On the 5th of August, a small, charming looking woodmouse stood in a field.
On the 8th of August, a different woodmouse, who looked a little less charming, perhaps, stood in a clearing.
What occurred on the 8th of August is interesting, to my mind, only in its relation to what occurred on the 5th of August. On the 8th of August, a woodmouse, standing in a wide clearing– mind you, a clearing to a woodmouse is a patch of thinned grass –under the moonlight, stabbed an earthworm to death. Worms, it should be remembered, can be rather ferocious when one is the size of a woodmouse. It takes a particular sort of woodmouse, with a particular sort of will, to stab a worm to death. One of these sorts of woodmice stood in a clearing on the 8th of August. And none of that is, to my mind, at all meaningful or interesting besides in its relationship to what occurred on the 5th of August.
What happened on the 5th of August was this:
A woodmouse stood in a field.
Now, those among my readers who are themselves woodmice have already gasped aloud, so unheard of is such a thing. Woodmice do not stand in fields. At best, woodmice skitter across fields on tawny little paws, noiselessly, and only with the utmost reluctance. Fields are not woods, and for this reason, woodmice do not, as a general rule, indulge them.
This woodmouse did not stand in the field for long: they had pranced through it for a brief moment, frolicked in it for some scant time, and for a fraction of a second, this woodmouse turned to regard the tree line. Her smiling eyes, which were large, even for a woodmouse, and were browner than the darkest patch of her fur, locked for an instant upon the eyes of her friend, who stood in the trees, biting his overbitten nails with overdulled and pearlescent teeth. It is very rare for a woodmouse to have pearlescent teeth. I encourage you, next time you go into the world, count how many humans you see with pearlescent teeth. Very few. And woodmice do not have dentistry.
The woodmouse in the field looked lovingly at the woodmouse in the trees for one instant; an instant is exactly the period of time it takes to memorize a face, by the by. And then, with no fanfare at all, no drama, with nothing but abject horror, a hawk seized upon her shoulders, and took her away.
I need not tell you what the hawk did to this poor woodmouse. It is common knowledge what hawks do to woodmice, even among woodmice, and they are a very naive people. I will not dwell on how she reacted. It was a horrifying thing to behold. I will tell you, this woodmouse knew at once that she was dead. She was flown the entire distance to the hawk’s nest, and did not at one moment so much as twitch. Resignation is an incredible thing.
The gentlemouse on the ground, however, was not of the sort to resign. We have seen already how he is a bit of a nervous sort: no man who lives life fully can have teeth like does this woodmouse. If he lived life at all, he did so through his books— which were carved with woodmice nails on old tree bark, as all woodmouse books were in those days —and through his lovely friend, sunshine incarnated in mouse form, who sailed now through the air above him.
The woodmouse ran.
He ran for longer than any woodmouse has ever run, and I do truly mean that: hawks are fast creatures, with wide demesnes, and this young gentlemouse tracked this hawk all the way to their nest. He was not a martial sort of mouse. I do not believe he had ever run at all, before. But now, here runs the woodmouse, through fields, through woods, to the Hawktree.
The Hawktree does not stand today. It was cut down several years ago and turned into stirring sticks for coffee. But in those days, the Hawktree was a towering, terrifying thing. It did not leaf, but neither was it dead; when a storm shook one branch from the tree, two more rose, gnarled and hateful, to take its place. It was a gargantuan sort of tree, and stood so tall over the rest of the wood that I dare say the hawk who inhabited it may have seen our woodmice from his bedroom. And never have you seen a blacker tree: it was an overpowering, gaping black— the Hawktree was not there at night. One could walk to it, put their hand upon it, feel its hideous pulse, but it was not there. There was no light in the world bright enough to reveal the Hawktree at night.
The hawk touched upon it easily– it was his tree, after all –but the gentlemouse, upon arriving at its base, became suddenly aware of how far he had run, and how tired he had become. Woodmice are very easily tired, and gentlemice even more so. They spend most of their leisure time riding about their estates, hunting isopods and caterpillars, on the back of any hare too polite to refuse them. And even that was too exerting for this particular, scholarly sort of woodmouse. At the foot of the Hawktree, his lungs began to scream, and his muscles began to scream, and, although he did not know it at the time, he had begun to scream himself. The woodmouse collapsed there at the foot of the Hawktree, and screamed. It was not any scream of terror; the woodmouse screamed with grief alone. So exhausted was he that he was conscious of nothing. It takes a half dozen minutes for a hawk to have their fill of a woodmouse. For a half dozen minutes, the gentlemouse screamed until his throat was brightly raw. He did not perceive anything, not truly, for a half dozen minutes.
At the close of a half dozen minutes, an unspeakable thing was tossed carelessly from the nest atop the Hawktree, and landed just beside the gentlemouse. It is not an imaginable thing, what the woodmouse saw when he opened his eyes. For our mutual comfort, and out of respect towards the dead, I will not dwell on it. I merely encourage you to remember that there are creatures in the world to which you are considered meat. This is what the woodmouse was forced to remember when he opened his eyes beneath the Hawktree and found That there. He did not know where to look: he could not look ahead of him. There was That there. He could not close his eyes: there was That there, also. He looked left, and right, and all there was to see was the endless brush surrounding the Hawktree. It was endless in the sort of way that left his mind empty: That rushed to fill the empty spaces like water. The woodmouse looked up, in much the same way as a man does when he prays. The woodmouse did not believe in prayer. He looked up, and there, peering over the edge of his nest, was a grinning hawk. There was very little cruelty about the smile. The joy was cruel, surely, but the smile was earnest, and contented, and genuine. There was nothing abrasive in the hawk. There is a certain type of pleasure which is more impersonal than business. He was simply happy, and when the eyes of the woodmouse met his, empty and broken, his happiness increased tenfold, and the edges of his beak creaked with the strain.
The woodmouse saw this, and the woodmouse took what remained of his friend, and left.
He returned to the field. She had wanted to dance with the wildflowers; he had been too afraid. The woodmouse buried That under the swaying daisies without a word. He cleaned himself in the river, and returned to his woodmouse estate. He spoke to noone. He went to bed. That was August the 5th.
On the day of August the 6th, the woodmouse was quite idle. He slept for the entirety of the day, or otherwise laid despondently in bed, and the smallfolk whispered about him, and it was very shortly August the 7th when the aching of his stomach roused him. The day passed as quickly as did our reference to it. There is nothing more to say about it. But let us take a moment and learn more about our woodmouse, while we picture him in a tranquil repose possible only through the previous day’s exhaustion– he would be having nightmares, if he had the energy for it. But here, he sleeps in complete oblivion. His unconsciousness is absolute. His teeth glint against what little sunlight filters through his leafwrought curtains. His tawny fur dances in the way of rippling grass as the sleeping woodmouse’s chest heaves. One envies him, for the moment. It is this way he should be remembered. Let us take an intermission to discuss the woodmouse.
Woodmice are born in litters. You may have known this already, but it is very important to consider it. Of our gentlemouse’s litter, he was the smallest, and among woodmice, this is a mixed blessing, for the smallest woodmouse is the most deft prowler, and yet there is a certain indignity in being a litter’s runt. He was not named. Runts never are, not among mousekind. I do not wish to go into the complexities of murine custom. Suffice it to say that, while the strongest littermates live the typified lives of gentlemice– go off to war with dormice, orchestrate plots, hunt isopods on hareback, and so on –in most every woodmouse family, the runt sits at home, and reads.
Reading is more dangerous than you may realize. One ill-chosen book can start one down the most destructive of paths. Our gentlemouse’s ill-chosen book, in the dawn of his youth, had been a woodmouse grimoire. Woodmice write many grimoires; I encourage you to imagine living as a woodmouse without a sense of magical wonder. It is a very difficult thing to do comfortably. They do not generally work– magic among woodmice is as elusive as it is among humans –but one can respect their effort. Our woodmouse read the grimoire in his father’s library first: it is the text he learned to read with, that is how deeply ingrained within him such ritualism was! He continued to read many more grimoires, and other such texts, and his father’s library in its entirety, twice, and then the libraries of his friends and neighbors, and he read through the deaths of brothers, of uncles, of his father, and one day, when he was not very old at all, the woodmouse looked up from his book, and he was the lord of Daunt– the estate upon which he had been born, and the estate upon which he had fancied to die.
The woodmouse looked back down, and continued reading.
From his childhood he had a friend, a kind, pleasant friend, a bubbly, sunny sort of friend. Past noon on August 7th, he dreams of her. He wakes with a start.
The woodmouse set to work at once.
He was an exceptionally neat mouse– gentlemice are always, you know, –and his servants adored him for it. But Daunt’s library was in disarray: book covers made of old treebark were adorned with scratched lists of herbs and quotes about the microcosm and macrocosm and so on; tables the size of acorns were so riddled with the gentlemouse’s prim writing that they looked as though they had been repainted; certain books are dented at the edges where the woodmouse had tossed them aside too carelessly. This all was seen by the smallfolk by the fading candlelight late into the evening of the 7th of August. Already, their master was gone.
All through the night he walked– he did not wish to tire his strength. The gentlemouse walked steadily. Like clockwork, every fifteen minutes (a more intimidating time for woodmice to walk), he sat and stared at the stars. The woodmouse walked all the way from Daunt to the Hawktree, and arrived, not by coincidence, not terribly long before midnight. He unloaded his bag, withdrew his chalk, and there, in a small clearing near the Hawktree, as the hawk slept above, he drew a circle. All around him were ancient monoliths of blackened stone, so old that the people who had placed them there were neither woodmouse nor dormouse: so ancient were these stones that they were erected where they stood by the precursor to both. This is where the woodmouse drew his circle. I know not if the woodmouse knew that a thousand years previous– when the Hawktree’s sire was young –his very ancestors had produced in the course of their murine rituals the red stains which darkened the center of the clearing. But this is where he drew his circle, a spidery thing of white chalk. The woodmouse removed a bundle from his bag, and a dark knife no bigger than a pushpin, and he placed the bundle just in front of him, and he knelt at the center of the circle, with the knife clutched to his chest. The woodmouse willed himself to still his trembling, and waited.
I encourage my reader to try an experiment, while we wait with our gentlemouse: go on a walk. That is not part of the experiment, and you should do it anyway, but first, go on a walk. Locate the plants mullein, spiderwort, and globethistle. Globethistle, which is a charming, round, generally indigo flower, is the most important. This is, I suspect, because they smell like rot when they are blooming. If you can not find the others, globethistle alone is worth a try. Cut these plants, just above where the individual shoots separate from the stem– this is for their health, you see –and take them home with you. Dry them in any method you prefer, tie them together with twine, and place it in your backyard.
You will notice, when you awake the next morning, that your bundle is swarming with earthworms.
Our woodmouse did a similar thing.
I do not know how long he waited, but he did so in the greatest stillness. He was terrified; our woodmouse is not the martial sort. But he waited until he heard the rustling all around him.
I ask you for a minute to forget everything that it is you think you know regarding earthworms. Forget desiccated creatures on sidewalks, and writhing bodies in the mouths of birds, and imagine you are a woodmouse. Imagine, if you will, fighting a buck. It is harder than you are imagining. All around the woodmouse swarm earthworms; they are skittish creatures, yes, but woodmice are skittish also. He begs his heart to beat quieter. The rustling intensifies on every side, and the woodmouse forces his eyes to stay open. A long, pink, humming earthworm sniffs the bundle in front of the woodmouse experimentally. He is not an inch away from him, but for a woodmouse, that is too far. The woodmouse waits. The earthworm crawls forward, painfully slowly, and the woodmouse, praying, trembling, sweating, issues the war cry that some part of his heart distantly remembers. He falls upon the worm, and so the struggle begins!
You may not think it particularly epic. It was an earthworm and a woodmouse wrestling in a thin patch of grass. The woodmouse, however, would care nothing for what you think. He is stabbing, over and over, an earthworm, in a battle where neither side can afford an inch of ground. The earthworm’s fellows scatter into the forest, and now it is just the grunting of the woodmouse, and the thrumming heat of the earthworm, and under the moonlight, it is a battle more epic than any fought before. The earthworm whips themselves about with all the furious rage of an angry bull, and clinging to what is either the worm’s neck or waist, the woodmouse screams with all the ferocious hatred that had festered within him, and I swear to you, when he brought his knife down into one of the earthworm’s hearts, he saw, as literally as you see these words, he saw his knife entering the breast of the hawk.
The loss of even one heart dampens the resolve of any creature, and the earthworm’s thrashing grows weaker and weaker. He and the woodmouse lay together on the cold stone. The earthworm dies wretchedly in his arms. This is what happened on the 8th of August. Now is the stroke of midnight. Now it is the 9th. Now the woodmouse paints himself and the cold stone with the earthworm’s blood. He removes their stomach, and drinks the contents. He looks up to the moon, and there, under the moonlight, the Woodmouse says his spell.
Woodmice spells are curious. They are not spoken in Woodmouse, which is an odd, chittering little language. They are spoken in the same language as speaks the wind. It is important, when using a spell, to be mutually intelligible with wind. The woodmouse blows and rustles and whistles, and the wind hears him, and the wind laughs, and above the Woodmouse, the moon blinks, once, slowly and lazily, like a cat’s eye. The woodmouse closes his eyes, and stands there, smiling, beneath the open sky, beneath the Hawktree.
If our hawk were smarter, I think he may have thought twice of eating this particular woodmouse, who was standing perfectly still, smelling as he did, so near to the hawk’s fortress. On the 9th of August, our hawk awoke, and took his breakfast with the untroubled delight of all true villains. He picked up this odd little mouse, and ate him messily atop the Hawktree. He satiated himself, and his easy smile did not fall until he regarded the intact face of that woodmouse. There, beneath the gentlemouse’s wide, laughing eyes, was a grin so wide that the edges of the woodmouse’s mouth had begun to bruise. The smile fixed on that mangled corpse was not a cruel one, oh no! Of course not! It was an easy, amicable, joyful, hawkish smile.
When the Hawktree was cut down several years ago, and turned into stirring sticks for coffee, they found, huddled into a derelict nest at its very top, the oldest, sickest bird they had ever seen. The hawk they found was minute and shriveled and featherless, and cold to the touch, and they threw the body haphazardly into the brush with no further thought. There, drawing his aged wings closer around himself to keep out the cold, the hawk watched his ruined tree as they took it away. I will tell you something curious about this hawk: this hawk, who was cast beneath the Hawktree, had laid in that Hawktree since before man made stirring sticks for coffee. For several frigid winters, and several blistering summers since, the hawk laid there in the brush, trembling in his nakedness. The hawk lays, even now, shuddering against the cold, in the withering brush that surrounds the shattered stump of the Hawktree.