Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

The Mouse and the Snake

Plenty of animals had pets, but few were more devoted than the mouse, who owned a baby corn snake-“A rescue snake,�� she’d be quick to inform you. This made it sound like he’d been snatched from the jaws of a raccoon, but what she’d really rescued him from was a life without her love. And what sort of a life would that have been?

“I saw him hatching from his little egg and knew right then that I had to save him,” she was fond of saying. “I mean, look at that face! How could I have said no!” The snake would flick his split ribbon of tongue, and his mistress would dandle the scales beneath his chin. “He’s saying, ‘Hello, new friend. Nice to meet you!’ ”

But the friends weren’t so sure. When the serpent coiled, they jumped and fretted, reactions that left the mouse feeling almost unbelievably special-exotic, really, which was different from eccentric. To qualify for the latter, all you needed was a turban and an affinity for ridiculously large beads or the color purple. To be exotic, on the other hand, one had to think not just outside the box but outside the world of boxes.

“You’re not afraid of my snake,” the mouse would insist. “You’re afraid of the idea of him. Why, this little fellow wouldn’t strike if his life depended on it. Haven’t I explained that?” She’d then describe how he slept at the foot of her bed and woke her each morning with a kiss. “He says, ‘Get up, Mommy. It’s time to start the day!’ ”

The snake was the smartest, the handsomest, the most thoughtful creature that had ever lived. The way he lay in the sun or stared dumbly into space for hours on end-it was uncanny. “He thinks he’s one of us,” the mouse told her friends, who responded with increasingly forced smiles. In time she stopped using the word “pet,” as it seemed demeaning. The term “to own” was banished as well, as it made it sound as though she were keeping him against his will, like a firefly trapped in a jar. “He’s a reptile companion,” she took to saying, and thus, in time, he became her only companion.

This suited the mouse just fine. “I never had anything in common with them anyway,” she said. “Not even the ones my own age.” The snake blinked as if to say, All we need is each other, and the mouse reached out to hug his slender neck. It was almost spooky how like-minded they were: On the weather, on the all-important hoard or binge question, the two were most definitely on the same page. Both liked weekends, both hated owls; their opinions differed only when it came to food. “Won’t you at least try a bit of grain?” the mouse had asked when the snake was very young. He wouldn’t, though, preferring instead a live baby toad. How he could eat these things was beyond her. She’d taken a bite once, just to see what it was like, and the ghost of it, viscous and fishy, had lingered in her mouth for days.

You couldn’t expect a youngster, especially such a vulnerable one, to hunt his own food, and so the mouse did it for him. Aside from baby toads, she’d fetched him a robin’s egg and a very young mole, which, like everything else, he ate whole. “My goodness,” she said. “Slow down. Taste!”

In those first few months, their lunch was followed by a speech-therapy session. “Can you say, ‘Hello, mouse friend’? Can you say, ‘I love you’?”

Eventually she saw the chauvinism of her attempt. Why should he learn to speak like a rodent? Why not the other way around? Hence she made it her business to try and master snake. After weeks of getting nowhere she split her tongue with a razor. This didn’t make it any easier to communicate, but it did give them something else in common.

The two were in front of the fireplace one afternoon, softly hissing at each other, when someone knocked on the door. It was a toad, and after a great sigh at the inconvenience, the mouse stepped onto the front stoop to greet her. Even without the mimeographed flyers under her arm, anyone could have guessed why she was here: it was that “long-suffering mother” look so common to amphibians, who had children by the thousands and then fell apart when a handful were sacrificed to a higher cause.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you this way,” the toad said, “but a few of my babies has taken off and I’m just about at my wit’s end.” She blew her nose into her open palm, then wiped the snotty hand against her thigh. “They’s girls as well as boys. Nine in all, and wasn’t a one of them old enough to fend for themselves.”

It was this last part that tested the mouse’s patience-fend for themselves-as if a toad needed any particular training. They hatched, they opened their eyes, and then they hopped around, each one as graceless and unappealing as a stone.

“Well,” the mouse said, “if you were that concerned for the safety of your children, you probably should have kept an eye on them.”

“But I did,” wept the toad. “They was just outside, playing in the yard, like youngsters do.”

Playing indeed, thought the mouse, and she recalled the patch of sandy soil, bare but for a single, withered dandelion. The area bordered a thicket of tall ferns, and that was where she had hidden herself and lured the listless, gullible children with the promise of cluster flies. If they hadn’t been starving, and possibly brain damaged due to their upbringing, they wouldn’t have so blindly followed her. So really, wasn’t this the toad’s fault? Where was her pity when flies came to the door, asking about their missing babies? Was an insect’s mother love any less worthy than an amphibian’s? And wasn’t the snake a baby as well, as cute and innocent and deserving of protection as any other living creature?

It pained the mouse to realize that, while he’d always be adorable, her companion was not the little one he had been. In the months since she’d rescued him, he’d grown almost five inches, and there seemed to be no stopping him. Underage toads would not suffice for much longer, and so the mouse accepted a leaflet and studied it for a moment. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “How’s about I keep my eyes open, and you check back with me in, oh, say, about two weeks or so. How does that sound?”

A few days later there came another knock, this time from a mole. “I’m wondering,” she asked, “if you’ve by any chance seen my daughter?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the mouse said. “What did she look like?”

The mole shrugged. “Don’t know exactly. I guess most likely she looked like me but smaller.”

“It’s a shame when things you love go missing,” the mouse said. “Take these grubs, for instance. I had a whole colony living in my backyard, darlings, every one. And just so smart you couldn’t keep up with them. One minute they were there, and the next thing I knew they’d taken off-no note or anything.”

Her visitor looked at the ground for a moment, and the mouse thought, Exactly. If awards were given to the world’s biggest hypocrites, you’d be hard-pressed to choose between the moles and the toads.

“To answer your question, I did meet a little mole,” the mouse said. “A girl it was, said she’d run away from home and asked if she could come live with me for a while. I told her, ‘Well, maybe you should think it over and not be so rash.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you see how you feel in a month, and then come back?’ ”

“A month!” wailed the mole.

“That’s what I told her, so why don’t you do the same? If your daughter is here, I’ll keep her for you, and if not, at least you tried.”

Off went the mole, buoyed with hope, and the mouse stepped back into her house. “Idiot,” she whispered. The snake lifted its flat head off the carpet, and she explained that from now on, his meals would deliver themselves. “That’s all the more time we can spend together,” she said. “Would you like that, baby? I know you would.”

Out slid the snake’s forked tongue, and she thought again that she had never seen such a beautiful creature. Smart too. Beautiful and smart, and above all loyal.

A month later the mole was back. She stood at the door, knocking politely, and just as she began pounding, the toad hopped by. “If you’re looking for that mouse, I think you can probably forget it,” she called.

The mole whirled around and squinted.

“I came by two weeks ago and did just what you’re doing. Knocked on that door till I just about busted it, but didn’t nobody answer. Then I talked to some squirrels yonder, and they said there hadn’t been smoke out the chimney since the beginning of the month. Strange, they said, because that mouse always had a fire going, even in summer. Their guess and mine too is that she took off, maybe found a mate or something. You know how mice are-anything for a little affection.”

The mole, distressed, spilled out the story of her missing child. The toad did the same. But had they not wept and commiserated, had they instead put their ears to the door, they might have heard the snake, his belly full of unconditional love, banging to be let out.

The Parenting Storks

The precocious stork was only two weeks old when he asked where babies come from.

“Goodness,” said his mother. “I mean, golly, that’s quite some question.” She considered herself to be as modern as anyone, but didn’t you have to draw the line somewhere? “Let me get back to you on that,” she said, and she shoved a herring down his throat with a bit more force than usual.

Later that day the mother stork repeated the conversation to her sister, who also had a recently born chick. She meant it as a Don’t kids say the darnedest things type of story and was unprepared for the reaction she got.

“Your only son came to you for answers, and you didn’t give them to him?”

“Well, of course I didn’t,” the stork said. “Why, he’s just a baby himself. How can he be expected to understand something so complicated?”

“So children should be put off or, even worse, lied to?”

“Until they’re old enough, sure.”

“So we lie and we lie and then one day they’re just supposed to believe us?”

“That’s how it was with our family, and I never felt particularly traumatized,” the stork said. “Besides, they’re not lies so much as stories. There’s a difference.”

“Oh, is there?” spat her sister, surprised at how angry this was making her. “Give me an example.”

The stork squinted over the surrounding rooftops until something came to her. “All right. I remember seeing my first full moon and being told by Granddad that it was a distant natural satellite formed billions of years ago. And I believed it for the longest time until I learned the truth.”

“The truth?” her sister said.

“God made it,” announced the stork.

Her sister felt suddenly ill. “Who?”

“God,” the stork repeated. “He made the world and the heavens, all of it out of dust and willpower, and in less than a week! I overheard a cardinal talking about him on top of the cathedral in the square, and it was really quite instructive.”

“So is that who brings the babies? God?”

“Lord no,” the stork said. “Babies are brought by mice.”

It took a moment before her sister could speak. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “our babies are huge, so how on earth-”

“These are special mice,” the stork explained. “Capable of lifting things much heavier than themselves. They hide until you lay your eggs, see, and then, when your back is turned, they slip the chicks inside.”

“But we build our nests on chimney tops,” the sister said. “How could a little mouse-a mouse carrying a live, vivacious newborn-climb that high? And how would he hold the chick while he did it?”

“Ever hear of magic pockets?” the stork asked.

“Magic mice pockets, sure,” her sister said, and she wondered how anyone so gullible could manage to feed herself, much less build a nest and raise a child. “And where exactly did you get this information?”

“Oh,” said the stork, “just this guy I’ve been having sex with.”

Now it was the sister’s turn to stare over the rooftops. “I know,” she said. “Why not tell your son that’s where babies come from-sex. It’s crazy, I know, but maybe it will tide him over until he’s old enough to grasp that whole magic-mouse concept.”

“You think so?”

“I do,” her sister said.

The stork flew off, and her sister, shaken, watched her go. They’d both had the same parents and had both left the nest at roughly the same time. They lived in the same town and drank the same water, so how was it that she herself had turned out to be so smart, while her poor sister was so confused?

With the conversation still fresh in her mind, she returned to her own child, a female born ten days earlier. The chick opened her beak for food, and the stork sighed. “I know you’re hungry, but Mother’s had an exhausting afternoon and needs to recharge her batteries before she puts on her slave hat.” She picked a few feathers out of the nest and flicked them over the edge. “Do you want to know why Mommy’s exhausted?”

The child opened her beak even wider, and the stork let out a moan. “It really wouldn’t hurt you to take an interest in others,” she said. “I tell you I’m depressed, I tell you I feel cornered and lonely, and your response is ‘Fine. Now feed me,’ which is actually very insensitive of you. All mothers feel unconditional love for their children, but there’s a timer on it, all right. It doesn’t last forever, especially when you’re selfish.”

The child closed her beak.

“Mommy’s depressed because your cousin wanted to know where babies come from. Now, this is all perfectly natural for someone your age-nothing at all to be ashamed of. Sex is a beautiful and important part of life, I explained that to you last week, when we discussed your father’s infidelity. Remember we talked about Daddy’s cheating? I told you that there were good lovers and bad ones and that your father is pathologically in-attentive to the needs of his partners. I said that you were not conceived of mutual orgasm and that it probably affected your ability to empathize, remember?”

A crow flew by, and, keeping her head perfectly still, the child followed it with her eyes.

“It’s caring too deeply that has gotten me depressed, not about you so much as your aunt, who told me with great authority that babies are brought by mice.”

The child’s eyes widened.

“That was my reaction as well,” said the stork. She looked at her daughter and, for the first time in days, felt a splinter of hope. Then, deciding she was hungry, she flew off in search of food.

The chick watched her go and wished once again that she had a brother or sister, someone, anyone, besides her mother, who never for one moment stopped talking about herself. She’d thought since birth that she was fated to be an only child, but maybe the mice could change that. The question was: How did they work? Did they visit every nest in turn? Was it possible that they took requests and would come when charmed or summoned? The chick leaned over the edge of the nest, hoping to see one of these mice and call out to it. Then she leaned out a little farther.