BY CALEB ROBERTS
I've been thinking of the times I've looked down and found that I had stepped on a trail of ants crossing a sidewalk. Of when I caught catfish, hit them on the head with a hammer, hung them from a tree, cleaned them, grilled them, and ate them. Of how when I was a child, we used wadded paper towels to smash any small, tan spider we saw on the carpet or walls for fear they were brown recluses. If I let myself, I spiral into thinking of all the bacteria I kill when I brush my teeth or the bees and frogs and birds I kill indirectly by purchasing broccoli that required neonicotinoids to kill off the aphids so its head could grow thick with florets.
A moose's hoof must squash some beetles scuttling under the pine needles without knowing or caring. Tiger salamanders swimming in clear mountain ponds corner legless larval young of other tiger salamanders in the rocks and reeds along the shoreline and gobble them up. Oak roots secrete tannins into the soil to poison their neighbors and eliminate competition for sunlight and water. In this one act, at least, we are all united.
I have felt justified in crushing ticks and leeches between my fingernails. I have felt horrified after cracking the spines of box turtles and opossums under my car. I know I don't recall every killing. But the ones I do remember, when I chose to kill for reasons other than eating or to keep from being bitten, I wonder why I did. How did I justify it?
Mercy
The spring of my high school senior year, Dad bought a couple of acres just outside of our small Kentucky town. It was a new housing development, and he wanted to build a house on it. There was a narrow gravel road to the lot. The only other house on the road was one of those huge red brick houses with sharp black roofs, a three-car garage, and an imported sod lawn. Dad’s lot was thick with old red oaks and shagbark hickories. Multiflora rose and coralberry and orange-flowered jewelweed tangled together in the understory. Every weekend and most days after school, Dad would drag me out there to help him hack away brush, fell trees, and toss all the leavings into a pile in the center of the lot.
I didn't understand why Dad wanted a house out there. It made me angry. I was a kid and didn't want to spend my days helping Dad build a house I wouldn't live in once I went to college. It felt wasteful to build a house out there when we already had a house in town—the one I grew up in. It also made me feel guilty. It didn't feel right to tear up the only woodlot within a few miles. Most of the acreage surrounding the lot shone green with thousands of rows of corn and soy like rank and file soldiers. I felt terrible when I chopped down a small juniper and a mantis egg case burst all over the ground, young mantids spilling out of the sack like skittering grains of rice. And when I sawed through a tree limb to find it brown and hollow and seething with carpenter ants seizing their white larval young and fleeing, coating the limb like black molasses, throwing themselves to the earth to find some shelter, any shelter. I watched them and waited until they all disappeared into the mangled grass and weeds before I picked up the limb, added it to the pile, and began sawing another limb.
By late summer, with the corn stretched to its full height and the air sticky and wet, we had cleared most of the lot. As we drove up the gravel road one Saturday, Dad told me we were going to finish chopping some stray limbs and burn the pile. I could tell he was excited because he was singing "When the Roll Is Called up Yonder" and banging out a rhythm on the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. I nodded and turned back to watch the corn rows march by.
Pulling off the gravel road, we bumped up the worn tire path into the lot. Blossoms of yellow and brown woodchips from ground-out stumps dotted the newly-cleared earth. Tire ruts in the soft soil drew a line from the gravel road to the pile and then branched out across the lot, marked from when we used the truck to haul slash to the pile. The pile had grown feet longer and taller than Dad's truck.
Dad parked the truck near the pile, and we both stepped out. He pointed out the limbs he wanted me to chop up as he pulled a tank of kerosene from the bed of his truck. So while I began cutting the larger limbs into manageable lengths, Dad sloshed kerosene all around the pile, crumpled a stack of newspaper, and stuffed it under a corner of the pile. When he was done, he called me over and handed me a matchbox. He knew I liked to start burn piles and campfires. I hid a smile as I struck a match and flicked it into the newspaper. The paper ignited in tall yellow flames, and the fire quickly spread throughout the pile. Dad and I stood watching it for a moment.Then we went back to chopping wood.
We worked without speaking. The bow saw slicing through wood sounded like a knife slicing a thick watermelon, and the fire hissed and gurgled as sap boiled and steamed from the cut ends of the still-green wood. We cut and tossed, cut and tossed. The fire's heat grew like a bubble around the slash pile, until the exposed skin of our necks ached and our eyes nearly dried out just glancing at the fire. We began tossing limbs from a few yards away, averting our eyes. We heaved logs upward into the flames like shot-put, building the pile higher, not wider.
After throwing a particularly heavy limb, I paused to squint at the bonfire and wipe my forehead with the back of my pigskin glove. Then I noticed something on the ground, at the base of the fire. In the newly-fallen ashes, something smaller than my hand tossed and twisted. I stepped closer to look, shielding my face with my glove.
A lizard, a skink I thought, writhed at the fire's base, tail whipping to-and-fro. It didn't run from the heat and flames. It just thrashed in circles. I realized it was in agony.
I called for Dad. I didn't know what to do. I imagined my bare skin buried in those ashes, pure white with heat. I imagined my hand reddening and bursting like the ends of a hotdog sizzling on a grill. I no longer felt the flames on my face.
I heard Dad rushing up behind me, and I pointed to the lizard. He too held his glove over his face. But when he spotted it, he didn't hesitate. He leaned over and batted the skink out of the flames with his gloved hand.
Turning my back to the fire to block what I could of the heat, I bent over the lizard. It seized and shuddered. Its scales were nearly as bleached as the ash that covered it. Only its torso and tail convulsed; it seemed unable to move its legs. Then I saw that its hands and feet were nothing but ruined nubs. The fire had burnt away its fingers and toes, leaving bloodless, cauterized stumps. Much of its tail had burnt away too. It made no sound as it shook, but its mouth was parted slightly, showing its tiny triangular teeth.
Dad kneeled beside me and exhaled a hiss. Its eyes, he said. He gently scooped up the lizard and showed me. Its eyes were gone. Melted out of its head. Only the perfectly round sockets remained.
We didn't say anything, but we knew we had to put it out of its misery. At least that's what I knew. And I told Dad so. He said yeah, nodding, not looking at me. But he handed the lizard to me. He said he didn't want to do it.
There was a black-headed maul in the truck, for splitting knot-ridden wood like sweetgum and hackberry. I carried the lizard in my hand, trying to hold him as gently as Dad had. I laid him in the grass near the truck bed. I pulled the maul out of the truck bed and turned it so the head faced the ground. I held it over the lizard, counted to three, and crushed the lizard's head. Then I turned around so I didn't have to see what I had done, cleaned the maul in the grass and dirt, and threw it back into the truck.
Revenge
During college, I worked at a sub shop twenty hours a week to pay for rent, textbooks, and food. I didn’t like the job, but it paid a dollar more than minimum wage. So I put in my time, deposited my biweekly checks in the bank, and counted every dollar I spent. I remember bringing a calculator to the grocery store, adding up everything I put in the shopping cart. And during checkout, I would watch the total flashing above the cash register, willing it to stay below my budget. I always bought generic brands. When I bought brand-names, it felt like a splurge.
Since I had classes throughout the day, I usually worked nights at the sub shop. Late one night after a shift, I came home craving a bowl of cereal and then bed. Stomping into the kitchen, I opened my pantry to get the cereal only to find shreds of cardboard scattered all over the shelf and Cheerios spilt all over the floor.
I picked up the box to see what had happened. More Cheerios fell to the floor as I turned the box over in my hands. Then I saw a hole in the bottom of the box. From the gnaw marks and the shreds on the shelf, it had obviously been a mouse.
I ground my teeth and threw the cereal into the trash bin so hard it shook. Turning to the kitchen sink and bending down, I pulled two mouse snap traps from the cabinets under the sink and laid them on the floor. Then I got a jar of generic-brand peanut butter from the pantry and an old, stained butter knife from the communal silverware drawer. Hunching over the traps, I generously lathered the trap triggers with the peanut butter. I wanted to be sure the little thing was tempted.
I set one trap behind the fridge and another in the corner of the pantry floor--hidden behind a carton of Coke so my roommates wouldn't step on it. Feeling accomplished, I replaced the peanut butter in the pantry and washed the butter knife in the sink. Then I took the broom and dustpan from the pantry and swept up the scattered Cheerios.
I ended up settling for a turkey, cheese, and tomato sandwich. Returning to my room, I peeled off my uniform, put on some gym shorts, and plopped into my recliner. I ate and watched some videos on my computer. Then I went to bed.
Sometime during the night, I woke to a loud crack from the kitchen. It sounded like it came from behind the fridge. Croaking a laugh, I turned over and went back to sleep. The next morning, I scraped the body, nearly severed at the neck, and chunks of hair and blood off the trap and into the trash. I washed the trap in the sink, replaced it under the sink, and went to class.
Knowledge
It was a rainy fall night in Kentucky, and I was running a trap line through an abandoned field. I was part of a university study surveying small mammal (e.g. pine voles, hispid cotton rats, eastern harvest mice, golden mice, etc.) diversity and community composition. We were capturing and releasing. It was my first time running a trap line.
With the single beam of my LED headlamp, I followed the pink flagging tape and the trampled grasses and young ash trees that marked my trapline. The year had been so dry, the maple and black gum and sycamore leaves dropped early from the trees into the brown broomsedge and green fescue. But now, the rain plastered the leaves to the grasses and mud and colored them black and grey and glistening as my headlamp passed over them.
I wore tall rubber boots, rain pants, and a rain jacket. Underneath them, my hoodie and jeans rubbed dry and warm against my skin. The rain tapped and splattered on my jacket hood, dripping from the hood's fringe in front of my eyes. I was on my last line of the night. I was ready to head home and sleep.
A few yards ahead, I saw some flagging tied to a dead ash sapling. I pushed through the waist-high grass, bent down, and parted the bower of senescent grass and leaves sheltering the live trap. I had placed it on a hummock of leaves and twigs so it wouldn't flood and drown anything caught inside.
I was using a common brand of live traps. They were steel rectangular boxes, about seven by three by three inches. They could be set by folding the front "trap door" down under a lever. That allowed a small mammal to go inside and step on the trigger panel, causing the trap door to snap shut. I baited them with sunflower seeds and dried cranberries. I also put cotton balls inside for warmth. Metal loses heat quickly, causing little creatures to go hypothermic and possibly die, even on a mild night. I didn't want them to freeze to death. But I did want to capture them.
Seeing this trap's door closed, I smiled. I hadn't caught much of anything that night, just a couple of house mice. I pulled a pigskin glove from my rain jacket pocket and worked it onto my right hand. Then I crouched down and slowly lifted the trap with my left hand, keeping it parallel with the ground. If there was something inside (which wasn't a given. Sometimes the traps just snapped closed on their own), I wanted to keep it as calm as possible, so slow and quiet movements were best. With a gloved finger, I pushed open the door slightly. The white light from my headlamp reflected brilliantly against the outside of the trap but cast shadows inside. Still, I could just see a little form lying on the bottom of the trap. It appeared to be a mouse.
I removed my finger, and the door clicked shut again. Trapped creatures had escaped before when I tried to look too closely and left the door open too long.I tilted the trap so the door faced upwards, into the rain, and set the butt on the hummock. I got a Ziplock baggie out of my front pocket and cinched it around the trap so that I could open the door, upend the trap, shake the trap a bit, and the mouse would fall into the bag. Urine-yellowed cotton balls and uneaten nuts and berries clumped in a corner of the bag, remnants of other emptied traps, making it droop to the side. With the bag secured, I snapped open the door and flipped the trap.
The mouse fell to the bottom of the bag, but it didn't scrabble or squirm. I closed the trap, crimped the top of the bag with my hand, and replaced the trap on the hummock. Rain pattered on the baggie. The light of my headlamp refracted on the raindrops and reflected off the bag's surface. I tapped the baggie with my finger--I was sure it was a white-footed mouse, Peromyscus leucopus--but still it didn't move. I sighed and used my index finger and thumb to turn the body over and sex it. It was a male, and its scrotum was enlarged, so it was probably in heat. Males are usually more "trap-happy" than the females, meaning they are more likely to take a chance on going inside a metal box if they smell food. Especially in heat.
I set the bag on the ground, took out my notebook and recorded my data, hunching over it to protect it from the rain: Trap Line: 3, Trap Number: 4, Species: PELE, Sex: Male. My hands were wet, so some of my writing smudged. Then I stuffed the notebook away and reset the trap.
I looked down at the baggie again. Rain was beginning to run off my pants and into my boots, sending trickles of damp and chill along my heels. Normally, I would just open the bag near the ground, and it would dart away, vanishing into the dark, slick grass blades. But I didn't want to just toss this one into the grass and move on. I had heard some rodents go into torpor if their body temperature cools enough—an adapted safety mechanism. But if I dropped the torpid mouse into the muck, it could drown or be eaten by a passing coyote or skunk. I had also heard that if you get rodents in torpor into a warm, dry place, they could wake up.
Pulling my glove off, I reached into the bag with my bare hand and touched the mouse's sides, feeling for breathing. Its fur was flat and wet and its body limp. But it was breathing. I unzipped my rain jacket, set the mouse in the hand pouch of my hoodie, and zipped my jacket back up. I figured when I felt it starting to wake and rustle around, I could pull it out and let it go. I put my hand to my hoodie pouch, cradling the mouse inside. I wondered if it would wake.
By the time I reached the final trap, my socks and feet were soaked, and a shiver had settled into my hands, numbness in my fingertips. This last line paralleled a fencerow overgrown with juniper and Japanese honeysuckle, with oak trees looming over it. The grass here grew sparse and low, matted with cracked acorns and twigs from the overhanging limbs of an old post oak. I suspected this visibility, convenient for me, also made it less tempting for wary small mammals. However, this night, the trap door was closed. Bending down and checking inside, I was surprised to see something inside.
Emptying it into the baggie, I saw it was a northern short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda. And by its stillness, I knew it was dead, not just in torpor. Shrews can't slow down like rodents and wait for better times or warmth. But this one probably didn't die from the cold. Shrews have such high metabolism that if they don't eat every three to four hours, find a grasshopper or a worm, perhaps a frog or small bird even, they will starve. They only live two to three years in the wild. Quick, hungry lives.
Yes, I felt sad. But as there was nothing to be done, I plucked the body from the bag and flung it into the vines covering the fencerow. I didn't want its body to lure predators or scavengers to the trap. Taking out my notebook for the last time that night, I noted: Trap Line: 3, Trap Number: 30, Species: BLBR, Sex: Male.
After replacing the notebook, I stood up and reached under my rain jacket and felt the little weight of the mouse in my pocket. I stood still, looking out over the field, into the night. My headlamp carved a cylinder through the dark, exposing raindrops for an instant before they skittered and danced out of the light. At some point, the light dissipated into the night, but I could not tell exactly where it ended.
On an impulse, I raised unfeeling fingers to my headlamp and clicked off the light. In the total dark, the rain became a roar in my ears. It seemed like I felt every raindrop splashing on my hood and shoulders. And though I couldn't see anything, I closed my eyes.
Sometimes I think of what little creatures do in the dark. What goes on in their holes and middens and dens and burrows and warrens? Or outside their homes, crawling, searching feverishly for seeds or a too-slow beetle under the decaying leaves or in the veins of bare ground between bunchgrasses. Do meadow voles sleep through the night, curled under a lichen-crusted stone of a fencerow? Do deer mice pups, skin pink and taut, eyes sealed purple spheres, scrabble and clutch silently at their siblings, dosing fitfully in the nest their mother made them in the heart of year-old thatch? Does a least weasel slither through the undergrowth, fur damp but body hot and alive, hunting a rabbit it can smell but not see? I want to know. But I also want them to be free so they can keep digging and eating and nesting and searching.
The rain was too loud now, and my temples ached. My knees stiffened, tired from bending and crouching, and my hands were almost completely numb. I wanted to go home and take a shower. I sighed and clicked the light back on.
Turning, I headed toward the rusty cattle gate leading out of the old field. My vehicle was parked right outside the gate. At the gate, I swung it open, my numb hands barely feeling the cold metal, and then shut it, securing it with a chain. I plodded to my vehicle, opened the door, and slumped in, not bothering to take off my sodden rain gear. I began fumbling in my pocket for my keys.
Then I remembered the mouse in my hoodie pouch. I didn't want to take a dead mouse home with me, so I reached into my pouch to remove it, intending to throw it outside. But I didn't feel the body in my pouch. I frowned and used both hands to try and search for the body. Finger met finger in my pouch, but I could not feel the mouse.
For a moment, I sat, considering. Then I heaved myself out of my vehicle and cast around on the ground with my headlamp. I worried I had dropped the mouse and perhaps stepped on it. But I didn't find a crushed body, even retracing my path to the gate. I looked over the gate, out into the field. I saw only a few yards ahead now--the rain had picked up and cut my light shorter. The grasses and browning goldenrod stalks trembled and bent in the shower, but I saw no movement on the ground or anywhere else.
I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. I leaned on the gate, hearing it creak, hearing the crinkle in the chest of my rain jacket as I inhaled and exhaled. I smiled, thinking of the mouse waking in my hoodie, feeling my heat and breathing. It must have darted out of my pouch without a rustle, flung itself to the earth, and run into the dark. Perhaps it would survive the night in spite of me.
I went back to my vehicle, switched on my brights, and drove slowly down the one-lane gravel road back home. Since it was rut season, I kept an eye out for deer. But as my wipers sloshed back and forth across my vision, I figured all the deer were probably bedded down somewhere out of the rain. Somewhere sheltered and secret. Somewhere I would never know.
Caleb Roberts holds a PhD in applied ecology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Caleb has published scientific articles in Nature Climate Change and Ecosphere and creative nonfiction at Terrain.org. He studies ecological resilience, prairie chickens, and fire. Caleb is from Kentucky but lives in Nebraska with his wife and cat.