There is a beautiful walk a person can take in Lillooet. It is a circle route that utilizes the new and old Fraser River bridges at the North and South sides of town. Many people use it for cycling, running or just strolling. One bridge is concrete and one is made of timbers and iron. The river is in almost constant view and the mountains on either side provide a spectacle that a person would have to hike up where the trees are small to experience if he were on the coast.
My wife and I first walked the bridge walk several years ago and paused at the old bridge to look at the river below. The canyon is narrow here and just upstream are the Bridge River rapids where St'at'imx people have been fishing since before the stones were cut to build the Mayan temples. Jagged rocks under the khaki-coloured water create a thousand eddies and swirls in ever-changing patterns with the foam supplied by the falls upstream. Its vibrancy is felt before it is seen.
On the first two or three circuits, I walked right underneath a massive osprey nest built upon one of the bridge supports. I had to walk around a massive deposit of guano to get to the other side of the bridge without whitening my shoes. All the while I was unconscious of the raptors and their offspring just meters above my head. My attention was on people, rocks, water currents and mountains. One day a pleasant Englishman pointed out the nest to his grand-daughter and I looked up.
I became aware of the birds from that time on and saw them fishing several miles downstream on many occasions while walking the sandbars with my wife or while fishing. Every trip to the old bridge after that included the awareness of those majestic hunters and their babies. Sometimes I would sit at a little table on the West side of the river for a rest before continuing home. Many times I heard small chirping sounds that were not coming from the young ospreys.
On one occasion I happened to be in a mind to find the source of the noise. I scanned the sun-blasted rocks all around my position for a long while. On my second smoke, I saw it! A big yellow-bellied marmot standing at attention and warning his colony of my presence. His coloration was absolutely perfect for his environment. It was only the slight movement he had made in standing erect that had made a picture that my brain could interpret.
I turned my gaze away and then tried to pick him out again. It was with some difficulty that I was able to pull an image out of the dusty yellow, rusty oxide and basalt grey pallet before me. I practised awhile. On every subsequent trip, I spent time watching for the birds and the marmots. I was almost never unable to see them both from this time onward. The method of searching for wildlife is quite different from the way a person’s eyes are used in a city during their working life.
In order to see camouflaged animals, area is scanned with sweeping motions without focusing on anything. It is almost always movement, however slight or silent, that breaks the magic of invisibility. A flickering ear, a blinking eye or a little hop. It is at this point, using the strongest attributes of our limited human vision, that the focus of our binocular-type vision comes into play and provides the brain with enough data to create a picture of the camouflaged creature and place that image in space with our very accurate depth perception.
After some practice, previously unnoticed sounds begin to be processed by the brain in co-ordination with the visual input. Without any effort or book learning, one begins to make connections between larger patterns that previously went unnoticed. Everything moves, everything leaves traces of that movement and always, everything is watching, listening, smelling and also being tracked.
Creatures warn their own kind of any potential danger in a variety of ways, utilizing sounds, scents or semaphore. Also, I have learned that wild creatures are just as curious as humans. Some creatures are very wise and some are not. A person sitting or standing stock-still will always be scrutinized before a decision is made by an observing creature as to its threat level.
On our walks of this circuit, my wife and I now usually see around a dozen marmots and the alfalfa that has been nibbled by deer during the previous night. We have been able to watch the osprey catch fish and feed it to their chicks. My wife once discovered that some dark, s-shaped, barely discernible squiggles in the muddy river water below the bridge, were the backs of salmon several centimetres below the surface that had been invisible to us before. We both realized what the birds could have easily told us.
Once, while we were munching apples at the old bridge, the following drama played out in the space of ten minutes. An elder marmot stood on his rock-pile and began a strong danger call. Two of his troop in the vicinity came out to stand on their rock roofs as well. These other sentries stayed low on all fours. All the younger marmots disappeared down holes near to their positions when the call came out.
A lady with a dog walked down the road, oblivious to the marmots twenty yards away. A car pulled up and parked and another woman got out and released a dog from her back seat. These two humans and two canines began to walk across the bridge. Not even the dogs took notice of their wild cousins. The marmot sentinels kept their positions and the chief kept up his warning cry.
An osprey flew off the crown of the bridge and circled down to the river’s surface. In a flash of light, she was airborne with a nice fish in her talons and was soon feeding it to her chicks. I saw a very large fish flop half out of the water on the other side of the bridge. It shone iridescent, like a rainbow snake and grabbed a grasshopper that had flown within range. Both osprey parents flew off, this time over the steep side of the bench land in front of where we sat.
I wondered if they ever dined on marmot. My wife was watching the Southernmost marmot and I was watching the birds fly low over sage and chokecherry trees, that formed a backdrop behind the standing marmot. There was a private road running along the bottom bench and its edge was lined with ancient sage bushes. Between the fragrant spring foliage of this sage, I saw something.
Like a wisp of smoke, a large healthy coyote was trotting our way. He was alone and working his way to a position behind the marmot that was entertaining my wife. Coyote came up the crumbly slope in seconds with no discernible effort and without making a single sound. I had to verbally assist my wife to be able to see him. In fact, he couldn't be seen against the grey gravel, the dry yellow grass, the sun-bleached sage bark and its grey-green foliage.
It was only his movement that could be discerned. When he stopped, he was sand. Sand he remained until his movement again broke the magic. We both watched in awe. The marmot stayed put and our minds raced ahead to their own conclusions, that we would soon bear silent witness to a coyote's meal.
In a position several meters behind the marmot's rock pile, the coyote paused inside a brace of goose-berries. He lifted his head slowly, intently and pointed his ears and nose to the South, down river, where the road comes in from town. After a few seconds, he turned, abandoned the chase and flowed like silk back across the private road, this time keeping in deep cover and maintaining his altitude by side-hilling.
We lost sight of his ears after a moment and began to discuss this turn of events. A blue wildlife control truck suddenly appeared from town and started up the private road. It stopped about thirty yards in. After two minutes, it backed down the gravel road and turned around. The men inside the cab waved as they chugged off up the hill and I didn't see any coyote in the cage they carried in the back. Coyote had been well tuned in to the larger pattern.
We are equipped in some regards like coyote, but have had to dampen our sensory inputs with filters in order to survive in our artificial sensory overloaded environments. These filters slough off like callouses over time with exposure to natural surroundings and sounds. Tuning in is a state where all our senses are open and unfiltered, including the non-physical sense of intuition. The focal points formed by any two or more of these senses are geared for our survival.
Human survival encompasses every endeavour from education to procreation to hunting to healing. In reality, when you traipse through a landscape, you are being studied by every other creature who is there, seen and unseen. You in turn form an integral part of the overall pattern of what you will see. If you wish to see what was going on before you came to a location, you only have to become sand.
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