Little Murders

 This is the season in Vermont when the wildlife assaults the barricades. The wolf spiders scuttle in from the garage and drink out of the dog water dish. The field mice squeeze through the tiny crack where the heating pipe enters the wall, hoping for a spot by the fire and a regular supply of crumbs. And it’s the season when, every evening, the gray cat Telemann goes on the hunt. 

In the morning I find the shrunken remains of a spider or two, its legs curled inward like fingers in a fist. I shudder as I walk by, thinking, if it’s the size of a penny in its contracted state, how appallingly huge it must have been while it was alive. And I am grateful to my hunter for keeping us spider free. 

But the field mice are a different story. If spiders rank at the bottom of the adorableness scale, field mice are at the top, with their furry little bodies, tiny paws, big ears, and shiny black eyes. Beatrix Potter used to keep them as pets, and so would I if I could litter train them. And if I didn’t have Telemann. 

Telemann doesn’t care about the adorableness of field mice. He views them not only as food, but as superior entertainment. If watching squirrels through the window is tantamount to watching tennis on TV, catching a live mouse must feel like playing an actual match. 

I don’t begrudge Telemann his mice. We really cannot have them in the house, and he saves us the distressing job of trapping them. It’s what happens between the catching and the eating that I cannot bear--the seemingly frivolous, sadistic batting and stalking and pawing for what looks like the sheer pleasure of prolonging the little creature’s agony. 

Or at least that’s what I thought until two minutes ago, when I googled “why do cats play with their prey.” And it turns out that they’re not playing at all! They are trying to exhaust their prey, before delivering the killing bite to the back of the neck, in order to protect themselves from being bitten or, if the victim is a bird, pecked. Cats have a short muzzle, and big vulnerable eyes, and a rodent in desperate straits can inflict serious damage. So the batting and pawing have a purpose, and Telemann, after all, is not a sadist. Whew! 

Not only that, he is a thrifty, respectful hunter. He eats every speck of his mice, leaving not so much as a tuft of velvety fur for me to find. For all I know, he bows and gives thanks to the Mouse God before settling down to his meal. 

When he’s done, he licks his perfect white teeth with his perfect pink tongue and, tail high, strides victorious and immaculate to where I’m reclining with my book. He jumps on my chest, right between the book and my face, butts my nose with his forehead (why?), turns around three times, and settles purring and blinking on my sternum to digest his mouse.

 

Haying Season

This endlessly rainy summer, we had started to worry that our fields were turning into woodland before our very eyes. The goldenrod was shoulder-high, the queen anne's lace luxuriant, the grass so tall that it was a chore to walk through it. But we're having a week of cool, sunny weather, and the farmer who hays for us, or one of his minions, came over in a big tractor with an enclosed cab, dragging a mower the size of a Cadillac, and in one morning the grass was cut and drying in the sun.

I was glad to see the job done, but the Robert Burns poem “To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough” kept running through my head. You remember how it goes,

“Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,

Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie!”

I figured that most of the birthing and nesting and nursing was done for the year, but still, there must have been many a panicked breastie as the tractor dealt death across our land.

Gone are the days when a farmer-poet could stop and apologize to a mouse for disturbing her nest. Though I am not a contemporary of Burns, I can remember in Spain mowing being done with scythes, lines of men advancing slowly across a field, swinging their blades. It was graceful, it was quiet except for the swishing of the scythes, and it gave the field-dwelling creatures plenty of time to get away.

Not so on our meadows. When the clattering machinery left for the day, the vultures arrived—six, seven of them, calm and stately--and alighted in the middle of the big field. Something must have died there, because they spent quite a while on the spot. That evening I took Wolfie out to the general area, and he sniffed around but didn't find anything. The vultures had done their work.

The next day the tractor came back, dragging a different machine to bale the hay into big, squat cylinders. Now our formerly disheveled fields look like their hair's been put up in rollers. It is all very civilized, and beautiful in its way. Our grandchildren will look back with nostalgia on this method of haying, back in the good old days, when there were still vultures.

Recycling

Every fall, armies of mice invade people's basements in Vermont. These are not the rat-like city mice, but adorable little country mice with big ears, bright little eyes set wide apart and tiny round bodies—so cute you want to make pets of them. (That, by the way, is what Beatrix Potter did—she tamed them and they ran around in her bedroom while she painted them.)

Mice in the basement don't really bother me. Mice in the house are another story. Yesterday, on the kitchen counter, I found some minute specks that I thought might be caraway seeds—except that they were too small for caraway seeds, and I don't think I have any caraway in the spice rack. So I alerted the official pest management expert, and he duly set a trap.

Which worked. This morning the OPME considerately emptied the trap before I got up, and hid the contents in an empty yogurt box before taking them to the chickens.

Yes, the chickens. You don't think we'd waste a mouse, do you? A lovely bit of fresh organic protein in the middle of this barren season would cheer the hens no end. I was filling the chickens' water dish when the OPME came in with the yogurt box. He opened it, dumped out the little cadaver...I won't describe the scene, but will refer you instead to the Old Testament, to the part where Jezebel is thrown to the dogs.

We've fed our chickens other kinds of exotic protein in the past. Back when we used a Japanese Beetle trap (we don't anymore, because they attract more bugs than they catch), we would empty it into a bucket of hot water, swish the beetles around and throw them on the compost pile. The hens would congregate around the bugs like party guests around the shrimp platter, and gorge until not a single one was left.

Tonight we're having spinach omelette for dinner (homegrown spinach, ditto eggs). When I crack open those pinky-brown eggs, I will remember the mouse, which, through the miracle of the hen, has been transubstantiated from pest to protein, and I will give thanks.

The Snake, The Egg, And I

My chicken coop is a haven of peace and contentment, and gathering eggs is my favorite job. The sun streams through the dusty window, a couple of hens walk around debating what to do next—scratch some litter, lay an egg? Chatting to them in a friendly tone, I reach into the nests, retrieve the morning's harvest and place it in my basket.

But one day I walked into the coop and found, sitting on a clutch of rosy-brown eggs, not a hen, but a snake. This was no pencil-thin garter snake, but a full-grown black snake, sleek and shiny and as big around as a pitchfork handle. She was draped over the clutch like a skein, and she had an egg in her mouth. To get the egg into her mouth she had had to dislocate her jaw (snakes are able to do this when they want to eat something really big), and there she sat, her tiny head barely visible around the huge egg, staring at me and trying hard to swallow.

I am not particularly brave, but when I saw that snake helping herself to my eggs, I was outraged. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the spaghetti tongs. Back in the coop I grasped the snake behind her head with the tongs and pried the egg from her jaws with my other hand. Then I carried her to the woods behind the coop, where she disappeared without a sound. I took the eggs to the house, put them in the fridge, and trembled a little.

Next morning, the snake was back on the nest.

This time she had managed to swallow an egg, and I could see its shape just behind her head, starting its slow descent down her body. The nerve! I exclaimed. I didn't run for the tongs, but grabbed the snake with my bare hand and took off for the woods. I put her down firmly and told her not to come back.

But she did, and when I found her on the nest again I took hold of her and hurled her as hard as I could into the woods. And that time she stayed away.

A day later, the mice arrived. At first there was only one, an adorable little field mouse straight out of Beatrix Potter, all ears and shiny eyes, watching me as I refilled the hens' feeder. The next day there were two, scurrying along the top of a hay bale. The third day—I could smell them as soon as I entered the coop--there were mice everywhere, running on the windowsill, scrabbling on the floor, leaving droppings on everything.


What, I wondered, was behind this plague? It took me a while to put two and two together, but I eventually figured out that the mice had moved in because the snake had moved out. In my ignorance, I had chased away the heaven-sent, poison-free, ecologically sound solution to my mouse problem, and the mice knew it.

Too late I repented my callous treatment of my friend, the black snake. She stayed away a long time, and during that period I fought the mice with traps and poison and verbal abuse, and lost.

But next spring the dog found a dried-out snake skin of impressive length under a bush. A couple of days later, the mice took off. And once again I found the snake in the nest, looking groomed and shiny in her brand-new skin.

This time I welcomed her. So what if some mornings she's draped over the eggs like a broody hen? I chat to her softly and she lets me push aside her coils, occasionally darting her tongue at me, the way a hen will make pecking motions when you get the eggs out from under her.

The snake and I have made peace with each other, and she makes herself at home in my corner of paradise. And isn't that what the real Paradise was all about--creatures living in harmony with each other, and humans knowing enough to let Nature take her course?