Of Mice And Men, Part I: The Protagonist

Though Montana is the setting for rivers that run through it, the Blackfoot is not the only waterway of note winding through the vast plains of the northern mid-west. The Missouri is famous for hosting Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental voyage, for overwhelming its banks and wreaking havoc on homesteaders, and, more recently, for driving me mad with its muddy, sinkhole-dotted shorelines and the biting insects that love them. There is something greater than my history or theirs’, though, at work on this river. Gazing down the river from its center, it appears to run into infinity as the banks move progressively closer and closer together. Turning around, the same view greets the eyes and one realizes that looking backward is really the same as looking forward on this river, filled with activity that registers only on the small scale, seemingly begging you to look into the water rather than past it. Lewis and Clark were on a mission to find the headwaters of the Missouri, a conclusion to their tale, the whole time forgetting that rivers neither begin nor end but rather flow cyclically through the waters of the world, telling always the same story through an infinity of different images, each reflection, each interaction, a reminder of that which is shared by the big, the small, the meek, and the mighty, that feel the endless waters lap upon the rivers’ shorelines.

Like a lot of good stories, this one starts on a lazy, Friday afternoon. Unlike those versions, however, this isn’t the beginning of my weekend; after all, weekends are when the most work gets done in a national monument park. Today, though, the fire pits have been cleaned, the bathrooms flushed, and the tents pitched, so laziness, even without the prospect of a weekend, has become the order of the day. Its also after 5:00 pm, and as I’m sure you know, government employees don’t work overtime. Doug, my river partner, excels at downtime and quickly has a fold-out recliner dominating the center of our campsite. Slightly less prepared, my canvas, folding stool is forced to suffice. Our sitting postures accomplished, leisure commenced in earnest.

With relaxation in full swing, Doug and I both into our respective reading material, even the mosquitoes had little power to fend off the consuming lethargy, their own flight paths less erratic, more predictable, than usual. The riverbank maintained a breezeless, dead calm, as if the environment itself conspired to contribute to the apathetic state of things that I felt around, as well as inside, me. The overhanging limbs of a pair of cottonwood trees provided a shaded, decidedly pastoral setting that seemed to pervade the visible length of the river, itself swollen, yet placid, with the last of the winter run-off from the Rockies. Unaccustomed to the unmoving, solidified ether about me, I wondered if clouds lurked beyond the hillsides, hiding some storm that would alter what appeared to be a culminating state for the river. At its high point for the spring, the river would soon be under assault by summer heat, enlisted to initiate an inevitable change of seasons.

The usual river soundtrack of cliff swallows, horseflies, and splashing catfish played on loop, further enhancing the cyclically meditative ambiance until, with an echoed splat, the harmonious illusion was dispelled. Doug and I both looked up, having simultaneously perceived a sound like that of a ripe tomato landing on the dirt hard-pack that made up the floor of our campground. Standing up to investigate, I found that the echoed sound of a falling tomato had actually been two tomatoes, and what had sounded like tomatoes had actually been mice. Juvenile field mice, to be exact, and as I incredulously looked at the two tiny, writhing balls of fur, Doug reluctantly quit his recliner to join me. Each was about an inch and a half long, though fully-fledged, with a coating of classically gray hair and twitching and twirling white whiskers. Based on the sound, and their otherwise miraculous appearance, we guessed that they must have fallen from a treetop nest. Sadly, another thing tipped us off: one of the two was lying on his side, erratically pumping its rear legs in a series of spasms. It had likely broken its back in the fall and a minute later the legs stopped moving, once and for all. His brother, or perhaps sister, however, had been graced with a more cat-like fall. The mouse seemed to be dazed and I reached out to pick it up. I snatched him up and was immediately informed, in a high pitched, squeaky diatribe of surprisingly high volume that such an action was wholly intolerable. Performing another act of acrobatic faith, the mouse leapt from my hands, a full five feet in the air, landing with a tumble that found my eyes following a freshly kicked-up trail of dust into the nearest grass thicket.

The moment apparently past, Doug offered the dead mouse full natural burial rites with a toss into another thicket and, as if on cue, another splat sounded behind us. I looked at Doug with a sidelong grin, brow furrowed in humored confusion, before I turned around to greet the latest would-be aeronaut. Like his luckier companion, this mouse seemed well enough alive, though thoroughly dazed by his daredevil experience. I looked up into the cottonwood branches, half-expecting to hear another splat resonate off my face, but no more mice seemed to be falling, for the moment at least. Turning my attention to the new mouse, I decided not to offend as quickly as I had before, instead taking a seat on the dirt and keeping my eye on him. Doug, muttering something about Biblical plagues, resumed relaxation status with his book and recliner. I continued to watch the mouse and despite my initially positive prognosis, I soon realized that he wasn’t as well off as his flight-of-foot friend had been. In fact, as I watched him roll about in the dirt rather aimlessly, I realized that he probably wasn’t very well at all. I could understand his misgivings about our campground. It was disorganized and rather crudely thrown together, a stark place even for us, much less a mouse. I was sure, however, that something deeper ran through his unease as I observed him sniffing the air with a sense of encompassing uncertainty.

Those who have run across mouse nests know just how cozy they can be for their inhabitants. Mice household mothers seem to have no trouble finding the softest and finest materials for bedding, efficiently lining the inside of hollow or cracked tree trunks with cushioning that would make a mattress manufacturer jealous. Moreover, here, on the banks of the Missouri river, cottonwood seeds, newly weaned from their own mothers, were available. These trees derive their name wholly from the texture of their seed packs, comprised of a feathery down that gives flight to the precious contents and sends them on to start cottonwood families of their own. Of course, not all of them make it, with lurking mouse mothers around to corral them into warmth and luxury providing servitude. Needless to say, the adolescent mouse before me must certainly have enjoyed a pampered upbringing. That in mind, his stance seemed less unwarranted than it had before. He looked about with none of the quick and jagged motion normally seen in mice, the traditionally shifty and nervous head swivels replaced with an awe-eyed scanning of his surroundings. How far things must have seemed from the world he had perceived as complete, here, a speck on the vast, flat, hard-pack wasteland that was our campground. He moved his limbs cautiously and deliberately, as if questioning if everything worked correctly in this new environment. He rolled onto his side, pointlessly, and with all the powers of anthro-centrism at my command I felt sure that he was wondering why the cotton-laced walls of the nest he had known as the world were no longer there to lean against, their false promise dismissed in the heartbeat of a dive from that warm fantasy down to the hard reality that instead greeted his back. Unable to further resist the temptation to find a way to alleviate his agony, I reached out to pick him up. Unlike his predecessor, there was no audible protest and only a half-hearted physical one. In a moment he had cozied himself into my palm, seemingly quite content to follow Doug’s lead and fully utilize our relaxation hour.

After a minute or two of calmly sitting in my palm, I watched as the mouse’s eyes began to crease and close, though the rapid pace at which his ribcage convulsed informed me that he was still breathing at the pace of the living. The eyes slowly tapered from large, black orbs to gray-wrapped slivers, the mesmeric comfort of a warm hand dropping him into the subconscious. Another couple of minutes passed and he was on his side, out like a light, surely engaged in the kind of dreams only mice can dream: unguarded cheese slices, abandoned and torn open seat cushions, toothless, half-inch tall cats with no claws. Maybe, though, the sleep was not merely provoked by need for rest. Was it trauma induced? Was his mind hard at work, unraveling the foreign environment he found himself in, contemplating how to look at it through nest-taught eyes, or perhaps trying to forget what his younger days had taught him altogether? Was he so waylaid by this investigation that he had to retreat from things entirely to work them over in trance? Whatever the cause, he outwardly appeared serene, leaving me to wonder what turmoil might lie under the calm exterior.

Crouching down to set him in the grass, a tinge of guilt crossed my mind; I knew how many bull snakes there were in the campsite’s grasses, and I furthermore knew what their favorite food was. This sleeping innocent, thrust from his promised home, didn’t stand a chance in his current state. So there I was, a fistful of conscious and mouse at my side. I sat back down on my stool, hand out as if I was waiting for change in the checkout line, watching the incessant rise and fall of the mouse’s chest. Thoughts tacked onto thoughts, as they always do, and feeling myself a part of his mammalian social group, I began to worry about my mouse-friend. Was this kind of behavior normal for mice? His living brethren certainly hadn’t acted so. Was there something wrong with him? Wouldn’t it be better if he were more like the other mouse, who had excitedly bound into the wild without so much as a note of questioning his fate? Maybe this was unhealthy. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he just wasn’t fit, genetically, to hack what was thrown at him. Doug shot me an unsympathetic look. A high school teacher of natural sciences during the academic year, the mathematically scientific sentimentality in him was clearly brimming over. I, however, couldn’t bear to let things fall out in ill favor for my mouse-friend, so there I sat, sleeping mouse in hand, as an hour rolled by.

At this point I had basically accepted the fact that I was going to have to hold this sleeping mouse until I too passed out from exhaustion. Thankfully, however, I was about to be relieved of my duty. There was an itch in my hand and, looking down with a start, I saw that my mouse-friend was no longer asleep. Whatever ordeal he had been going through was over, and he now was eagerly cycling around the perimeter of my hand, peering over the edge with beady, black mouse eyes at the verdant grass fields below and beyond. There was a change, however, definite and complete, and though he seemed like any mouse now, fidgety as they always are, he was yet different from his long gone companion. Looking over the edge of my hand at the ground far below, he resisted what looked like an irresistible urge to jump. Despite his otherwise convincing behavior, there was something particularly un-mouse-like about him, captured in the different thought pattern that I imagined he had emerged from sleep with. My duties seemingly done, I lowered my palm to a less frightening height and, as he deposited a tiny mouse turd in my hand, watched him leap off and into the tall grasses, whatever new knowledge he possessed going with him. In a flash he was gone, off to face the world that he had momentarily shrunk from. I turned around to see if Doug would again frown at me, but he was asleep in his recliner, a mouse’s advice well heeded.

Continued in Part II