Barefoot-Hearted: A Wild Life among Wildlife

1 Twisted into Corkscrews Living on This Earth Is No Simple Matter In setting up housekeeping in our new domicile, we became the first of the species Homo sapiens to nest-build and vie for domain under the broad gambrel roof. During the long-light days of summer, we'd made acquaintance with the extended marmot family. As nights chilled down and they took seriously to hibernation, another species lobbied for top contender of our space. Had someone asked me, before we moved into the barn, to sit down and ponder the worldwide parade of wildlife that humans have displaced, I'd have listed grizzly bears and wolves, caribou and turtles, coyotes perhaps, whales and manatees, certainly all the spectacular African beasts, and a broad range of brilliantly graceful waterfowl. Never mice! In the perennial trigger-finger and backhoe desiccation wrought on the world by humans, some species fare better than others. Some are the fortunate ones, the ones we take to passionately with preservation in mind (albeit, frequently after they're almost gone). Pandas we love. Snakes, skunks, slugs, grubs, micethough equally sentient beings in the eyes of any great spirit, are to most of us two-leggeds not so cuddly. In our first years in the barn, we were overrun with deer mice. We caught them with traps, old-fashioned ones we bought at the hardware store, Victor brand, two for $1.25. The war was on. Miniature massacres took place daily, and the traps required attention. Without pang of conscience, I went about my tasks, never once thinking that in staking out a place to live I shouldn't just clear away whatever critters were distasteful to me. Extirpation full ahead: I'd been taught well by my lineage. Here in the northern New World, such behavioral characteristics are traceable directly to my own muttlike bloodlines: Irish, English, French, and Germanic peoples, a smidgen of Dutch, and then the hearty Scottish clan, descendedmy mother once read, to her horrorfrom cannibals. These were the folks in the westward claiming and taming of America who had seized every spot that was to their liking, appropriated unbidden rights to mow down all irritants standing in their way. Pomposity. I was, it appeared, a further shining example. I found it amazing that we required no cheese for the traps; it took only a bit of fibrous material, invariably a scrap of shredded yarn, brushed with a hint of peanut butter, to snag their teeth. Tucking the lure into the curve of the bait pedal, I set each spring-loaded mechanism, oh so carefully, so as not to trigger a sudden mashing of my thumb. I performed my half of the baiting and disposal chores dutifullyshirking only when it wasn't too obvious. Patrick's balanced outlook on male and female workloads, careers, opportunities was, upon our meeting, part of his great appeal. His unique "equal-everything-equal" philosophy, so suited to my own, most likely harkened back to 1975 when NOW, the National Organization for Women, started chipping away at the traditional family foundations in his hometown in Michigan. A friend corralled him into "filling up a chair" at the initial get-together. When the evening closed on Chippewa County's new chapter of NOW, it was Patrick who was its secretary. What woman doesn't love the man who will do, if not quite half the cooking, then more than half the dishes! Wash his own clothes! Sew on his own buttons! Yet, naturally, the female counterpart must pull back from throwing over her own set of philosophies just because an instance turns fustyjust because Patrick's current "Your turn today!" applied to grim mice chores. To my emptying the traps. I now admit I fell disgracefully short of the mark. But my probable 30 percent felt, at the time, liMeyer, Kathleen is the author of 'Barefoot-Hearted: A Wild Life among Wildlife' with ISBN 9780375504389 and ISBN 0375504389.