A
weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his
tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without
leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more
bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to
instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at
the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let
go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand
deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and
he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and
soak him off like a stubborn label.
And
once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He
examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his
throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the
weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won.
I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before
he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur
pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel
with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful
airborne bones?
I
have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a
weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Twenty
minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway,
is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at
sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it
covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and
six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle
of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like
miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers
are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal
plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to
black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This
is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of
houses, though none is visible here. There's a 55-mph highway at one end of the
pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a
muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and
woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose
bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
So,
I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced
the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of
the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the
woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a
dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty
raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep
blue body of sky.
The
sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of
lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the
thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind
me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I
was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel!
I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a
muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce,
small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was
just a dot of chin; maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur
began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any
more than you see a window.
The
weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous
shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted
backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the
key.
Our
look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown
path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut.
It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all
the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It
felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled
and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other
that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We
keep our skulls. So.
He
disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what
shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from
the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel
felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the
urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited
motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he
didn't return.
Please
do not tell me about "approach-avoidance conflicts." I tell you I've
been in that weasel's brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are
private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes-but the weasel and I
both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time.
Can I help it if it was a blank?
What
goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He
won't say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and
bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown.
I
would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so
much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't
think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I suck
warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the
prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of
the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without
bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating
necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as
I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way
is like the weasels: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything,
remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
I
missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for
that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud
and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild
rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I
could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird
bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of
grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out
of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness
as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance
received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly,
like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way?
Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth
mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as
unchallenged, as falling snow?
We
could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your
calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live
spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't
"attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every
moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I
think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one
necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then
even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize
it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let
your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and
scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless,
from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
No comments:
Post a Comment