Rivalry

The larger of the two eaglets wakes from a nap and pecks at the smaller one. The smaller eaglet turns away and makes itself still. I worry if it will survive. It’s already learning to keep its head down. I close the browser window. If it’s about to be killed by its older sibling, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know.

Funny, I spend all this time drawing symbols of death (the skellies), but I can’t face it when it’s right in front of me. When the nature programs on pbs show the cheetah chasing down a deer, I automatically reach for the clicker. It doesn’t bother me to see it being eaten because then it’s just meat. It’s the struggle that I can’t bear to watch. The triumph of one over the other.

Maybe it’s because I empathize so much with the helpless. One of my earliest memories is  seeing snarling faces in a piece of furniture just visible in the light beyond my bedroom door and being frozen by fear. If the bed had been on fire, I couldn’t have escaped then, couldn’t have gotten past the wolves in the hallway.

I can’t watch an eaglet being pecked to death or pushed out of the nest because it feels so personal to me. I’ve been scared to death. I can’t be an impartial observer.

My sister says it’s because space is an issue. If there’s enough space in the nest, they won’t turn on each other. This makes sense to me. We were raised in a pretty big house, and still there were plenty of times when I wanted to kill someone. All that vanished once I’d left home. I wasn’t competing for resources then.

I hope the smaller eaglet survives, but I know it’s not up to me. I’ll keep watching and drawing because I want to do it, want to have a series of eagle paintings. But this is hard. You always hope for a Disney ending. But life isn’t fair and sometimes the eaglet dies.