Winter 2010 - Bestiary Issue | The Harvard Advocate

Features • Winter 2010 - Bestiary

Animals in Western Art: From Magic to Science

Adam was given dominion over all animals in the *Book of Genesis*, but there was a sting in the tail – the serpent’s tail. While animals provided food, work, and companionship, they also harbored other traits, which threatened danger in the form of wild beasts or evil as in the snake-like form assumed by the devil in the Garden of Eden. In art, animals figure among the earliest known representations: the painted bison in the caves of Lascaux, or a coyote head fashioned from the pelvis bone of an extinct species of llama in Mexico, or the earliest Egyptian stele with their processions of falcons and other beasts. A common feature of these earliest representations was a combination of direct observation and magical invocation; with cave paintings, in particular, the undulations of the rock form were employed by the artists to mimic the contours of the bodies of animals, and the carver of the coyote head must have seemed possessed with supernatural gifts to his or her contemporaries.

Art, of course, has the power to evoke images out of nothing, by making connections between medium and the subject represented. This imparted a magical quality to most early representations of animals. It was seen in fabulous beasts like the Egyptian sphinx or the winged bulls of Assyria, resplendent with pinions and the bearded heads of men, and it persists in the anthropomorphic treatment of animals from antiquity to early modern times. Grafted on to the representation of animals were allegorical and symbolic meanings, which are found in both the classical and biblical traditions. Human psychology and character traits were paraded in animal form by the fables attributed to Aesop, and animals play a fundamental role in representations of Christ as lamb of God or the four Evangelists symbolized by the ox, bull, eagle, and angel.

The classical zoological cultures of Aristotle’s *Historia Animalium*, Pliny the Elder’s *Naturalis Historia*, and late antique works like the *Physiologus*, contained a mixture of factual observation and folklore to which Christianity added an allegorical gloss. Take the case of the pelican, which became a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice because it was believed to revive its young with the flesh of its own breast. This erroneous observation was woven into a comparison with Christ’s crucifixion, when blood flowed from His side, symbolizing the water of salvation. This was the source of countless representations of the pelican and her offspring in medieval illuminations, ecclesiastical vestments, and stone sculptures. Thus, when one saw such images, one could interpret them in three ways: literally, symbolically, and allegorically. By the same token, the eagle, which adorns many lecterns in Christian churches, was considered the bird that flew highest and closest to God. The psalmist’s invocation to bless the Lord, “who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s [Psalm 103:5]”, contained an allusion to the regeneration of the eagle by the heat of the sun and the cleansing action of spring water.

The medieval bestiary was a major vehicle for transmitting images of animals and their Christological interpretation. As a literary form, the bestiary was a compendium of information and misinformation, enlivened by marginal illustrations of animals. Often these images now need to be deciphered because any resemblance—especially in the case of more exotic animals like elephants or tigers—can be tenuous. They are generally depicted as acting out mythic behavior, such as the lion resuscitating its stillborn cubs by licking them or the even more fabulous unicorn being tamed by a virgin.

Ancient texts were respected for their auctoritas or authority, which was only gradually supplanted by contact with animals and observation of their traits and features. Menageries—both royal and civic—contributed to this shift from symbolic representation to more scientific study: there in one place artists and the general public could watch ostriches, leopards, camels, and a variety of birds. Thus, a Florentine chronicler of the fourteenth century witnessed the birth of live lion cubs, not stillborn as recorded by Pliny and the author of the *Physiologus*. The charismatic St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226) also fostered a new awareness of animals, and his *Canticle of Creatures *or hymn to creation was one of the earliest compositions in the Italian vernacular. Likewise, the saint’s interaction with animals became a source of illustration. His miraculous preaching to the birds was depicted in the earliest altar panel dedicated to him in Pescia, near Florence, by Bonaventura Berlinghieri (c. 1235). Seventy years later, a predella panel by Giotto in the Louvre presented the same miracle withan array of carefully rendered images of hawfinches, magpies, and goldfinches, among others.

By the end of the fourteenth century, sketchbooks with more precise renderings of animals were in circulation. The Italian humanist, Bartolomeo Facio wrote of the painter Pisanello that he was “blessed with true poetic genius in rendering the appearance of things and in expressing their sensitivity; in painting horses and other animals, he was considered superior to all others by the conoscenti.” Many of Pisanello’s drawings survive, and they display great flair in capturing the plumage and coloring of birds as well as more exotic animals like cheetahs and a camel. He drew them with an interest in reportage that raises them above other albums of similar material, and they found their way into frescoes like his *St. George and the Princess* in Sant’Anastasia, Verona, or his panel painting, *The Vision of St. Eustace*, in the National Gallery, London, where the saint on horseback is framed by a veritable menagerie of hunting dogs, game and birds, many of them traceable to the artist’s previously prepared studies. In an exquisite portrait like Pisanello’s *Ginevra d’Este* in the Louvre, four butterflies are rendered with enough accuracy as to be identifiable.

The sketchbook tradition continued well into the fifteenth century, and Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco of the Procession of the Medici in the chapel of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence offers a cavalcade of carefully presented portraits, both of men and animals. The birds in particular have the appearance of quotations from another source, but the hunting cheetahs in their bejeweled collars bear only a passing acquaintance with their originals. Albrecht Dürer raised this kind of study to a high art form, and he approached studies of stag beetles or dragonflies with the same eye for detail that made him peerless in the realm of woodcuts and engravings. One of his most mesmerizing images is a watercolor from 1502, showing a crouching hare in an attitude of intense concentration. Dürer manages a deft balance between details like the whiskers, fur, and the reflection of light in its brown eyes without losing a sense of the animal as a whole. Indeed, the authority of Dürer’s animal studies was such that his celebrated 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros continued to be cited in later publications, even after photography showed that Dürer’s image had been based upon second-hand accounts and not direct observation.

During the period known as the High Renaissance, two factors changed the way artists and the educated public regarded animals: the medium of print and cabinets of curiosity. Books devoted to natural history enabled a wider reading public to recognize a variety of native and more exotic animals. Exploration of the Indies – both East and West – brought animals like tigers into sharper focus while introducing new species like the American wild turkey. Pierre Belon’s *Histoire de la nature des oyseux* of 1555 was the first printed book devoted solely to birds, illustrating not only their bone structure but also various species in a comparative manner. Though of good quality, its woodcuts were largely executed in the manner of artists’ sketchbooks. Belon’s book was complemented by Guillaume Rondolet’s treatise on sea-dwelling fish of the same date as well as a host of similar texts produced in Europe in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Some of these authors, like the Bolognese doctor Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), had notable collections or cabinets of curiosity, which they used for their research.

Cabinets of curiosity or *Kunstkammern*—to give them their German title—were the forerunners of modern museums. They were composed of natural and manmade objects and could trace their lineage back to the treasuries of great medieval churches like San Marco in Venice or Cologne Cathedral, in which the miraculous bones of saints and other sacred relics were displayed in containers made by the finest goldsmiths and stonecutters. Over time, the workmanship of the artisans rather than the thaumaturgic power of the relic commanded greater attention. Moreover, the scope of the princely *Kunstkammer* became the means of presenting the macrocosm of the world in microcosm. In addition to precious objects and regalia like crowns and scepters, these assemblages contained ancestral armor, portraits and other paintings, and specimens of natural history. The last category included minerals, fossils, botanical and ethnographic specimens, not to mention artifacts fashioned from exotic materials such as ivory, amber, and rock crystal. The objects in such collections were assembled in cabinets, a word that meant either a cupboard or the room in which such cupboards were housed. In Italy, these rooms were called studioli, in France estudes, both of which share the same Latin root as our modern word “study.” The name underscores a principal function of the cabinet as a place where the prince or a private collector could pursue the contemplative life as an antidote to the intrigues of the court or the pressures of everyday life.

By the sixteenth century, the mania for collecting had filtered down into the realm of the wealthy and the intellectually curious. Animals initially figured in cabinets of curiosity as fossils, skeletons, tortoise shells or pelts, but by the turn of the seventeenth century, many cabinets began to be known as museums and were sights of cultural pilgrimage from Naples to Copenhagen. Because taxidermy was then in its infancy, accurate drawings or paintings of animals were in demand, especially to identify new and rare specimens from distant corners of the world. Perhaps the finest artist of this kind at the end of the Renaissance was the Italian Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1626). After entering the service of the Medici Grand Dukes in Tuscany, Ligozzi began specializing in tempera studies of exotic plants and animals acquired by his patrons for their gardens and collections. It doesn’t matter now that his princely employer, Francesco I de’ Medici, was primarily interested in alchemy, poisons, and their antidotes; Ligozzi’s assignment was to delineate precisely the flora and fauna set before him. His studies, whether a study of a dormouse or a flying fish, have an intensity and attention to detail that anticipate modern photography. Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Ligozzi’s focus on the subject at hand foreshadowed the empiricism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific analysis of the natural world. With the Enlightenment, the old cabinets of curiosity became the victims of their own success as they were broken up into component parts, eventually becoming museums of natural history as well as art. The artistic creations of Dürer, Ligozzi and others fall somewhere between both worlds.

By Bruce Boucher

Features • Winter 2010 - Bestiary

Myrddin Wilt, Myrddin Emrys, Merlinus Silvestri, Merlinus Celidonus, Merlinus Ambrosius, Merlin: A Bestiary Entry

Myrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Although some say he is merely a figure of legend, it may be less than prudent to concur with the doubters. After all, they were the men who dismissed the story of Myrddin’s magicking of Stonehenge from across the seas and we know now that the monument’s stone came from a quarry that is indeed across a sea, across the Cardigan Bay, on the southern coast of Wales. Such disbelief, however, is not uncommon in the treatment of this man of the woods. His life, to this point, has not been one of ease, but has been marked, yes, by madness but also by a never-ending struggle against those who would sleight his essential nature, even going so far as to attempt to kill him for it.

His nature is as his name indicates, Wild, or Of the Woods. Once a prince in the world of men, he rules over the forest as king. He speaks the tongues of animals and they listen to him as they listened to Adam, Noah, and the early men of this earth. The society of his animal companions, sometimes the pig, sometimes the wolf, is the only society that Myrddin can withstand for the world of men has driven him to despair and madness. Much has been made of his madness, which unmoored his mind’s eye so that rather than experience the world in the present, as the mass of men do, he sees the future relentlessly unfolding before him. To hear him speak of the future is to put oneself in peril, for, as it is commonly known, foreknowledge is a grave danger to all sane men who encounter it.

Myrddin was, before prophecy struck him, a great lord of the Welsh people, the bearer of a golden torque. He was terrible to meet in battle and his prowess inspired awe from his enemies and friends alike. He had a wife whom he loved dearly and who was deeply enamored of him and his powerful figure. He was, from all accounts, well spoken and well spoken of at court, though he harbored great hostility toward the Christian missionaries who had taken to trumpeting their new faith throughout the land. It might have been because of this animosity that he went mad, though the accounts all differ as to how it happened. What is certain is that he was never the same after the Battle of Arfderydd.

The Battle of Arfderydd was fought on the plains of Scotland before Scotland was known by such a name, between the rivers of Liddel and Esk. Assembled on the field that day were the hosts of the Welsh’s two most mighty warlords, Rhydderch Hael, a Christian ruler, and Gwenddolau, a devotee to the old Gods and Myrddin’s liege lord. It is during this clash of titans that the Gods touched Myrddin. According to some records, he was cursed by one of Rhydderch’s Christian clerics. Others say that it was his discovery that he had slain his sister’s children in the fight that plunged him into turmoil. Some warriors bearing scars from the battle tell of celestial figures that howled Myrddin’s name and chased him from the field of combat, while an equal contingent claim that the champion simply laid down his weapons and walked away from the bloodshed.

Oh blissful dam

if you saw

the sheer violence

that I saw,

you wouldn’t sleep in the morning,

you wouldn’t dig the hillside

you wouldn’t make for the wild

by a desolate lake.

—“The Ohs of Myrddin,” *The Black Book of Carmarthen*

Away from the moans of the dying and injured, away from the grunts of the soldiers exhausting themselves in the attempt to kill their enemy, in the attempt to stay alive themselves, away from the horrible accusatory silence of the corpses, of the cloven heads that bobbed in estuaries of blood, away from that silence, that silence! and into the woods went Myrddin. Off into the wild he flew “like any bird of the air,” if the Gaelic record *The Frenzy of Suibhne* is to be believed. He landed in an apple-tree in the Forest of Celyddon and was to stay there for many years. In that forest, the forest where the madmen searched for their sanity, he lived with the animals. He slept in the boughs of the oak trees and lived on a diet of nuts and vegetables. It was among the animals that he hid as he sought protection from King Rhydderch who he was certain was trying to kill him. It was to the animals that he foretold the coming of Cadwaladyr, the great King who would unite the Britons and bring peace. It was to the animals that he spoke as he attempted to find peace with the violence of his kind.

Perhaps it is this preference of the world of animals to the world of men, the possibility that Myrddin harbors deep reservations about humankind, that spurs some chroniclers to deny him his madness, to deny him his time in the forest. Believe it if you wish, but there certainly seems to be a coterie dedicated to extirpating him, or at least Myrddin as he truly is, from the records. Geoffrey of Monmouth not only Latinized the Welsh, changing Myrddin to Merlinus (lore has it that he chose this name because Merdinus—the logical Latinization—would have been too closely associated with the Anglo-Norman word for shit, merde) but he also expunged Myrddin’s madness and his sylvan life completely in his *Historia Regum Britanniae*. In fact, this “Merlin” was prescient from his earliest days, always able to divine the future’s truth, and is brought to the court of King Vortigern when yet a child. Geoffrey did try to amend his factual errors with his later work, Vita Merlini, in which he does recognize Myrddin’s time in the forest and the horrific genesis of his foresight, but the process of recasting Myrddin as Merlin, of siphoning away the man’s spirit to feed a fantasy was begun.

In one account of his madness from the Gaelic tradition, Myrddin brings his madness upon himself by trying to spear a cleric after the cleric sprinkles him with holy water. It seems that the Welshman had found the ritual to be insulting. Close to six hundred years after this event, Robert de Boron, a deeply Christian French poet of the late 12th century, completed the cleric’s work—or at least did so in writing. Through his Merlin, he began to convince Europe that the man was a Christian. The unknown father in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account becomes a demon and Myrddin’s otherwise troublesome paganistic aspects could be neatly explained away as the result of his devilish heritage. But his demonic blood, manifested in his full head of hair—a sign of his bestial associations—and his perfect knowledge of the past, which could be no other than a full acquaintance with pagan lore, is counteracted by his acceptance of the Christian faith. His mother has him baptized, neutralizing the threat of ungodliness and transforming the troubled antichrist into a leader of the Christian world. Gifted by God with knowledge of the future (for Christianity’s God is the future as Boron takes pains to make evident), Merlin spends his life as the courtly adviser to King Arthur and his knights. By Boron’s book, Merlin’s prophecies and magical powers are useful tools in creating the most perfect Christian world possible. Discounting a brief time masquerading as a shepherd so that he can usher Arthur into the world, the woods, the wilderness, the outdoors, seem to have been successfully exorcised from his person. De Boron’s account presents as self-evident the obviously false idea that Merlin was a man of the courts rather than of the woods.

In fact, when Myrddin is removed from his arboreal kingdom, it is known that he becomes terribly depressed and is prone to retaliate against his captors with awful pronouncements. Geoffrey of Monmouth, referencing earlier records, tells of Myrddin being captured by his sister, Queen Ganieda, and being brought back to court. There, he refuses to speak a word about his experiences and suffers civilization in silence. That is, until one day, when he sees the King Rodarcus, his sister’s husband, remove a leaf from his sister’s hair. He laughs and there is a quality to the laugh that like the fury of a waterfall about to crash against the rocks, excites and frightens the King so that he must know why the madman is laughing. The King will give him anything to know, to know, from whence this secret mirth bubbles, finally promising to allow Myrddin to return to the woods. The response though, could not have brought joy to Rodarcus for Myrddin tells him that the leaf became entangled in her locks when she lay in the woods with her lover. Myrddin tells the King that his great love for his wife is unrequited. She loves the man with whom she lay that morning under the trees of Myrddin’s forest. And then Myrddin laughs because he shall be free.

The records of other men exposed to Myrddin’s prophetical voice are equally joyless. In one account, Myrddin orders his wife to remarry—his love for nature leaves no room for any other—on one condition: that he never lay eyes on her husband. On the day of her marriage, he comes riding to her, astride a great stag, shepherding herds of animals that he desires to give to her. However, as she comes out to meet him, her husband catches sight of Myrddin and laughs at the man riding a deer. Like thunder is to lightning so is laughter the warning that Myrddin is about to strike. If you hear the sound in his presence, it is best to leave as quickly as possible. Myrddin, hearing the laughter, knows exactly who makes such noise and, turning to look at the man, flies into a rage in which he tears the horns from his stag and assaults the bridegroom with them. And then he disappears back into the shadows of the forest.

The Myrddin that rides off in a burst of speed, astride his bloody steed, slicked with sweat from the exertion of ripping the antlers from his mount, lost in the exhilaration of dramatic action, is a far cry from contemporary depictions. The man who crushes his wife’s betrothed with a blow of the antlers is a virile, albeit chaste, being. He is strong and powerful, a warrior who simply chooses not to fight, a noble savage, not the doddering octogenarian in which his spirit—whatever is left of it at least—has been incarnated. Sir Thomas de Malory introduces this misconception in his romance, *La Morte D’Arthur*, as he writes that Merlin, after being ignored by Arthur when appearing as “a child of fourteen year of age,” “came again in the likeness of an old man of four-score years of age, whereof the king was right glad, for he seemed to be right wise.” After Malory, the choice that Merlin makes to assume “the likeness” of an old man is forgotten. The association between age and wisdom becomes primary. He becomes an old man because he is the wise councilor. Age, rather than the touch of madness, becomes the font of wisdom and Myrddin Wilt finds himself further effaced.

Becoming thirsty, Merlin leaned down to the stream and drank freely and bathed his temples in its waves, so that the water passed through the passages of bowels and stomach, settling the vapours within him, and at once he regained his reason and knew himself, and all his madness departed and the sense which had long remained torpid in him revived, and he remained what he had once been—sane and intact with his reason restored.

—*Vita Merlini*, Geoffrey of Monmout

It is recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, even if the surviving Welsh poems do not acknowledge it, that Myrddin does eventually recover his sanity by drinking from a newly born stream. Restored to his senses, though still empowered with the vision that his madness had wakened, it is said that his first action was to praise nature. For Myrddin, there is nothing that can compare with the world of the forest. The forest is Myrddin’s home. There he lives and there he one day shall die.

Thomas Malory’s *La Morte D’Arthur* tells of how the lady of the lake refuses Merlin’s love because she was “aferde of [Myrddin] for cause he was a devyls son.” This sentiment seems to characterize Merlin’s later “chroniclers” as well. They are afraid of Myrddin’s true nature. They age him, remove him from his natural habitat, and create a force to tame him—Vivien’s seductive charms. However, even in such stories as that of Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” they cannot deny his sylvan roots. Even if they remove him from his life’s rightful realm, they allow him to return there for his eternal sleep. Even if they cloud his reason with lust for the lady of the lake, they are unable to do away with all of his aboriginal tendencies. Malory tells of how Merlin returns to the earth, how he goes “under the stone to let [the lady of the lake] wit of the marvels there, but she wrought it so that for him he never came out.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, while reducing dignified Myrddin to lecherous Merlin, an old man allowing the needs of his “dying flesh” to lead him into doom, depicts the final moments of Merlin’s life as occurring among “the ravaged woodland” and ends the poem with Merlin sleeping forever not simply within the forest, but within a tree: “in the hollow oak he lay as dead, / And lost to life and use and name and fame.”

So Merlin, Myrddin, is sentenced to sleep. The fantasists—Monmouth, de Boron, Malory, Tennyson—are unable to destroy his presence. His animal magnetism is too robust, too vibrant, too wild, to be fully washed away by the waters of baptism nor predictable enough to be channeled properly in the world of the court. And so they invent the myth of his lust to draw him out of the court, back into his wild world of the forest and there sentence him to sleep, not death—they do not have that power of the pen—and they proceed with the stories that they are interested in telling. They chained him to their purposes, forced him to usher Arthur into the world and to his throne, all the while denying Myrddin his own true history. And then they cast him off, back into the forest from whence he came. But, Myrddin, even in his sleep, even as they have imagined him, laid to rest in a tomb encased by earth or oak, remains their nightmare, the specter of the natural world, not yet bent over by Christ or civilization. He haunts them like wolves circling just beyond the light of a campfire; they cannot distinguish the forms but they can feel the presences. In response, they crowd closer around the fire. On the outskirts of their minds, hidden in the caves that they have long since run from, they know he, Myrddin, is waiting with the knowledge that primeval nature is not something to be afraid of—simply to respect—and that terrifies them even more.

When I remain under the green leaves the riches of Calidon delight me more than the gems that India produces, or the gold that Tagus is aid to have on its shore, more than the crops of Sicily or the grapes of pleasant Methis, more than lofty turrets or cities girded with high walls or robes fragrant with Tyrian perfumes. Nothing pleases me enough to tear me away from my Calidon which in my opinion is always pleasant. Here shall I remain while I live, content with apples and grasses, and I shall purify my body with pious fastings that I may be worthy to partake of the life everlasting.

—*Vita Merlini*, Geoffrey of Monmouth

Myrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Perhaps he is singing, for he is, they say, as gifted in voice as the famed Taliesin of the golden brow. But, if he has died in the centuries since he was last beheld by mortal mind, if the word-sorcerers de Boron and Malory have succeeded in stealing his soul to animate their fantastical courtier-counselor, Merlin the magician, and Myrddin Wilt has sunk into slumber, then, it is said, wait for the time of the great King Cadwaladyr’s return, when the steel cages shall crash to the ground, the black tar shall be uprooted, the endless fires shall be extinguished, the silver dragons that belch smoke into the sky slain, and Myrddin Wilt shall once again walk with the lonely wolf, ride the crownless stag, and speak prophecy to the pig.

By Sanders Bernstein

Fiction • Winter 2010 - Bestiary

Atticus

Marcy finished picking up after the dogs and tied the plastic grocery bag with two simple knots. The three greyhounds barked when they saw she was done because they wanted treats.

“Hush dogs,” she said. She crossed the yard and opened the side gate that led to the front of the house—and the two late Thursday afternoon trashcans that would be emptied on Friday morning garbage day. She swung the gate behind her as she usually did and proceeded forward across St. Augustine grass of the front yard.

When she did so the purebred, silvery dogs raised their heads like chickens around a cock. They were waiting for the click of the gate. This was the sign to stay put, though the opposite had been true during their racing days. The starting cages would snap open, and nothing would have been better than to finally sink their teeth into the fake white rabbit that was always just out of reach. Men would have bad days because of them, and some lucky men would name their own kids after their winning bets. Now, standing around in the yard with ears pinned back, the dogs can’t quite remember how the track and rabbit would, without fail, be replaced by wire cages and rough human hands, but they remember other things.

Before they could really understand what they heard, they were running—the three of them— streaking across the yard. There had been no click, and the first dog to hit the gate and force it open yelped. Marcy hadn’t even reached the trashcans when they ran past. In all her years of rescuing dogs, she had never once yelled after the ones who got out. They would come back.

Blocks away, an old man was trimming stray branches off of a tree in his front yard. The look in his eyes was that of a meticulous man, but his dry, cracked hands made him clumsy. His white undershirt was a good fit, and the wrinkled dimples of his forehead overflowed their narrow banks with sweat. The sunlight coming through the branches and leaves made it look like he was underwater. Occasionally he would stop his work and look toward his house, perhaps in anticipation that his wife might bring him some water or lemonade.

Across the street, a boy passed by his living room window and saw the old man cutting the trees. He doesn’t know the man’s name, but he doesn’t remember many people’s names. His mother says that he should be starting high school now, but the high school said no, so now he doesn’t go to school “for the time being,” his mother said. His own name is Peter, and it helps him understand the man cutting trees better if he imagines his name is Peter too.

Moving away from the window, Peter picked up a pen from his mother’s desk and went into the kitchen to draw on the newspaper at the kitchen table. He would add details to the pictures. Not mustaches and missing teeth, but instead birds and other people, standing in the background. His principal once told his mother that he was troubled, but Peter hardly ever got in trouble. His hands got dark with newsprint, and Peter started thinking about the other Peter, who could still be heard rummaging in the yard.

When he was younger, Peter would play in his front yard or in the street, and once, the old man came and talked to him. The old man reminded Peter of a horse riding character from a movie, and his voice was like a bassoon. He didn’t introduce himself as is the way of most old gentlemen, but his name is, in fact, not Peter, but Sergei. Sergei asked Peter questions he didn’t understand about his father, and then he said he was sorry. Peter was still thinking about the Western he had seen and finally asked Sergei what he knew about horses.

Instead of answering the question directly, Sergei began telling a story, as is the way of most old men. He said that when his parents first arrived in America with him when he was very young, they had had a very rough time. His father had been a skilled taxidermist, which Sergei explained is when you stuff an animal, and Peter nodded in understanding.

“He could make no money doing this in the cities, though, so he answered a letter from his older brother, telling him we would join him in his new home in Kentucky. He lived in a small town outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and he worked in the only ambulance. My father was able to start stuffing the animals that the hunters wanted as trophies, and we were soon able to live in our own small house, and my mother worked in a restaurant.”

His uncle had always told his father that they should all go see a horse race in Louisville. Sergei’s father would sit amongst stuffed ducks and cardinals and think about the horses gliding over the mud and all of the rich men cheering their favorites. Sergei’s father had never gambled outside of poker games with friends, but the thought of hugging a horse with a collar or roses lifted him beyond the musty seclusion of bird feathers. He began setting aside money for his first bet.

“Then one day, my father took my mother and I to Louisville for a horse race. He asked us to dress in our church clothes, and he wore a fancy tie he had made for himself out of the colorful feathers of ducks. In the car, we passed horse farms that went on forever, and I could see the horses playing games and asking their owners for food along the fences.”

The track was exactly how Sergei’s father had envisioned it, and he kept his hand in his pocket, feeling the greasy dollars and lint inside. Sergei watched as his father placed a $50 bet on a horse called “Sea Wolf,” and when his father finished, he turned and winked at his son. Because they couldn’t afford seats in the grandstand, they stood along the fourth turn railing.

“When the race started, Sea Wolf was in the middle of the pack, and we were all yelling. The leader started slowing down though, and Sea Wolf took the lead! My father’s voice broke when he screamed with excitement, and our horse sprinted toward our turn, leaving the others in his dust. My father was watching his $50 become $500, and my mother couldn’t contain herself.”

Sea Wolf started making the fourth turn, and as Sergei clutched the white railing, something began to happen. Sea Wolf’s leg buckled in the mud, snapping her femur. The jockey was thrown as the horse fell and lay motionless and unconscious. The other horses just barely avoided the two as they flew toward the finish line. The horse made horrible sounds as it lay there in the mud, looking wildly around in pain.

“The horse looked at me, and I yelled at it to keep running. It was sad, but I didn’t understand. Three men came out and restrained the horse while a fourth inspected Sea Wolf’s leg. With his back still turned to us and the grandstand, he brought out a needle. The horse kept screaming, and then that was it, and it was silent.”

Sergei’s father lost his bet, and a man in a nice suit and hat made fun of his tie as they exited through the turnstiles. The story made Peter upset, but he didn’t say so, and he began playing again as a sign for Sergei to return to his yard.

Peter kept scribbling in the newspaper, only stopping momentarily to drink a glass of orange juice. His mother called, and he explained to her what he was doing. She said she would pick up dinner on her way home.

Sergei opened his garage door and brought a trashcan out to the curb for trash pick up. His white shirt somehow seemed even whiter now as it soaked through and sparkled with sweat. Very few cars were on the road. Sergei started working in the flowerbed nearest the front door. He wasn’t wearing gloves for this, and as he pulled dollar weeds from the flowers, black soil would get stuck in the cracks in his hands.

From the kitchen table, Peter first heard dogs barking and then the shouts of a man and then something closer to screams. He went again to the living room window. Sergei lay on his back in his yard, and the three greyhounds were sinking their teeth into him and scratching at him with their paws. Peter could see some of Sergei’s blood on his white undershirt, and it scared him. Peter thought about the other Peter being attacked by the dogs, he thought about Kentucky, and he remembered what his mother had always told him about being a gentleman.

Peter walked out of his front door, and he crossed his yard. As he crossed the street, the largest kitchen knife his mother owned reflected the sunlight like a playground slide. Without hesitation and with the methodical movements of a livestock farmer, Peter brought the knife into the dog nearest himself, and he thought of butter. The dog reeled on Peter with its jaws but too slowly. Sergei was so badly torn that he wasn’t fighting as much anymore. Peter moved to the second dog with equally passionless movements. A butcher might have had more misgivings than Peter. The third dog, now without the advantage of his pack, lifted his blood-filled jowls and growled. Peter stepped over Sergei and lifted the knife. This time, though, it was the dog that was quicker, and it ran back down the sidewalk in the direction it had come from.

Peter turned from Sergei and the two dead dogs, and he started walking back toward his house with the dripping knife at his side. A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk, and they quickly rushed to Sergei after letting Peter pass. Peter cleaned his mother’s knife off, and sat back down at the kitchen table. He wished his father was there, but he quickly forgot about everything as he returned to the newspaper.

Marcy opened her front door. It was a prospective adoptee, who was there to see her greyhounds. Marcy was about to explain that her dogs had just gotten out and hadn’t come back yet, the third dog wandered up the sidewalk to her front porch. It smelled the other woman before nuzzling against Marcy’s outstretched hands. Marcy sighed and said, “Yes, of course, these are great family pets.” The dog had already licked its jowls clean on the walk home.

By Andrew Nunnelly