Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Dillard continues her journey down the Napo River. At a village called Providencia, Dillard and her three North American traveling companions encounter a deer with three of its legs caught in rope in a clearing. The nearby villagers, who intend to eat the deer for supper, go about their normal routines, for the most part ignoring the struggling deer. Dillard and her traveling companions, along with some of the village boys, form a circle around the deer to watch it. The deer fights against the rope but only ends up injuring itself, an extended process that Dillard observes: “Then, after I would think, ‘It has given up; now it will die,’ it would heave” (79). Three young boys try to free the deer, but in its haste to escape, it becomes ensnared again, “like Brer Rabbit and the Tar baby” (80).

Dillard and her companions proceed to lunch, where they eat battered fish, roe, and a stew made of deer killed the previous day. Dillard enjoys the lunch, despite the deer dying nearby. That night around the campfire, Dillard’s companions—all men—marvel at her stoicism in the face of the deer’s suffering: “I had looked detached, apparently, or hard, or calm, or focused, still” (82). One of the men describes how his wife wouldn’t be able to watch any creature suffer that way. Back at home, Dillard looks at a newspaper clipping of a man named Alan McDonald, who received severe burns as a child, then underwent several years of reconstructive surgery, only to be severely burned a second time as an adult. Moved by the story, Dillard writes to McDonald and re-reads his story every morning. She wonders who will “explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity, to the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on?” (86). Dillard recalls that as she passed by the suffering deer, she called it “‘Pobrecito’—‘poor little thing’” (86), though she knows she doesn’t truly mean it.