by Stephen L. Burns
Stephen L. Burns discusses his work in wildlife rehabilitation and how it informs the themes found in his latest short story “Recruit,” which appears in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
I know it’s unseemly to brag, but I will do so anyway: I am a damn good squirrel juggler.
I have to good at it; once past a certain age they become so hyperactive and crazed that to nurse them you have to juggle them—and you may have to keep multiple squirrels in the air to extract the one that needs to be fed next. When you reach the point where they are in an outside pre-release cage, and you go in to feed them they are climbing on your head, up your legs, crawling up your sleeves . . . the stuff of nightmares for some, bemused bliss for others. Like my wife, like me.
My wife and I both have animal care backgrounds, growing up with the usual dogs and cats and birds and rodents, not to mention other strays, and chickens and pigs. In our thirty-some years together we’ve had cats on and off, just taken in our fourth rescue dog, keep chickens, have kept ducks and turkeys. For the last 18 years we have maintained a small, mom & pop wildlife rehabilitation practice, caring for all sorts of orphaned and injured birds and mammals. Neither of us have second thoughts grabbing a terrified juvie squirrel that is lunging and snapping to show how dangerous it is because we know that within a couple minutes that critter will be putty in our hands: relaxed, nursing, even purring. (I seem to have some special squirrel mojo; it may be we are on the same wavelength, or have similar minds.) The same for a baby hawk or owl, or baby muskrat, days-old kingfisher or grackle. Our calm will become their calm, our care will be received, and in most cases appreciated.
Humans can connect with, love and be loved by almost every critter out there. Humans love and are loved by even such seemingly alien, unlovable, and possibly dangerous creatures as sharks, bees, poisonous snakes, spiders, big cats, bears—I swear, someone out there probably has pet tapeworms. And has named them.
Fear of the “other” is natural, but so is an empathy for, even a strange attraction to that same other; the path between xenophobia to xenophilia is a continuum, a spectrum, and we’re all on it somewhere.
I swear, someone out there probably has pet tapeworms. And has named them.
Is there alien life out there? Probably. Could some of it be so outré in aspect our minds rebel at believing it is real? Again, probably. Would some people freak out and immediately try to kill it on sight? Sadly, almost certainly. Are there people who would regard this incomprehensible creature and, with care, caution and respect, and feel impelled—driven—to try to understand what it is, what it thinks and feels, and to make it understand that she or he have no desire to cause it harm or even discomfort?
I sure hope so. We do have that capacity in us, like water deep under desert sands. Or maybe it’s milk—that fabled milk of human kindness.
I could go on to talk about vile, vicious, even lethal attacks on fellow humans perceived to be the “other,” the deep soul rot that leads to “kill the gays, kill the Jews, kill the fill in the blank,” the misbegotten zeal to demonize and destroy those who the hater has not the wit, empathy, or mere mist of kindness to acknowledge as fellow humans. But I won’t. If that message wasn’t implicit in my story, or others I’ve had run in Analog in the past then I have failed.
PS: Just as I was completing this I had to go out and extract a fairly large, rather pissed-off osprey from a carrier and hold it while my wife examined its wings for injury. It tried to bite, but that’s not a big deal; it also wanted to get me with its fairly lethal talons. I will not go into the gory details of what having an osprey grab you is like past saying it’s like having three or four fishhooks the size of human fingers driven deep into your flesh. In spite of of unhappy moments in our histories with ospreys we remained calm, talked soothingly to it, handled it gently (in a sort of demon-wrestling sort of way), and no blood was shed on either side. We knew it was scared, having been abducted by aliens.
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