poisonous, so the birds learn which ones to stay away from. Some of the prettiest butterflies you see flying around here at Dead Owl Cove are like that."
Later in the summer of the velvet ant, Raff was startled when a red-shouldered hawk flew low over his head carrying a dead field mouse in the talons of one foot. The next week he came upon a water snake swallowing a frog. The lesson he learned was that animals die in nature, and some die in order for others to live.
Raff discovered that when he turned over small rotting logs, he was rewarded with the sight of hundreds of insects and other tiny creatures that hide there. When exposed, some froze in place. Others leapt away or ran off to hide in the surrounding leaf litter. Woodlice, the little crustaceans often called pill bugs, and millipedes, also known as thousand-leggers, rolled themselves into armored spheres. Centipedes, or hundred-leggers, as they are often called, slithered to safety like miniature snakes, halting at the first object that covered their bodies. None of the tiny animals attacked Raff; all were afraid of him.
Raff never succumbed to the "icky factor," by turning away from anything, even the slime-dripping slugs. On the contrary, he never tired of grubbing under logs and other debris like this, over and over. Every excursion yielded something new. He learned that most animals in nature are very small and live underground. He put spiders in jars and watched them spin webs. The most common denizens of the subterranean byways, he noticed, are ants, which come in several sizes and colors. He put some in a jar of soil and watched them dig tunnels.
Nature works, Raphael learned, because it has order, and from order, it has beauty. Little birds sing in the morning. Cicadas shrill in the afternoon, and katydids rasp at night. Crickets come forth at twilight to chirp in the grass. And lantern flies write dots and dashes with their on-and-off luminescent abdomens through the black air of evening, flashing brighter than the stars in a moonless sky. Each creature, Raff came to understand, has a clock. Every passing hour retires some of the players and brings forth others.
In one important sense, Raff's learning process was ordinary. It was also primeval. For two hundred thousand years or more of their prehistory, human beings had to learn a great deal the way Raff did in order to survive. Stone Age parents could speak of what they knew, but they could not leave an enduring written record. Their mathematical prowess was limited to counting, perhaps to "one, two, many"--if that far. Travel beyond the tribal boundary rarely occurred and was undertaken at great risk. Geographic knowledge stopped at a river's edge, a mountain ridge, or strip of gallery forest. Beyond lived people who spoke and dressed differently. They were deceivers, the locals could tell you, and poisoners, and cannibals. They were ruled by demon-gods.
Such ignorance did not extend, however, to the living world. The tribe had to have near-encyclopedic knowledge of all of the important plants and animals within their home range in order to survive. To keep everything straight, hundreds, even thousands of species had to be given names. If an ordinary person could not master all that knowledge, elders and shamans could be called on to serve as the tribe's walking archives.
Although spirits and mythic histories were imputed to many of the plant and animal species, practical information about them remained exact. It was regularly retested by experience. A single fragment of misinformation could result in disaster. Every child knew answers to the kinds of questions never asked a modern child. Where do camouflaged vipers wait for prey? Which of the many kinds of mushrooms are edible, and which are deadly? Where can you find the deep-growing tubers that carry us through in times of drought? And where do you dig for water? Such was the proto-science acquired by children through talk and imitation, and picked up still more by cautious individual exploration on their own.
That was the quality of Raff's Nokobee self-education, which his parents mistook for frivolous child's play. It was enjoyable, and thereby true to the way the brain is constructed. It was ordained by genes to which modern classrooms and textbooks are ill-fitted.
Raff's learning was kinesthetic, by which is meant it employed action that engaged all the senses, and it was channeled by instinct. As Uncle Fred Norville, his mentor, I could ask him, What is the