Assassins

Once in the sun-fierce badlands of the west

in that strange country of volcanic ash and cones,

runneled by rains, cut into purgatorial shapes,

where nothing grows, no seeds spring, no beast moves,

we found a sabertooth, most ancient cat,

far down in all those cellars of dead time.

What was it made the mystery there? We dug

until the full length of the striking saber showed

beautiful as Toledo steel, the fine serrations still

present along the blade, a masterpiece of murderous art conceived

by those same forces that heaved mountains up

from the flat bottoms of Cretaceous seas.

Attentive in a little silent group we squatted there.

This was no ordinary death, though forty million years

lay between us and that most gaping snarl.

Deep-driven to the root of a fractured scapula

hung on the mighty saber undetached; two beasts

had died in mortal combat, for the bone

had never been released; there was no chance

this cat had ever used its fangs again or eaten -

died there, in short, though others of its kind

grew larger, larger, suddenly were gone

while the great darkness went about its task. . .

There were the great teeth snarling in the clay, the bony crests

that had once held the muscles for this deed,

perfect as yesterday.

I looked a little while, admiring how

that marvelous weapon had been so designed

in unknown darkness, where the genes create

as if they planned it so.

I wondered why

such perfect fury had been swept away, while man,

wide-roaming dark assassins of its kind,

had sprung up in the wake

of such perfected instruments as these.

They lived long eras out, while we

in all this newborn world of our own violence show

uncertainties, and hopes unfostered when

the cat's sheer leap wrenched with his killing skill

his very self from life.

On these lost hills that mark the rise of brain,

I weep perversely for the beauty gone.

I weep for man who knows this antique trade

but is not guiltless,

is not born with fangs,

has doubts,

suppresses them as though he knew

nature had other thoughts, inchoate, dim,

but that the grandeur of great cats attracted him -

envy, perhaps, by a weak creature forced to borrow

tools from the earth, growing, in them, most cunning

upon an outworn path.

- Loren Eiseley, The Innocent Assassins, (1973)