Their human equivalents don’t do so well in captivity either; I know this because once, very briefly, I went to a glossy east coast prep school. My English teacher was so like a walrus that a T-shirt was made to honour the resemblance. He was popular, and the shirt was intended as a kind of testament — a portrait of the man, complete with Clark Kent glasses and long tusks, along with the phrase “The Archetypal Walrus” (he was fond of identifying archetypes). Not long after I was asked to leave the school, a rumour echoed back to me: the walrus now spoke of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax — in short, he had lost his mind. He had been forced to leave the school as well. Even though I failed his course, I wore my Archetypal T-shirt with pride until it fell apart.
About eight years later, having gone west in pursuit of an archetype to call my own, I ran across another walrus, this time in the wild. It was a brief and sordid encounter, but it left me able to say, with complete honesty, that I have “handled” a walrus. I was alone on a remote beach in southwestern Alaska, looking for a boat I’d lost, when the walrus floated by. It was dead (if you think they smell bad when they’re alive . . . ).
This is where the trouble started. I waded into the 5°C water and rolled this absolutely massive, gas-filled carcass over so I could see its face — something I intend never to do again, should the occasion arise. Once upon a time, these creatures were called sea horses; in Old English they went by horschwæl (horse whale), and their scientific name is Odobenus rosmarus, meaning “tooth walking seahorse.” But a dead walrus, up close, is like a seagoing Jabba the Hutt. With a hide like an elephant, the colour of sand, it looks more like a protoplasmic waterbed than anything you’d be tempted to call one of God’s creatures. It is also extraordinarily heavy; male walruses can weigh up to 1.4 tonnes. This one’s appearance wasn’t improved by the fact that someone had beaten me to it and torn out its tusks.
In between waves of exhilaration and disgust, I experienced a third emotion: disappointment. I felt cheated — robbed, even. This is not to say that I would have sold the tusks; I wanted them purely as a souvenir. No, the painful part, the part that makes me feel vaguely nauseous, even fifteen years on, is how, in that moment, I felt I deserved a piece of that animal. This response wasn’t calculated or planned; in fact, it may have been as pure and spontaneous as any I’ve ever had in my life. It wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit; there was no one around, literally, for kilometres.
An aerial image of all this would have been comical, if it weren’t so grotesque. Picture to the west, a vast ocean of celadon grey (not green) and, to the east, a gaping, treeless void of coarse grass and alder thickets interspersed with pothole lakes fed by streams that coil back upon themselves like intestines. Along the broad shingle beach that sutures this agoraphobe’s nightmare, there is literally nothing of human manufacture for thirty-two kilometres in any direction, save bits and pieces of wrecked fishing boats and the occasional crashed plane. Nothing but this tiny, naked, out-of-state scavenger armed with a pocket knife, hacking away at the gums of a creature twenty-five times larger than himself. (If I couldn’t have the tusks, I figured, I was damn well going to get some teeth).
If you were to multiply this archetype of eager industry and visceral entitlement by millions and then transpose it to a forest, a buffalo herd, a mountain, or a stock exchange, you would have a pretty accurate picture of the history of the New World from 1500 to the present day. I was to the walrus, and to Bristol Bay, Alaska — a place that, over the course of three years, I dug, drilled, dynamited, shot at, fished from, pissed in, shat on, and then abandoned — what England was to Canada. What Ottawa is to British Columbia. What North America continues to be to much of the world. The only difference is that, in the end, I lacked the requisite conviction and stick-to-it-iveness to fully plunder my prey. My pocket knife was no match for walrus bone, and I felt a growing discomfort with my own reflection in the light of that long, long Subarctic day.
Sometime later, after forsaking the walrus and finding my lost boat, I ran into my neighbours: first, Mike the Vietnam vet, a man of few words and big dogs who never went anywhere without his M-16 . And then, Charlie the sourdough — six-foot-something, mutton chop sideburns, smile like a rotten picket fence — who once very nearly killed me with an articulated loader.
Charlie was lurching down the beach with a bloody club in one hand and a skinned fur seal pup in the other. He was going to throw the little carcass in the ocean, so I took it from him and ate it. By doing so, I reasoned, I was saving the poor creature from being wasted. But wasted on whom? Local eagles, seagulls, and crabs, as opposed to a transient Homo sapiens? This is the scary, refreshing thing about remote places like the wilderness, or the back alleys and upper floors of office buildings: they encourage the human chameleon’s true colours to show themselves — not in the civil pastels of our daily lives, but in the primal blacks and whites and reds of undiluted self-interest. It is not a failure of our human nature that causes us to take all we can. No, it is more a matter of not being able to overcome our animal nature. We are merely cleverer versions of the aptly named killer whale, and of the far less romantic lemming: a creature who dumbly rides the sine wave roller coaster of population explosion and catastrophic die-off. We just ride it in more elaborate ways. But if one looks at the ends rather than the means, the veneer separating us from them is terribly, terrifyingly thin. The difference amounts to little more than a tendency toward a species-centric vanity that, if mayflies and comets had senses of humour, would make them laugh hysterically and ask, “Who on earth do they think they are? ”
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