Maybe you have never experienced voles. But some creature has disrupted your domain: rabbit, mole, pack rat, Russian boar. Maybe a gopher has decided to feast on your young cherry tree. You try to steer the invisible menace away from the tree by lighting gas bombs. When that fails, you flood its tunnels. Next morning, you find more tunnels and realize the gopher is moving faster because damp clay facilitates digging. You fill the tunnels with disincentives: coffee grounds, mothballs, urine, a Macabee trap. Terrible idea.
For days afterward, you find mothballs pitched out of the burrow, and now your throat stings when you work. Using a spade, your thumb, and the two fingers of your right hand that the Macabee didn’t crush, you tear open all the tunnels you can find. The gopher digs deeper. While you sleep, it railroads on, eating away roots and leaving piles of soft dirt and coffee grounds increasingly closer to the bole of the baby tree that depends on you for its care—the only cherry tree on that acre. After you (and a mammoth amount of your time and money) have chased the gopher around the tree for three weeks, you find the tree tilted over in the wind. You lift the seven-foot tree—no longer tethered by lateral roots—into the air and see that it terminates in a finely chiseled point. Your tree is dead; the gopher is not. The fat, healthy gopher is down in its nursing den giving birth to a bevy of bucktoothed uglies. Before you chop the cherry tree into the world’s most expensive mulch, you bring out the strychnine.
Really?
Strychnine?
Because that, my friend, is a revenge killing, and I won’t do it, no matter the animal. I have been there with that gopher. As you read this, I am probably still here with the uglies or their descendants.
Land stewardship, especially in harsh country, is hugely difficult, and more so if you are the kind of person who feels compelled to kill tiny rodents simply for spite. That’s why I hesitated to level Vole Forest. I needed something more honorable than revenge to motivate me.
Advancing across my land, Vole Forest was sucking water and spreading shade. Sun-loving plants—round cactuses no bigger than golf-balls, thick-leaved yellow violets, circular mats of purple pea, and rare fuchsia bitterroot—were withering in the weeds. I especially loved the ball cactus. In another month, those that had escaped the hegemony of Vole Forest would sprout a crown of pink recurved petals. On days when I worried over a pile of applications for university jobs that I didn’t want but should have been applying for anyway, I remembered I owned land in a high-altitude desert where tiny five-headed ball cactuses bloomed in the shadow of snow-capped mountains, and I stopped worrying.
And so, I found a reason to level Vole Forest—fighting on behalf of my sun-worshipping tenants.
The fox dug the fingernails of his forepaw into the dirt and pulled his head up and over until his chin crossed his wrist. The person from the house was spinning around, swinging long metal objects, and shouting at the air. Her long and flexible fingers were curling and stretching in too many places at once. Like a woodpecker drilling sap holes in smooth-barked willow, she jerked her hands rapidly, but without any discernable pattern. Even ant-sucking flickers drilled in only one direction. The fox swatted two grasshoppers coupling and pressed them into the dirt until he felt their wet innards. Her hands reminded him of a hurricane, his least favorite weather event. So much energy, so little purpose. But, maybe, if entrained, so many possibilities.
Lifting the ball of his paw off the now-still grasshopper pair, he impaled them with one fingernail. She waved arms, fingers, and implements; he munched on grasshoppers. Clanging and booming tools reminded him of a windstorm’s harsh, unpredictable noise. Her grunts and puffs merged to a cacophony. Debris rained on him, and he shut his eyes tight. Pulling his tail across his nose, he waited for the cloud of dirt to settle. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.
A slight opening, quite possibly illusory, appeared in the knotted shrubs where she had spent the entire afternoon. Somewhere within the mess, voles were taunting him. The thorny weeds would blind, slash, or impale anyone foolish enough to try and jump through them. He wasn’t in the mood for a hard landing. He sunk his head below his shoulders, poking his snout forward into a clearing barely wide enough to fit his shoulders. Deer could have eaten the entire thicket into a field in the time that had passed that very afternoon. They could, but they wouldn’t. Deer never licked a slobber on that type of weed.
He was still considering the incommodious nature of deer when Hurricane Hands returned with more equipment and the battle between person and plant recommenced. He enjoyed the animation, all the twisting, pulling, and throwing; less so the banging, clanging, and shouting. When she finally retreated into the house, daylight was disappearing and the weedy thicket looked unchanged.
On more than one occasion, Tennis Ball, who always seemed irritated—the morning’s yolks were late, or sparse, or poorly presented—abandoned a nest-patching work party a quarter mile uphill to return and berate me. Magpies weren’t always so antagonistic. Thomas Nuttall, author of America’s first field guide to birds, and for whom John Audubon named the West Coast magpie—Pica nuttalli—writes about watching children from America’s first nations feeding and domesticating the birds. Nuttall was traveling along the Snake River in the 1800s. Shoshone country. He was a hundred miles from here when he observed native children with tamed magpies. The camaraderie between birds and boys surprised him. In Europe at that time, magpies were “proscribed and persecuted.” If they saw people, they attacked. If they saw lots of people, they fled. Abundant anecdotal and experimental evidence tells us that magpies, along with their close relatives—crows, ravens, and jays—are among the animal kingdom’s most intelligent members. Like people, if you persecute them, you can expect them to act persecuted.
Black and shiny as a mirage, Tennis Ball slipped onto Gin’s farthest overhanging branch. I was cleaving weeds with my hunting saw. She raised her tail, squirting uric acid in my direction. Frankly, were it not for its bloodstained shaft and dull edges sticky with pieces of venison, my saw could have masqueraded as a pruning saw. Either way, you simply cannot work efficiently with gimpy tools and birds squawking. I needed a mattock. A week into the project, I had razed only a fraction of Vole Forest. Groveling in dirt left me with ant bites that swelled for hours. On windy afternoons, ticks stuck to me like I was wet tar. On calm afternoons, black flies covered me so fast I felt like a carcass. Crested wheatgrass, another invasive European weed, grasped the clay soil with a million fibrous roots that would not yield even to a good spade. I was working with a broken spade. I might as well have tried to dig the weeds from a cement block using a toothpick. I lowered my expectations. What had begun as a logging project would finish as a thinning project. Besides, I didn’t own a mattock.
The fox poked his head out from under his patio’s juniper-branch awnings and inhaled. Roots from the big juniper reached deep into the ground, shaping his den into three main cubbies. Stretching his neck, he felt the warm pull of muscles. He stretched further and shivered. The morning air felt bad and looked worse. A fuzzy gray mound had replaced the blue-roofed house. Clouds would soon be sitting on his head.
Weather notwithstanding, an elk-scavenging project was waiting across the dry channel in the knee-high grasses below Round Hill. He circled the elk carcass, confirming that no one had trespassed overnight. Someone tugged on his tail. Weasel pee! In a flash, he was back in the den.
He crouched around the central root post, scanning the den’s three main chambers. Light entered two of them from the tunneled doorways; the third, farther into the hill, remained dark. It was rock-free, cool, dry, and safe. And still, it was no place for a grown fox with four good legs to spend the day.
The tail tugger turned out to be a knee-high blade of opuntia, now waving a clump of his long white hairs. Light drizzle left the hair clinging like an old seed head on the unrepentant cactus. He laid his chin along the melting snow and hissed. Pulling his lips back and planting a leg on either side of the
cactus, he hissed again. All winter, snow leveled the ground, filling holes and covering cactuses. Now the snow was melting and leaving behind slick mud and fur-thieving opuntia. They were just more weeds in his path. Sulking, however justifiable, was not part of the day’s plan. An elk carcass was waiting.
Pulling on the mired elk femur with his teeth produced results that a less optimistic fox would have considered hopeless. Gnawing through the joint attaching the femur to the pelvic bone freed his trophy, and digging into the moist ground loosened it. Yanking with his teeth, he edged his long bone homeward.
Midmorning the following day, spying on Hurricane Hands. When he left for home, he found that the best way to avoid sun blindness required crossing a shallow basin that was filling up with deer. Fawns blemished with disorganized spots on their flanks pushed their faces under their mother’s bellies. Cows wriggled, and the cowbirds picking ticks off their backs stretched their wings to regain balance. The deer stayed in the basin for the same reason they’d originally entered it: it dipped. They had simply slumped into it. Deer often slumped, a movement like falling, but slower and less dramatic. Nature was not infinitely flexible, and deer were no more likely to slump upward than to fall upward. Getting out from the shallow basin required exerting energy, which the deer clearly lacked or they would not have slumped into an uninspiring depression in the first place. Compounding the conundrum, the relatively small depression could accommodate only a few deer, and a long line of them waited to slump in. A deer jam. Off plan! The next best route wove around sandy hills. They were bare and smelled like cat pee. Undaunted but circumspect, he skipped between the mounds. A cat stepped out from under a pile of logs, swinging a wide head on a short, fat neck.
Detouring around the cat left him on open grassland with a shadow passing overhead. After moving upslope and disappearing, the shadow returned, blocking the sun in a series of passes. The shadow-caster was a dark eagle. It could grasp his entire head in one foot; a single eagle leg was wider than his neck. Common at carcass feeds, dark eagles specialized in disemboweling deer, often in gratuitously creative ways. And they were moody. Some eagles would happily rip your throat if you got too near their carcass. Others would do so less happily. Some eagles didn’t care if there was a carcass nearby; if they felt like ripping up a fox, they ripped. Every eagle had its own personality. Trying to analyze them could get complicated. And why bother? Every eagle had its own mood—all of them bad.
Bluebirds ruffling up a juniper tree above the meadow were favoring the branch tips while they chattered. The birds’ behavior was a good sign that the eagle whose shadow kept passing overhead was not hunting. Not yet. Running and interpreting birdcalls simultaneously, he reached the den in good time. It was quiet and undisturbed, except for fresh bird poop on top of the main boulder. A task for another day or another fox.
Stretching out on his belly, he sunbathed in the den meadow below a crumbling cliff. Above that cliff, another meadow and another crumbling cliff. Mountain lions—shorthaired cats as big as elk—prowled both cliffs. Most foxes kept their noses to the wind to sniff out lions. He knew better. The safest way to sunbathe was to let wind blow your back hairs up against the grain. And listen. If rocks trickled down the cliff in synchrony with the wind, all was well. When rocks trickled in the still air, it was time to dash into an abandoned badger hole.
The next day, deer droppings coated the lone switchback on the shady route to Hurricane Hands and the blue-roofed house. A procession of female deer filed down the trail, each one sliding on fresh pellets that were simultaneously ejecting from the preceding animal’s anus. Deer were grass eaters, a characteristic that freed them from the responsibility of overanalyzing their surroundings. One doe skidded onto the gravelly bank. Another who had skidded earlier was rolling up from her backside. No wonder so many deer were limping. And the rain was only just starting.
The long-trunked sagebrush that provided cover from the rain was close to the house. But it was a noisy spot, near the round-bellied magpie’s nest. Stuck on brood duty, waiting for her long-tailed mate to bring food, she was squawking loudly. Between the sagebrush and the house, deer were chomping up and spitting out waxy leaves from a pungent shrub. Of course, an abandoned badger hole offered him a quieter refuge, but clouds and rain had shrunk the world so much already, there was no need to make it even smaller by hunkering inside a dark hole. Besides, the sagebrush offered a view of Hurricane Hands staring out the window.
After the rain stopped, after every drop had fallen from the sagebrush, after the sun pushed off the clouds, Hurricane Hands was still inside. No animal worked a shorter shift. When he had waited long enough for her to come outside, and because he tolerated boredom poorly, he went looking for a place to expend some saved-up energy.
That evening, on the way home, he stepped over piles of mushed-up shrub. No doubt the same deer that had regurgitated the sticky leaves that morning had returned to eat and spit up more leaves. The deer would eat from the same plant tomorrow, and the next day, and every day until autumn. And every day after spitting the leaves out, they would turn their long jaws this way and that and look at each other in astonishment, as if to ask, Who knew they tasted so bad?
Waking to the sound of rain waves pummeling a steel roof is unnerving. Unless, like me, you are jaded from living with packs of roof-thumping magpies. And the storm looked worse than it sounded. I pressed my nose and open palms up against the window: oobleck.
Dr. Seuss illustrated his book Bartholomew and the Oobleck using only one color. He probably intended the book as an exploration of man’s relationship to weather, but who can control well-meaning pirates after his or her writing sails into unknown waters? The moral of Seuss’s black, white, and green book is Settle down and don’t fuss with Nature. In the story, a king who is bored with snow and rain and other humdrum weather events commands his magician to conjure up a novel form of precipitation. To remind the king that she controls the sky, Nature responds to his whining by dropping oobleck, a thick, sticky substance that neither melts nor evaporates. Realizing that boredom is better than this new stuff, the king recants his demands.
Today I looked out into amorphous gray oobleck with unabated dismay. When I ranged in Mount Rainier’s wilderness, a similar thick mist often blocked the sun, homogenizing sky and ground, but it never dampened my mood. When mist hugged my thighs, I found refuge from the aerial morass by squatting on my heels and searching for tubular maroon flowers hiding under the heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger. Nearby, I would find a spotted banana slug, pull off my polypropylene glove, and depress its rubbery trunk with an index finger. I might have a week without seeing another person, but contact with a slug was all I needed to keep from feeling alone. On rainy days in the lowlands, I hiked under canopies of old growth. On rainy days in the high country, I edged along under white rock overhangs. Of course, if you did not have claustrophobia, you could just as well have stayed inside your tiny, dry cabin and lit the Coleman.
I have never liked being indoors without a view of blue sky during the day. When you hear the word claustrophobia, you probably think about closets, elevators, and public bathroom stalls. I avoid elevators, don’t have a walk-in closet, and often jump out of bathroom stalls before I’ve zipped up my jeans, but I feel especially confined by heavy, low clouds. They unsettle me. Psychologists might label claustrophobia as an “irrational fear” of confined places, but my avoidance does not seem irrational so much as instinctive.
Still, if you were no longer a backcountry ranger but a part-time college professor teaching two ecology classes while at the same time under contract to Chelsea House Publishers to write a middle-grade forestry textbook, you needed to stay inside. Never mind the claustrophobia.
Eventually, the grayness chased me downstairs to a room with fewer windows. Oobleck, omnipresent at 7:00 a.m., seemed immortal by 7:00 p.m. Windows were looking back at me. I counted six hours of work completed in a twelve-hour shift. Trying
to run out the weather by moving between rooms, looking out windows, and staring into the abyss for a glimmer of sun- or moonlight took as much time as grading papers. Before quitting, I returned to the Rainbow Room to discuss clumped and scattered patterns of prey distribution with my online ecology students.
The Rainbow Room, with its inset bathroom, spanned the entire upstairs, thirty feet end to end. Like the Shriner Peak fire lookout tower where I used to work, it was small and surrounded by windows. The contractor had warned me I’d need to wear sunglasses inside. He was right. Because I had the cottage built into a hillside, the Rainbow Room’s backside was level with the ground. Two glass doors led outside, the front to a deck and the other to the back field. Six double windows, two single windows, and two doors left little room for artwork. Still, I had squeezed in photos of Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, and Arches National Parks. A photo of Glacier Park hung from the ceiling. It prevented the smoke detector’s red light from disturbing my sleep. Three enormous Georgia O’Keeffe prints—all abstract flowers—hung on the wall behind my desk.
Bookshelves, photos, and a door-mirror with a rainbow-colored frame filled the remaining wall space. The mirror, which I passed every time I used the bathroom, was decoration; I didn’t do much about hair or makeup. Anyway, I liked my looks—except for the pink puffy tissue ballooning between my upper front teeth. Which I hated. People generally didn’t say anything about the enlarged frenum, and anyway, my high cheekbones always got most of the attention. Yes, they are very high—you can tell I’m smiling when you’re standing behind me. But dentists always asked why my parents had never taken care of the frenum. “This is always taken care of in childhood,” said my current dentist (and the two dentists before him). He’d never seen an adult with a frenum growing to the bottom of the front teeth. Well, neither had I. And I’m pretty sure I’d spent more time looking than he did. The frenum announced that I was not a coddled child. Was I sad about that? Well, the frenum tore and bled if I smiled too big or too fast. Ditto for laughing. And it seemed to be always bleeding. So I guess that’s your answer.
Fox and I Page 6