Opinion: Thousands of Bambis and Flowers and Thumpers, and the fires

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Spare a merciful thought, please, for the wild creatures that have suffered so much in this fire, as in all such disasters. They have no evacuation centers, nowhere to go out of the juggernaut of fire that drives them into the concrete spaces that once were not concrete at all, that once belonged to them and their kind.

As my colleague Louis Sahagun wrote of the scene near Mt. Wilson, the charred bodies of squirrels lay at intervals along the roadside. A state forestry captain and his team came across a bunny with a broken back, and put the poor thing out of his misery. Disney, so protective of its images and copyright, laudably allowed Bambi -- made motherless by a hunter’s bullet and homeless by a wildfire -- to be used in public service TV spot airing and again this week about preventing forest fires.

A friend in the northern part of Los Angeles County reports deer and coyotes showing up, timid and frightened and forlorn, in her garden, forced by fire from their coverts. Someone told me about a black bear in a store parking lot, and I can only hope that locals and rangers understood his fear and did him no harm.

When the fires come, I can never get out of my mind a poem by Robinson Jeffers, the California bard, who wrote this about our dispassionately apocalyptic fires and their innocent, mute victims. Having read it, you may never be able to forget it, either, nor should you. It is called ‘’Fire on the Hills.’’

-- Patt Morrison

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.