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dreams of tiny rocks, and she dreams of the sounds of water moving
through the night and into the day. She dreams of the stars, and of
the sun. She dreams of a cloudless sky she cannot see.
The German victories in Poland and France made more
distant the possibilities of victory for any coup attempt, as the
regime became more popular and the resistance lost support:
then as now, there were many who did not mind a dictator, so
long as he was successful. But there were others who persevered
in attempted to kill Hitler. Eugen Gersenmaier and Fritz-Dietlof
Graf von der Schulenberg were two of these. Together, they as-
sembled a group of officers to arrest Hitler, killing him if, as
presumed, resistance was offered. Despite many attempts, they
were never able to get close enough to pull it off. The closest
they came was in Paris in 1940; they planned to attack Hitler
during his victory parade. But at the last moment, Hitler de-
cided against having this parade. Instead he flew into Paris at
five o clock that morning and visited the Champs-Elysées, the
Opéra, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Invalides (includ-
ing Napoleon s tomb) before catching an 8:00 a.m. flight back to
Prussia.
Evidently and of course this is true of conquerors in
general, on every level from the most intimate to the most glob-
Songs of the Dead " 93
al Hitler could conquer Paris, but he couldn t comfortably visit
it. The act of conquest makes any sort of real visitation impos-
sible. This is, once again, as true of those who rape individuals
as it is of those who rape countries as it is of those who rape
landbases.
I don t think I ve told you yet about the bears and the apple
trees. A family of bears lives in the neighborhood, and all of us hu-
mans have agreed to not call Fish and Game, because we know that
Fish and Game would kill them. That s what they do. The cliché is
that a fed bear is a dead bear, but it s more accurate to say that a bear
who has been ratted out to the state or federal mobile killing units is
a dead bear. The humans in our neighborhood who don t like bears
make sure to not leave trash where the bears can get at it. Those who
do like bears leave offerings of corn or dog food, and are sometimes
blessed by seeing a bear or, better, a mother and cub. At the very least
we all get to see lots of bear poop.
Allison and I decided to take this one step further. We kept
thinking about the old adage about how if you give a man a fish, you
feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you ll feed him
for a lifetime (and if you blow up a dam you ll feed his descendants
forever). Well, we knew we couldn t teach bears to fish any better
than they already do, and besides, the wétikos have killed the streams
and rivers (where are the salmon, lampreys, and sturgeon?). And
both Allison and I already work on dam removal and anti-logging
issues, so we re already helping the fish some, though obviously not
enough. We wanted to do something more direct. We couldn t figure
out what we should do until bear poop gave us the answer.
We noticed that each year during apple season we often see
huge piles of poop that reveal to us all too clearly the inefficiency of
bear metabolism. If I can venture perhaps too much detail, the poop
looks like filling for apple cobbler. If you had enough patience and
94 " Derrick Jensen
really liked three-dimensional puzzles, you could fit the apple pieces
back together, glue them, put them on your kitchen counter, and no
one would be the wiser.
In any case, we decided that if you give a bear an apple you
feed her for a day or more accurately in a bear s case about five
minutes but if you plant a tree you feed her and her descendants
for many generations, maybe even long enough for civilization to
crash and for what little wild that remains to begin to recover.
So we planted apple trees. Spokane has hot, dry summers,
and we knew the trees wouldn t survive their first few years unattend-
ed, so we planted them near water sources. We planted some near
Hangman Creek, and some near its tributaries. We planted some in
a beautiful little meadow on a tributary that begins near our home,
then winds down to cross beneath the Pullman Highway and open
into Hangman Creek.
We planted heirlooms. I m not sure if bears find red deli-
cious apples as bland as I do, but we wanted to give them and all the
other critters a variety, and besides, the centralization and standard-
ization of agriculture is destroying diversity of fruit and vegetable va-
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