Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
Robert Burns
I keep my birdseed in plastic container inside a small shed behind the house, and the other morning I forgot to put the cover back on the container.
When I went out to feed the birds the following day, I discovered at the bottom of the near-empty container, a mouse peering out from the coffee mug I used to scoop the seed. Its nose was quivering like a dog’s (at least I remember it that way), and its eyes were huge and black. It had fallen into the container, hulled numerous sunflower seeds, but then had been unable to climb out.
So I took the container outside to dump the cup and mouse, and feed the birds. But when I looked down once more, a second mouse appeared from out of the cup and then a third: three fat, frightened mice packed into a coffee mug, coming out to look at me and then retreating back into the highly inadequate shelter, stuffing themselves so tightly that only their tails stuck out.
I stood in the snow, imagining their panic and their dread. Certainly, they might have known I was their adversary. I had killed so many of their kind in traps winter after winter when they had invaded my porous house to find warmth and crumbs. They had little reason to hope for clemency.
But the more I thought about what they might be feeling, the more I became entangled with myself. Shamelessly I anthropomorphized those mice, projecting my own fears and regrets upon them. Suddenly their predicament stood for all the foolish, reckless, thoughtless, ill-advised things I had ever done in my life, things so stupid that I try to forget them all the time but never quite succeed.
I made a general confession of my failures to the mice, telling them things I had hidden for so long, admitting to them things I could not have told a human soul. And it felt so good, talking to these compatriots in crime, that, for just a moment, it seemed a fearsome burden had been lifted from me and that my transgressions had been absolved.
Slowly I reached down and lifted the cup, spilled its contents close to a space under the shed where the mice could escape. They stood for an instant in the sun and the snow, their pelts shining, priestly dark, their fat black eyes searching mine, and then they scurried for safety.
“Go, and sin no more,” I told them (and myself), placing a little extra seed around the hole into which they disappeared.
For a few days, they were on their best behavior. I decided that they must have understood all I told them, that they had learned from their mistakes and mine, and that they had realized, as Robert Burns wrote, how “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,/Gang aft agley,/An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/ For promis’d joy!”
Then yesterday, I found a small hole gnawed into the side of the seed container near the tightly fastened lid. This time, there were four mice in the mug.
This is wonderful, Bill. I’ve memorized few lines in my life but one of them–inaccurately–was “wee, cow-ring, tim-rous beastie.” I identified with the timidity of mice. But you have gone far beyond that, told the story, made a point, included riveting description (e.g. the moment of their standing in the snow with pelts shining…fat black eyes…)In the larger picture, the writing is consistent, I think, with your cyclical themes and their hopeful significance. A true prose poem.
(I had meant to tell you not only about Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven–ever read that? but also that I like your use of the sentence “We are all in this together” in one of your last essays.
Thank you, Barbara! And yes I have often read “The Hound of Heaven.” Perhaps these mice in the mug are the mice of heaven.