The Hidden Life of Deer Read online

  Mice can sing? They can and they do. One day, before my mother came to live with me, I visited her in her house in Cambridge. My father was no longer living, and the big empty house was quiet—only my mother and her elderly orange cat were in it, and the mice who lived in the basement. The cat had given up mousing because he had lost some of his teeth, but even so, the mice were seldom in evidence. Like all such mice, they would have had a colony with thirty or forty members gathered into family groups of several grown females and their children, a few young males with little or no authority, and a dominant male with much authority. If mice from other colonies were to appear, the mice of my mother’s colony would massacre them or drive them off. Thus it seems safe to say that my mother’s environment, friendly to animals and very stable, would have had just one regular, functional colony of mice numbering somewhere around forty or even fifty. Now and then we’d see one run across the floor. My mother might put down a little piece of cheese. The mouse would come back in the dark and take it.

  On this particular day, she had opened the front door to let me in, and we were standing together in her hallway. Just then, we heard birdsong, or thought we did. It was coming from her kitchen. A bird in the house, not flying in panic against the windows but singing? We went to the kitchen, and there we saw a mouse sitting upright at the edge of the counter with his front paws crooked against his chest, singing one of the most beautiful songs that we had ever heard. I had no idea that mice could sing, and for as long as I live, I will never forget it. For a moment he didn’t see us and kept on singing. Then he saw us, jumped down to the floor, and ran.

  I am fascinated with mice for many reasons, but especially because they sing. They sing for the same reason that wolves and birds do, a reminder to others not to trespass, and perhaps for other reasons too. But they don’t sing often, or not in my experience. I’ve heard from other people of other mice singing, but in a lifetime of living in houses with mice in them, I heard only that one song.

  As for two-parent families, I once caught a pair of house mice and put them in a big aquarium. They soon had six children. It is easy enough to identify gender in adult mice, so I was surprised to see the father taking care of the infants while the mother occupied herself nearby. I hadn’t expected that. As soon as the infants grew a little fur, they began to move around, but this worried their father, and he would pile them all together in a heap and spread himself on top of them, covering them all as best he could, with his arms and legs stretched over their bodies. Why? It doesn’t take much to overcool an infant mouse, so most likely he was trying to keep them warm. If one of them managed to wiggle away, he would quickly drag it back to the pile of its siblings and spread himself over them again. When the infants were old enough I tipped the aquarium gently on its side to give the group the choice of staying or leaving, and they left. I expect they rejoined their colony, wherever it was. I was a bit surprised, however, that they never returned to the aquarium for food, although I left it on its side with food in it. But they never came back to the scene of their captivity, not even for peanuts and cheese.

  We have always had mice in our house and in my office—two kinds, the gray, foreign, house mice and the red-brown, indigenous white-footed mice—so it would seem we had more than one colony. However, they all stayed mainly out of sight, or they did while a certain cat was in residence. His name was Pula and he was a champion mouser. Unfortunately, he was also an occasional birder, although not in the league of the great James Audubon, whose collection of specimens enabled his art. And as far as I’m concerned, the cat had the high ground because he ate his victims while Audubon just drew pictures of them. Anyway, when Pula wasn’t mousing, he was traveling, and sometimes he didn’t come home before dark. Then I’d go looking for him in the car, and if I saw him by the roadside, as I often did, I’d pick him up and bring him back with me. I thought he appreciated this. I thought he was glad to be retrieved and didn’t have to walk home alone when the coyotes and the fishers were out hunting. But now I’m not sure. One day, to learn what he was doing when he wasn’t with us, I fitted him with a little radio collar. To my sorrow, I found he was visiting other families up and down the road in search of a home that was more to his liking. Perhaps because of personality clashes with our other cats, he had decided to move on.

  At last, after numerous visits and much consideration, he chose a family about a mile away. Their elderly cat was no longer living, so they had no cats, which may be why Pula favored them. They liked Pula and took him in. For many years after that, I’d see him at the roadside when I drove by at night, and I’d stop and get out of the car. He always recognized me, and he’d hurry over for a visit, purring, but if I tried to pick him up he’d make an almost inaudible growl, just a suggestion, to tell me I should put him down and not try any more to take him home with me. Like the mouse with the dimmer switch, he wanted to control his own life. At the time of this writing, I still see him occasionally by the road at night and we have our little visit.

  As has been said, while Pula lived among us, the mice stayed in the walls. If they were unwise enough to come out, he caught them. Our other cats were getting on in years and didn’t bother very much about the mice, so after Pula moved away, we began to see mice often and found their droppings in the desk in my office and in the kitchen drawers. Without Pula to help me, I had to clean the drawers almost every day. I set traps, but those particular mice were so accomplished that they could eat the bait without springing the trap. Of all the mice that lived in our house, I managed to trap just one. So when Pula and I would stand together in the dark by the roadside while light streamed from the windows of his new home, I would feel a twinge of envy, knowing that those people were mouse-free and we weren’t, and all because this cat knew his own mind. He continued to like me well enough—he always welcomed me when I’d see him at the roadside—and because his new family let him come and go as he pleased, he could easily have come back to our house if he wished. I hoped he would. But he did not. His decision had been final.

  After that, thanks to me and also, perhaps, to Pula’s absence, as he might possibly have been able to help with the situation, we had a truly major tragedy. What led up to it was an event involving my parrots. They lived in my office in giant cages with bars about an inch apart, so when, one night, a raccoon came in through the dog door, he couldn’t touch the birds, but he could reach into their dishes for their uneaten food. Something about him so panicked my macaw that she went into hysterics, beating her wings and screaming so loudly that I heard her from the house and came running. The raccoon was gone but the macaw was inconsolable. She had one panic attack after another, wildly hysterical and trying to bite, and it was me, my husband, and the dogs who set her off. Although she had shared the one-room office with the dogs and me ever since her adolescence, and although I unfailingly cared for her every day, she seemed not to know any of us. I still had to feed her, of course, and give her water, and luckily the cage had little doors for the dishes so I didn’t have to get inside with her. I was afraid that if I did, either she would bite me so badly that I’d lose an eye or a finger, or she would literally be frightened to death.

  During the second day of the macaw’s intermittent hysterics, my African grey parrot flew to the top of her cage. She didn’t like anything on top of her cage and didn’t particularly like him but on that occasion, she more or less ignored him. Thinking that she was perhaps okay by then, I tried again to approach her. But again she went into hysterics. Not until the third day was she calm enough to let me near her, and by then I thought I knew what this was all about. My macaw understood that the people, the dogs, and the raccoon were the same kind of creature. All of us were mammals, thus more like one another than we were like her. Nor were we like the other parrot, who wasn’t the same species as she was but was nevertheless a bird. And I wasn’t. I belonged to a Class of dangerous animals and in her eyes was a kind of raccoon.

 
I was deeply impressed. I’ve met kids in the local high school who couldn’t reach that level of taxonomy, or not without a lot of prompting. The people who think that animals lack cognition should revisit their views.

  The episode with the raccoon played a brief but important role in the tragedy I generated and for which I cannot forgive myself, when a colony of rats moved into the wood storage shed that adjoins my office. It’s in a building that was the barn of the original farmhouse when my father bought the land, and although the old barn was reconstructed, it kept some of its original populations. It’s attic was once a refugium for flies, for instance, many thousands of whom would shelter inside it in winter. As usual, I didn’t know just what kind of flies they were, but they looked like houseflies. They’d be pretty much dormant, of course, and never bothered anybody, and in the spring, they would leave. All summer we’d know nothing about them—we didn’t have flies in the house, or not many, and nothing much was lying around outside that would attract them, as our garbage was contained and the dog droppings were disposed of, but as soon as the weather got cold, the flies would be back in their multitudes, knowing that winter was coming and they needed shelter to live. They’d been using the attic for a very long time—they were there in their numbers when I was a child, and probably long before that. The refugia of houseflies are ancestral. They are not abandoned unless something bad happens. And it did. My dogs got fleas, and I decided to fumigate the office, and though I killed the fleas, I killed the flies too, and never again was my office a refugium. I would have welcomed flies if more came back, but though there were plenty of flies in New Hampshire, perhaps using other barns as winter refugia, none were still living who knew about mine. I had wiped out a coordinated population. I didn’t mean to—I was just thoughtless—and it was tragic. But it wasn’t as bad as what happened after that.

  I first learned of the rats from their droppings, which I found on the floor near the parrots’ cages. I was very busy and didn’t think much of it—not being Olaus Murie, I didn’t know the difference between the droppings of a wood rat and those of a brown rat and wouldn’t have worried if I did. I was always finding something like those droppings because my office is porous and often enough small creatures come in through the various cracks and holes. A few days later I was working late. My dogs were lying beside me when one of them suddenly leaped to her feet and ran across the room, and when I looked, I saw a small rat disappear in the crack behind the chimney. A brown rat! So that was the kind of rat that left the droppings, and there wasn’t just one—the droppings were too many. Obviously, there were quite a few rats, perhaps a small colony. I then began to worry about the parrots, especially the macaw with her phobia about mammals. I wished for Pula. If he were with us, he would catch some rats and frighten off the others. But he had lent his hunting skills to others far away.

  So, although my other cats were not as dedicated as Pula, they were the only cats we had, and I decided to leave them in my office for the night. But in the morning, I couldn’t find them. Worried, I called them, but they didn’t answer and didn’t come. At last I found them squeezed behind the books on the upper bookshelves, hiding, and even when they saw me they didn’t want to come out. I realized they had been frightened out of their minds. Perhaps the rats were worse than I thought.

  The following night, I put the dogs in my office. I had a small cot there, and in the morning I found the dogs together on it, somewhat subdued, their ears slightly folded, their eyes almost accusing. They quietly got down and came to greet me, then silently went past me out the door in the manner of people who are politely trying to bypass an unpleasant situation. Obviously, we had a problem. I had brought the parrots their breakfast, and when I came to the macaw, she again became hysterical. She shrieked and threatened to bite. Stay away, you horrid thing, her manner said.

  If not for the animals of our family—the dogs, cats, and parrots who have no choice but to live with us—I would have let the rats come and go as they pleased. I would even have put out a little food for them. They would have gotten used to me and gone on about their business in my presence. I could have learned as much from them and about them as I was later to learn from the deer, if not more. But as things were, my first obligation was to my own animals, so the situation with the rats could not continue. Something had to be done. I closed the dog door and blocked all the holes I could find through which a rat might enter. In the morning, there were more droppings, some almost the size of kidney beans. So that didn’t work. Later that day I saw who made the larger droppings. I was working at my desk with the dogs nearby, when suddenly the skin prickled at the back of my neck and I looked up, saw my dogs sitting stiffly with their eyes wide, their ears high, and their fur bristling, and then saw, on the far side of the room, an enormous rat about eighteen inches long, tail included, who must have weighed upwards of one pound. I took him to be the alpha rat, the silverback of his group, and I began to understand the extent of the problem. Being very much smaller than most of their many predators and also fearless, rats have found the surprise attack to be useful, and if necessary they will fling themselves ferociously at their enemies before the enemies can collect their wits and respond. Perhaps something like this had happened with the dogs. They appeared to respect this rat. They certainly did not go after him as they had gone after the bear. The rat looked at me for a moment, perfectly calmly, then went behind the chimney. It would seem that the rats had reopened that particular hole.

  I told various people about the rats, and got all kinds of advice and warnings. The rats would destroy my books and chew through electric wires and set the building on fire. I had to get rid of them but wasn’t sure how. In the past, I had tried to discourage mice in my mother’s apartment by putting coyote urine (available commercially and used to keep deer from eating ornamental shrubs) behind her washing machine. It was a bad mistake. I don’t know if it discouraged the mice, but it overwhelmed us—the vapor from the urine was so strong it stung our eyes, and although I quickly did my best to clean it up we couldn’t use the apartment for a week.

  I planned to get a Havahart trap. But my advisers told me what I already knew, the rats would probably come back. I hated to do it, but I set a few conventional traps—the kind that crush the victim’s skull or break its neck—and these caught two of the smaller rats, but then no others, although the traps were sprung and the bait gone. As a last resort I put out poison. It comes in a small tray that you put on the floor. Mice and rats think it’s food and carry it to their nests, where they eat some and store the rest against a time when other food may not be available. In the morning, half the poison was gone.

  The next morning, the tray was empty. The next day I found a dead rat in my office. The day after that I found a large weasel, his mouth open in a grimace, his body contorted, lying dead on the lawn in front of my office. The day after that our neighbor Don found an enormous rat dead in the driveway. Not knowing why the rat had died, he threw the corpse in the field. When he told me about it I looked for the corpse but didn’t find it. Perhaps a coyote had found it first and had himself a meal. The rats were dead, the mice too, and the poison was spreading. I realized what I had done and tried to find where the rats had stored the rest of the poison, but I couldn’t. I tried to find more corpses, and I couldn’t. Evidently they too had been eaten. This meant that in the woods, there would soon be other corpses, but there was nothing I could do about that except cry.

  Truly, this was the worst thing that I have ever done, a serious crime, a multiple murder. Killing the flies was bad enough. This time I had killed my own kind—other mammals. Mindlessly, I had done to some of the co-owners of my land what serial killers do to people, and in a very cruel way at that. Judging from the appearance of the weasel, death by poison is nothing like a hunter’s bullet in the brain—it is horribly painful to the degree that those who are affected don’t hide, as do most animals in extremis, but go out in the open to
die.

  I would prefer not to say what I had done, rather than announce it in print. I was tempted to leave it out of the book, or to invent a happier story. The only reason I didn’t, other than that the book is nonfiction, is to tell whoever will listen how dangerous and destructive poison is, so that others may refrain from using it. It’s one thing if you live in the city and don’t mind causing horrible agony to animals. The animals you murder will probably not be eaten by other animals unless they are found by someone’s dog or cat. It’s another thing if you live in the country, because you will do what I did and spread this terrible death widely. And you’ll never know where it all ends. The weasels will eat the corpses of the rats, the coyotes will eat the corpses of the weasels, and who knows who will eat the corpses of the coyotes, or how long the death-food will last in their bodies. It could be a very long time.

  You cannot make up for the evil things you do—they’re there forever. You can only add better things to your list of deeds in hopes of creating some kind of cosmic balance. A few years after this disaster I put an easement on my land to preserve it, hopefully forever, for the plants and the wildlife, or in other words, for the co-owners of my land who survive me.

  I would like to say I placed the easement in atonement, but in fact, our family had been planning the easement for many years. It was a lengthy process and very expensive—the land must be surveyed and appraised, legal advice is required, legal documents must be filed, and the entity that takes the easement—in my case the Monadnock Conservancy with the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests as a backup in case the Monadnock Conservancy somehow disappears—requires a fund for supervising the land in perpetuity to make sure that whoever owns it is keeping the rules and not destroying the forest or building developments. The citizens of Peterborough, the town I live in, and of Greenfield, the next town over, where my land extends, have voted to create funds to help people such as myself with the expenses, which was fortunate. My husband and I could not afford to do this on our own. These funds are the best possible tools for conservation—to purchase large tracts of conservation land costs millions of dollars, while to help a landowner put an easement on the same amount of land costs only a few thousand dollars. The result is the same but with important differences. Land owned by a town generates no tax money, and taxpayers must support it if expenses arise. In contrast, land under easement pays taxes as before, and the landowner pays the expenses.