives, just by watching closely. The same for deer, possums and raccoons. It is easier for me to feel what the animal might be feeling; I can sense their anticipation of a cold, hard winter this year, I see this in the nervousness of the squirrels, in the thickness of the raccoon and possum's winter coats and the layers of fat they've stored on their bodies.
Love ya,
Carrot
