A Brian Doyle-inspired essay about small kids and smaller animals.
The Shrew by Peter Lang-Stanton
My three year-old son stood in the backyard, in the grass, holding a bright pink soccer ball against his pot-belly. His arms were short, like a burrowing animal’s, unable to touch on the far side of the ball and complete the circle. He was trying to get our attention. Watch this, he was saying. My wife sat beside me on the patio sofa, which we use without its cushions, instead sitting directly on the hard wicker frame to preserve the longevity of the cushions for some later, more deserving future. She had only just started showing. It happens earlier the second time. Apparently because things are already pre-stretched and ready to go. Her hair was thick and brown, and would have made a good nest for a small creature. And the sun rested for a moment on the glowing nest before slipping behind the neighbor’s house, taking its duty elsewhere, to another part of the country.
The three year-old hoisted the oversized soccer ball up to his chin and slammed it onto the grass. As the ball bounced feebly, there was a small, otherworldly scream. Not from my son, from the grass. The noise was beyond description, but if I had to do an impression, it would sound like this: eeeeerrrghhhh! It was alien and strangled, but unmistakably spoken in the universal language of pain.
I looked at my wife and she looked at me. The fuck? The three year-old is mostly obtuse to our channel of reality, but is a savant for reading our contorted micro-expressions; he started asking what was that sound, and why are you making that face. I had no idea. I stood and searched the grass, aware that my son was watching me minutely. I am always aware that I, and to an even greater degree, his mother, are his mooring to reality, and that any time he perceives uncertainty in us, his world becomes unmoored. I told him I was just checking something. And that’s when I saw it, the source of the scream. It was a mole or a vole. I’m not sure which. I can’t really say I know the difference. A velvety gray body with soccer-ball-pink paws, it was the size of the roll of 35mm film sitting on my desk as I write. The snout was a good third-to-half of its body—a snout with limbs, really, like the nose in Gogol’s short story, The Nose, which is about a very large nose. The poor creature—mole or vole—was crawling through the grass with heartbreaking effort, dragging itself like a seal, its hind legs splayed out, the back half of its body now useless, dead weight. The soccer ball, an object of human fun, must have come down on it just so, and crushed its spine, I think, or snapped its toothpick femur bones. Whatever the case, now the mole and/or vole escaped one inch at a time, no doubt adrenalized by some form of mole shock, in what must have been the worst moment of its life, pulling its broken body through towering grass blades towards home.
I wondered what possible future this animal had, and what future it deserved at this point. The refrain ‘don’t let it suffer’ came to mind. It is what we are told in similar circumstances—a paralyzed mouse in a glue trap only able to blink, a fledgling robin twisted on the forest floor—but when it comes right down to it, the line between mercy and needless mole-stomping is a little blurry. There are a lot of assumptions smuggled into the phrase ‘don’t let it suffer’. Assumptions about the extent of the damage, the limits of healing and what is survivable, assumptions about other minds and phenomenologies of pain, or what the experience of present-tense pain is like without the forecasting of what it will mean for the future. Assumptions about humans being outside of nature rather than a part of it. But the biggest assumption is about the crude calculus of living itself: that nothing is better than something, if that something get bad enough.
That said, I gotta kill it. I should take the soccer ball or my bare heel and finish the job. Isn’t that what we should do?
The animal was in fact neither a mole nor a vole. It was a shrew. A Northern short-tailed shrew who lived beneath our woodpile and made its parallel life there, in a channel of reality we were entirely oblivious to until now. Shrews are not rodents, despite, to my eye, being one hundred percent rodent-passing. They look like large mice without eyes or ears. They have both, but their eyes are furred-over and can only detect changes in light. They mainly use echolocation, and sensitive whiskers to navigate underground. Like moles, shrews are fossorial—they spend most of their lives in dirt tunnels, and can dig at one inch per minute, which translated to human size would mean that, in five minutes, you could dig a six foot hole in your backyard, with your bare hands. Shrews live alone, underground, in a nest they line with leaves or stolen fur from a meadow vole. Their lives are short, solitary, and unromantic. Females mate with multiple males and take care of all of the parenting duties solo, which amounts to a month of nursing before the little shrewlets are on their own.
Northern short-tailed shrews are one of the only venomous mammals. In the salivary glands below their incisors, they make a poison which is chemically identical to the Mexican beaded lizard, whose bites can cause lung failure in humans. A shrew bite, on the other hand, will cause local itching and redness. A shrew doesn’t have fangs to inject the poison, so it has to really chew it into its prey. The venom is less for hunting and more for making the post-hunt meal less writhey. Northern short-tailed shrews eat earthworms, spiders, snails, salamanders, mice, moles, voles, and even other Northern short-tailed shrews. They have to eat three times their body weight every day to stay alive. They rarely come above ground for very long, only to hunt at sunset or relieve themselves, which they do in a kind of designated latrine area. Despite spending their lives underground, their predation rate—meaning not how much they get but how much they get got—is high. Some think only about six percent of shrews make it to the next year. And I doubt that factors in the ones unlucky enough to encounter three year-olds with pink soccer balls or their indecisive fathers, squeamish about doing what needs to be done.
What is it daddy? My son was still saying. I told him to get the soccer ball. When he was distracted, I gave my wife a look and she gave one back to me. Then I watched the poor animal disappear into the woodpile. I just couldn’t bring myself do it. Not with my son watching.
Once, my son and I found a fresh dead yellow warbler on the path beside our house. We talked about death and we covered the bird with a cereal bowl so we could talk about it more later after we got back from the beach. I have never shied away from talking about death with him. Our german shepherd was there then she wasn’t. It seems better to have always known about death than to not know and then one day know. But the shrew was different. In that moment, I judged it something he should not see, something he should be protected from entirely. I don’t mean me killing the animal—although that’s not great—I didn’t want him to know what he had done.
Sometimes I think about parenting as a controlled lie. We use our own bodies to hold back a flood of injustice, confusion, uncertainty, questions to which there are no answers, and funnel it all into an eyedropper, so that our children can consume it in non-lethal doses. Maybe causing some local itching and redness, but nothing more.
Everything dies, that’s easy. But that you are capable of causing suffering—suffering for which there is no antidote or solution—that’s harder to talk about. But probably also better to have always known than to not know, then know.
My son picked up the soccer ball. I sat next to my wife on the patio sofa. Those were really good bounces, I said. Let’s see that again.
Written and read by Peter Lang-Stanton. Edited by Andrew Cominelli. Thanks to Steven Jackson and Pat Walters. Music in this episode is by Cue Shop.
Antlers is Maine’s Audio Magazine. Email us at antlers.show@gmail.com or message us on Substack.
