He sleeps in his cozy underground home, his tail wrapped around his nose. Sometimes he lounges in his hole for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, and birds, killing more than he can eat warm, and often dragging the bodies home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the veins at the throat or crushing the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods and across a highway overpass, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallow water where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. The pond covers two acres of low-lying land with six inches of water. This is, mind you, a residential area. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none are visible here. There's a highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of ducks at the other. At the far end fields and woods alternate, threaded everywhere with paths carved by humans.
So, I had crossed over the highway, stepped over two low fences, and strolled along a path, rejoicing in the wild rose blossoms sprinkled along the pond's shore. I climbed up into high pastures of grass and then cut down through the woods to the fallen oak tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry bench at the upper end of the pond, a tilted column thrusting out of the rose-crowded shore to become the intersection of a shallow blue body of water and the deep blue body of the sky. The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, watching the water plants at my feet tremble and slowly part as a fish thrust its way through. An owl appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I whirled around — and the next instant, by some coincidence, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
He was ten inches long, a muscular ribbon, covered in soft velvet, brown as a sculpture of dark bronze, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a snake's; he would have made a good arrow tip. There was just a dot of chin, and then began the ivory -colored fur that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window. The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness, twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on a quiet path when each had been thinking of something else: an abrupt blow to the stomach. It was also a stunning blow to the brain; it emptied our lungs. It extinguished the sun, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world fell into pieces and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the magic. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel, feeling the shock of separation, was wrenched back into real life and the urgent commands of instinct. He vanished under the wild roses. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit pleading, but he didn't return.
Brains are private places, recording our inner muttering on secret tapes — but the weasel and I both plugged into each other's tapes, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if his tape was blank? What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.
I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular — shall I dine on raw meat, hold my tail high, walk with both feet and hands? — but I might learn something of the purity of living only in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity but dying at last in its claws. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way to live is like the weasel's: open to time and death without regret, noticing everything, remembering nothing, taking his prey with a fierce and pointed will. We could also take prey with such a will, you know. (Words: 1,010)The trick is to stalk your calling with a certain skill and focus, to locate the most tender spot and bite deeply. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp one necessity and not let it go. Seize it and let it carry you upward.
