Prey Defenses

I’ve learned a lot from animals that play dead. I’ve learned from opossums with their convincing mortal bluff, which can last up to several hours, and the eastern hognose snake, who responds to threats by rolling over onto her back, letting her muscles relax and her forked tongue loll out of her head. That tongue, purple-black like a rotting plum, is pretty but off-putting in its dangling state.

    If menaced, fawns experience a plunge in heart rate from 155 to 38 beats a minute within the span of one beat of the heart. This reflex response makes the deer fall into a position that resembles the posture of a corpse.  Grim to imagine a little downcast deer, white flecked and bristle comb-soft with her muzzle and overlarge eyes, becoming so terrified that her body impersonates death, but it’s a prudent evolutionary strategy. When a raptor or fox or hunter approaches, the instinct to flop over and ham up your last curtain call is not a bad one.  Evolution is sensible, after all. Freezing behavior conserves energy, and it minimizes predator aggression.

     There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being hunted.  The body becomes a house turned inside out like something irreplaceable has been lost. I’m familiar with the signs; they’re as intimate as my mother’s face: the sudden lurch of the stomach, the feeling of vertigo, a sensation of heat, a trace of acid in the throat. When I am afraid, my limbic system releases hormones that can cause sweaty palms, a rapid heartbeat. I implore my body to master itself, but it has its own operating system that has little to do with my will.

     When I pick over the visceral impacts, studying their hazards, their repeated costs, I want to be something fiercer and faster than I am. My unspoken desires crystallize into the form of a peregrine falcon who can turn her body into a missile when she is flying. Speed that defies wildfires and tornadoes and any manner of manmade disaster.

      One gray winter afternoon, my car was towed. Apparently, I had parked illegally, which I had been doing a lot lately, my mind elsewhere. On the long walk to pay for and retrieve my car, a busted-up truck veered onto my road and slowed down to a crawl, shadowing me each time I crossed the street or turned a corner. Time stilled. I remember the potholed sidewalk, the sweat soaking the back of my shirt, the rattling sound of the muffler behind me. I wondered if I should run, ceding whatever power I had to him, or confront him. I was in a remote section of town and didn’t see a single person who I might turn to if he escalated or tried to grab me. What was he trying to do anyway? Kidnap me? Intimidate me? I don’t know, but it went on like this for a good twenty minutes. When I spotted a dive bar, I ducked in and peered out from the window. I didn’t feel the jitters leave my body until he drove away.

    Another time, not long after, a neighbor in my apartment building let me know every day in passing (or by design, more likely) that he had seen me in town, had noted where I parked, had watched me as I bought a newspaper or read in a cafe.  He always said it as if it were a normal thing to do, to catalogue all the places a stranger’s been over the course of the day. Every dawn, he approached me and asked if I wanted to take a jog around the neighborhood with him and each time I said no. I was in a rush, I had to get to work, I didn’t run for fun: all my excuses were brushed aside.  The nagging persisted. I went to the police station and made a report, but there was nothing they could do apparently “unless he takes action.” Like kill me? I asked. Mostly it was a humiliating exercise.

    Later, after moving to a safer part of town, I found out that he had a reputation as a stalker and convicted felon, but the landlord evicted him for not paying the rent.

     There are other stories, some harrowing, others just weird. One creep bored his eyes into me at a town park while I hung out and read my book of short stories. When I had enough and started to walk away, he asked if I would like some cookies, as if I were a child in a bad kidnapping movie. They were in his car. Would I come with him?

    No, thanks.

    Perhaps it’s common, universal even, to be female and feel hunted. If we’re lucky enough to escape, some of us learn at a young age to shrug it off. We learn the gestures of self-contraction, a polite smile to temper the rising anger of a male colleague or a deranged stranger. We learn ironic remove, as if each aggression is in the past, not a present or ever-lurking threat. We learn to keep car keys in one hand, cell phone in the other. Or we shrink ourselves or approximate the passive state of death like little Bambis on the street. All of it feels like self-betrayal, but in some cases, maybe it’s what keeps us alive.

    Or we get mad. We grow spines or quills. Our patron saint becomes the porcupine with her extravagance of exclamation-pointed quills springing from her body. She’s primed to whack any threat, owl or coyote or fox, that gets too close.  Quills are designed to vex assailants; they have tiny backwards-facing barbs that can sink deeper and deeper into flesh, causing infection. Despite their weapons, porcupines don’t shoot their quills, as some might think. No, porcupines keep to themselves unless threatened, sloughing off their quills and injecting them into a predator.

    I have a couple of quills that I wear as earrings, poking them through my ear lobes. They are among my favorites, tokens of self-protection and defense. Do they send a message? I hope so. I wear them with black, all black.

    Some women cherish the thorns of a rose rather than the bloom or find ways to integrate both. There’s nothing frivolous in a rose, it’s true, but I prefer the thorns. “Your thorns are the best part of you,” Marianne Moore quips in her poem “Roses Only.”  Moore, athletic in her rhetorical gymnastics, her arch humor, her portrayals of others precise as arrows.

     Has there ever been a more understated line as Moore’s truism in her poem “Marriage:” “…men have power/ and sometimes one is made to feel it”?  Restraint is less impressive, I suppose, than it once was.  People these days are less thrilled by the subtle power of a poetic diss.

   As for me, the creative insult is a fine weapon with all of its pocketknife uses. I like its concealed power: the way it can be whipped out to cut or jab, strike or hook, or even deflect a wolf whistle or ass grab.  Extravagant cursing can be effective; but in other cases, the ones that really kill me, a self-effacing joke can assuage the ego long enough to make a getaway. The right distraction can prevail over an enemy attack.

     I’ve taken a few lessons from piping plovers, adorable shorebirds camouflaged in the shades of beach sand and rocks.  Tiny and discreet creatures, they also make excellent parents.  They pull out the old “broken wing display” when a predator approaches a nest.  If a coyote finds a nest in the sand, for example, piping plover parents will fan their tails and drag their wings like they are suffering from an injury. They flutter pathetically about, seemingly too weak to fly.  The idea is to get the coyote to follow until they are far enough away from the nest that they forget about its pile of eggs, giving the parents time to fly away, unharmed. Such an elegant trick— astonishing, really, in its daring and simplicity.

     How many times have I faked stomachaches and headaches, even period cramps, to get out of uncomfortable situations with men?  Or used a light air or humor to deflect a tense situation with somebody whose anger is on the verge of becoming violent or whose body suddenly traps me into a corner?

     I feel weird about the way these deflections have become reflexive over time. They spawn self-doubt: am I overreacting? Am I reading the situation correctly?  Did I have to contract myself, my voice, my frustration, just to tamp down his rage? What’s worse: sexual assault or reflexive self-erasure? Dodge a predator and live another day, but the costs accumulate in the body.

   I suppose this is a human problem, to question one’s defensive approaches.  Does the screech owl resent her bark-like camouflage? What about those creatures who mimic other species to seem more fearsome? Some katydids have learned to fly in the manner of wasps and through emulation of the stinging creatures, they have avoided consumption by a predator.  Do chameleons rue their various green-blue shades and permanent side-eye? But why should they?  They are poker-faced artists of stealth and disguise. They have crypsis on their sides, meaning the color, shape or behavior that an animal might use to avoid a predator’s detection. It’s not a bad strategy.

    Bitterns, with their long necks streaked with umber and burnt sienna, hold themselves perfectly still in reedbeds, becoming one with their habitats.

    Pygmy seahorses, a miniaturist’s dream, live off a kind of coral called a sea fan, their bodies so small that they dissolve into the background. They live like ghosts, unseen except for the marine biologists who study them.

    Decorator crabs don their shell with any material close at hand: detritus, plastic waste, sand and muck from the ocean floor. They do what they must. They salvage others, shrink themselves into a squint of a being, mimic the colors of the world around them, become landscape.

      Some become bigger. The snake mimic caterpillar can make herself larger, expanding her body to resemble a snake, inflating her tail, which happens to be a dead ringer for a snake head, and lunging at passerby as if striking. I admire that foolproof mimicry, the ability to masquerade as a creature fiercer than herself. She lives in dense jungle, in places like Mexico, Costa Rica, and Central America, and can become truly frightening at close range even though her body length is only about an inch.

    How many of us, women, queer folk, marginalized peoples, and prey creatures, traffic in illusions to survive?  I don’t think it’s a form of cowering; it’s just survival, a way to tip the odds in one’s favor for a few precious moments until we make our escape or the predator loses interest.

    I’ve been told that I trust people too easily. I don’t know. I’m wary, but I don’t want to be a pangolin, self-retraction and armor being my chief features.  Don’t get me wrong: a pangolin, with her keratin scales and tendency to curl up into a little retractable ball, is maybe the most gorgeously intricate shield on earth. My shields— a decent vocabulary, a tendency to collect secrets, a gift for knowing when to shut up at the right moment—have probably saved me more than a few times.  I know when and how to melt into a landscape. How to morph into tree bark. How to shift my eyes away at the right moment. How to become anonymous as a cicada.  As common as a fly.

     I feel vindicated knowing that animals, like us, are always navigating the marshy realms of trust. And a prey animal’s faculties and defense mechanisms are various and artful, hardly naïve, but they can be costly, causing reduced growth, stress, compromised fitness. I’m talking impaired functioning, flight behaviors run amuck, physiological arousal that hardly dissipates, anxiety disorders, aberrant responses to perceived threats. 

       Persistent and stabilizing for me has always been the herd scene. Herds provide a secure layer of protection to the individual.  When wolves approach, muskoxen face the threat together.  Babies will huddle close to their mothers, hugged inside a tight circle of adult oxen, all of whom face outwards, prepared to take on any pack animal that tries to penetrate their defensive shield.

     Sisterhood, at its best, can look like this. More than once my friends have supported me at sketchy bar scenes.  They were with me in the takedown of the lurid-eyed guy at one bar who kept calling me doll face. They were with me at karaoke nights and stood in as my backup, camouflaging my fuck-ups with ironic vocalizing when I galloped through a song, forgetting how it went. They were my allies when we took back the night against my skeevy landlord with his frequent and impromptu chit chats at my back door. They’ve been my conspirators in all matters of justice and plus-one functions. They were by my side with their eyeballs rolling when our boss went corporate and commenced another meeting in the hues of Dark Accent III custom color palette on his PowerPoint presentation that meticulously graphed our collective failures. Sisterhood has been my support through nausea-inducing alpha male matches. Sisterhood has been my ballast and buoy for all the times I’ve been grabbed, shaken or squeezed without my consent.

     I remember one summer a few years back when an obscenely muscled guy tried to pick me up at a gay bar. When I told him—surprise!— that I am in fact gay, he flipped, as if I were lying or intentionally being rude just to avoid him.  So what if I was?

   “No, you’re not gay,” he decided to inform me, an air of irritation coming off him like a toxic chemical.

    “I am. Truly.”

    “No, you’re not. Stop it.”

     I could feel my quills puffing up on my back, all across my body. I tried to walk away, but he grabbed me. My mind bucked against him.

     “Let go!”

     When my quills unlatched themselves from my body, sinking into his hands, I felt the pressure burst. I took my cocktail back to a table where my friends sat, waiting for me. Herds provide a second layer of protection. We turned our back to him, conscientiously draining our cocktails, laughing and laughing at his dumb force.