Weasel
Posted on | January 28, 2008 |
A weasel found it’s way into the coop, the way only weasels can. Murderous and thrilling at the kill, it went after every hen, the sick rooster (who was getting better!) first, taking their heads, leaving blood splattered across the glass panes on the door. When I came home DH was in the coop gathering up the decapitated bodies, already frozen. We’re not sure when it came, how long it stayed, how it got in even. Flatlanders, the two of us. We should have known the signs broadcast all over last night: the scent of musk; the skipity tracks in the snow, not a squirrels, and too small for a drowsy skunk or hibernating raccoon.
Two hens, that’s all that’s left, of six, total, including the ailing rooster. It’s what happens, here, anywhere, the food chain and so forth, but it still sucks. I pulled on rubber boots (new ones, pretty with black and red and white flowers) and old fleece gloves and raked out loads of blood flecked hay and scat. We almost had it cornered (I keep wanting to call it a him, but who knows? And it gives me the shivers to think how naturally I assume the gender of a killer, even animal, and small with a mink black coat and a rust colored underbelly.) Both of us feeling fierce enough to kill it, and I grazed it with my boot, but it made a get-away out the door, and when we followed it’s tracks, we found it’s likely living under the shed on the other side. Vermin.
I knew it could happen, even when we got the half-dozen of them, itty-bitty and peeping, just a day old in the mail. We picked them up at the post office, and I kept saying maybe we should get more, in case. Now there are two, and while I cleaned the coop they sat on the roost above my head, the one shoving it’s head into the soft feathered underbelly of the other, twittering in that low, purring way hens do.
This is what we picked, choosing rural life. The likelihood of weasels, tracks zig-zagging the snow. Now that the January cold has set in, this is the season of hunger for small warm blooded things that do not sleep in the ground or in nests or burrows until spring. We wanted to feel closer to the land, and I keep an animal tracking guide on my desk. But I’ve grown lazy and fat and distracted in the warmth of my house, writing heaps of paragraphs furiously (for a deadline: this Saturday) and eating pineapple upside down cake (for my birthday.) I grew up on the stories of Sterling North, and when I am outdoors, the land sings and I feel it in my bones. I love the barren maples and the way the ice is dark and slick over the places where water and mud used to bisect the trail.
So even as I’m feeling like punching the wall and I’m googling weasel traps, I’m already planning for more: hens, chicks, beehives, lamas, a garden. Maybe not all this spring, or even this year, but over the course of the years here. Because even when I’m dizzy and distracted, as I am right now: balancing on the very tiniest rung of the tall ladder reaching up towards the sickle moon of my dreams, these things pull me back. Nothing like chicken manure and a mess of bloodied feathers to pull you back into the right-here-now of life.
These things are my Polaris, giving the twirling compass of my heart a north to true towards in the dark winter days when I’m crazy with words and to-do lists and hectic schedules and friends I haven’t kept in touch with; or in summer when the evening sun hangs in the sky until almost ten and I’m drowsy and sun drunk and undirected. Still. I’m sad tonight.
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20 Responses to “Weasel”
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January 28th, 2008 @ 10:31 pm
I am so sorry to hear about your hens. We found a dog in the woods when we lived in MN - wild and hungry, living on the gut piles left by the deer hunters. We adopted him and named him Jack - sweet, loyal, beautiful like a wolf, and understood the hierarchy of our “pack” in our home. We bought chickens like you did and raised them. One spring day when they we pecking in the fresh grown grass in the yard, sweet Jack came and killed most of them … it was terribly gruesome … I know your bloody scene all too well. You can’t change nature.
January 28th, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
I know how you feel! It’s so heartbreaking and stupefying. I will always remember my dumb feeling, watching (and hearing!) a hawk take off down our driveway, just barely clearing the ground before ascending (as best it could) with our largest, loudest chick. Or the bloody hens on the side of our road. You’ll certainly deal with this time and again, living the rural life, connected to the earth and the circle of life. But I’m sure you’d have it no other way, even with the heartache.
January 28th, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
I love animals, but I just cannot get my head around the whole “food chain” or “survival of the fittest”. Nature can be cold-hearted and gruesome.
Sorry that you had to endure that experience.
January 28th, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
I love animals, but I just cannot get my head around the whole “food chain” or “survival of the fittest”. Nature can be cold-hearted and gruesome.
Sorry that you had to endure that experience.
January 29th, 2008 @ 5:47 am
Ah I am sorry about your chickies. You are right, this is what keeps us here; the whole circle of teeth to feathers and blood in the straw. Keep dreaming fiercely.
January 29th, 2008 @ 7:48 am
UG - this happened to us earlier in the spring! it is such a chill to your very core! they were my 8 year old’s chickens and something came and threw them into a mess of feathers - all 6. i sent him back to check for eggs and i will never forget his mortified face running back to tell me what he had seen. it was tragic! needless to say that VERY SAME DAY i drove to get him 6 new chics. seeing his loss was unbearable. now the new chickens have grown and is like christmas every day when he comes striding up to the door with 6 charming, brown eggs in his hands beaming from ear to ear.
this too shall pass.
January 29th, 2008 @ 10:32 am
Let me just say first that I am sorry about the chickens too, and for your sadness.
But when I read this, mostly I thought about how it had an energy that we don’t always get in our daily blogs, about what a cold, effective writers eye you had turned on this moment, in places and that made me think about writing in general. Of course it seems to me that there’s a short story lurking here, at least half of one.
But also, didn’t you just describe that awful mess we make sometimes when we go after the most alive parts of our life in order to put them in writing? That Faulkner quote “kill your darlings” is misused a lot, and I’m going to misuse it again a little here. What it means is that you have to be willing to edit out some beautiful pieces of writing, lovely strings of words, once you realize they are not working to serve the story you are trying to write, and that’s something worth thinking about for sure, but what I think of when I hear it is also that kind of bravery you have to have, that sometimes the thing that is going to make the most powerful writing is exactly the stuff you would rather not make a bloody mess of. That stuff that tells the truth and gets ugly and pisses off some people you would really rather not piss off and maybe makes you see some things about yourself that you would really rather not admit, in the nicer parts of your life. But in writing life, you are the weasel, and you are hungry.
Or, maybe that’s just me. In any case, I think this lengthy comment is proof that this post did what I want all good writing to do, regardless of whether the piece is kind or ugly or filled with the kinds of things that fill us with regrets, and that is - it sent me off into a world of thought that the originally story itself could not have anticipated. That’s good.
And, if you write that story, whatever you do, don’t leave out that bit about grazing it with your boot.
January 29th, 2008 @ 11:24 am
Aw, I’m sorry. Been there, with hens and pigs and cattle, too. It sucks. Always.
January 29th, 2008 @ 12:07 pm
I absolutely love the way you craft your sentences. You turn sorrow and blood into something achingly beautiful.
January 29th, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
i’m sorry for your chickens…
that’s so sad.
January 29th, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
So sorry to hear about the chickens. Like others have said, I’m always amazed by how eloquently you can paint a story.
January 29th, 2008 @ 2:39 pm
I’m sorry for your heartache and your chickies.
January 29th, 2008 @ 2:39 pm
What a shock that must have been for you! I gasped a little when I read the first few sentences.
January 29th, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
This comes at a difficult time for me since we’re getting ready to embark on a chicken adventure of my own. Is that really what I have to sign up for? I’m feeling sick for you. And a little scared for me.
January 29th, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
I had a similar incident happen with my two year old hens and rooster, except it was a new dog in the neighborhood. I had planned for foxes and even weasels, but not for a very determined border collie who busted into the coop while I was gone at the store. I would get chickens again in an instant though, maybe next time a different breed and a better built chicken run.
January 29th, 2008 @ 9:33 pm
Sorry about your chickens. We had some of ours killed by a coyote this summer. It wasn’t bloody. All he left was feathers. Your writing is so awsome by the way.
January 30th, 2008 @ 2:27 pm
I am so far from weasels, here in urban Berlin, you would not believe. We do have foxes, though. Slender and burnt umber. Just like in the fairy tales. I am a long-time (and heretofore silent) reader of your blog. I have tagged you for a meme. I hope you do not mind.
http://grovergirl.typepad.com/berlinorbust/2008/01/im-official-or.html
January 31st, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
oh i’m so sorry…yes, it does suck…
February 1st, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
I am so sorry. We raised baby chicks a year ago too…they survived but our bunnies were taken out by racoons. It’s a shocking and frightening experience.
Hugs,
a.
February 1st, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
I am so sorry that this has happened.