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dissecting needles." Still the dogs froze. The scientists pursued the dogs with electrically charged toy cars, which delivered 1,500 volts to the animals on contact. The scientists reported that the dogs, raised in isolation, did not seem to understand the source of their pain.
    What does a person do with this kind of information? How do you grapple with the knowledge that, in the pursuit of data— and ultimately in an attempt to make ourselves "lords and possessors of nature"—members of our culture will give electric shocks to kittens and will mercilessly torture dogs? It seems impossible to form an adequate response.
    Six nights ago, I dreamt of fishing. In this dream I began to reel in a huge fish. I pulled and pulled, and when it came close enough to see from shore it sped toward me and leapt onto the beach. Its bulk scared me—it was as long as my outstretched arms, and nearly half that distance from dorsal fin to belly. Its cold eye seemed to follow my every movement. Its jaw worked for breath. I wanted to throw it back; I couldn't stand having it next to me. Nor could I bear the thought of killing it. It had swallowed the hook. I had no choice: placing one foot on the fish's head, I pulled on the line. At last the hook came loose with the familiar crunch of cartilage. I still wanted to throw the fish back. Dying now, it was even more hideous. As I searched for a \ hatchet to finally kill this creature of the deep, a man approached, and said two words: "It's cod." I awoke perplexed, and then realized he meant for me to eat it, take it in. That is what we all must do.
    I called my friend, Jeannette Armstrong. A traditional Okanagan Indian, she is an author, teacher, and philosopher. She travels extensively working on indigenous sovereignty and land rights issues, and helps to rebuild native communities damaged by the dominant culture. I told her about my interactions with the coyotes and said, "I don't know what to make of this."
    She laughed, then said, "Yes, you do."
    A few weeks later we took a walk, and sat on the steep bank of a river. I leaned against the reddish dirt and played with the tendril of a trees root that trailed from the soil. In front of us an eddy whirled in circles large enough to carry whole watersoaked trees in lazy circuits. Each round, the logs almost broke free only to fall back toward the bank and slide again upstream. Beyond the eddy the river moved slow and smooth, and beyond the river we could see cottonwoods and haystacks dotting broad meadows, interspersed with fields of alfalfa hemmed by barbed-wire fences. In the distance, the plains gave way to mountains, low and blue.
    Jeannette said, "Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor." She paused, then continued, emphatically, "It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is."
    I looked at the river. It would be easy to observe the eddy and make up a half-dozen lessons I could learn from it, for example, the obvious metaphor of the logs traveling in circles, like people trapped in a confining mindset that doesn't allow them to reenter the free flow of life. There's certainly nothing wrong with fabricating metaphors from the things we find around us, or from the experience of others—human or otherwise—but in both of those situations the other remains a case study onto which we project whatever we need to learn. That's an entirely different circumstance than listening to the other as it has its say, reveals its intents, expresses its experience, and does all this on its own terms.
    Certainly it would be a step in the right direction if our culture as a whole could accept the notion of listening to the natural world—or listening at all, for that matter—even if they thought that "listening" was merely a metaphor. I once heard a Diné man say that uranium