If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons? Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?
Or would bears converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?
We ask, “Did you see two people pass this way, a man and a woman, walking north?”
The stag shakes its antlers. “Nope,” he says.
“The woman was dark with a ripe body, the man had white in his hair. Sure you didn’t see them?”
“Yep.”
“Well, how about you?” we ask a fox. “Have you seen a couple in Byzantine garb heading in the direction of Bohemia?”
The fox is slow to speak. “Tonight I dined on loon at the pond,” he says. “It was a good meal. Food has an excellent place in my values. Quiet has an excellent place in my values. The forest has been quiet tonight. It is a good thing being a fox when the forest is quiet.”
“We apologize for disturbing your peace, but we’re searching for a husband and wife, racially mixed, and they are either wandering through the woodlands trying to figure out what to do next, or else are making their way by the stars to Bohemia, where the man at one time – longer ago than you might imagine – had an important job and a large family. They may have passed this way.” We pause hopefully.
“The hunt was good,” says the fox. “The moon was right. There was a fresh breeze. A man and a woman would have spooked the loon. What a good thing the forest is when it is left to the fox and the loon.”
Is that the way animals would talk?