I am on vacation, camping out west, a trip that mirrors one I took a decade ago to see Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. They are worth seeing twice.
I could say many things about what I’ve seen, but I would like to tell you about this one thing for now.
Driving near Granite Creek Campground in Bridger-Teton National Forest, I saw a tiny thing scurry across the gravel road in front of me, no bigger than a pebble. After imagining it to be an unpleasant thing, a fast moving spider thing perhaps (my worst nightmare), he came into clearer view.
He looked like a mouse, but a mouse in miniature; perhaps a third the size of a regular house mouse, which are already tiny things.
I slowed to give him room and time to get to where he was going — the other side, no doubt, but in the noise and confusion of my truck bearing down, he doubled back, dodging pieces of gravel that must have seemed like boulders to him. Then he changed his little mind again and stopped near the roadside, allowing me enough room to pass.
I hit the brakes and rolled my window down to get a better look, and I believe that as I looked down at him, he looked up.
And later, telling this same tale from his point of view:
“I had traversed the rocky plain where the rumbling beasts often pass, and riding not so much on as within the monster sat another creature: two beady eyes set within a round and hairless sphere floating there above me. He stopped and looked down from a great height and I must admit I froze, terrified and expectant of a horrible fate — a moment that felt like eternity!
Yet he made no move except to look down upon me. Snapping out of it suddenly, I fled for my life into the foliage. And what did he do? He simply looked after me and from between the yellowed teeth of his maw — large enough to eat 50 of us in one bite, I can assure you — came a not unpleasant sound as though he were attempting to communicate with me. It sounded like — and you all know I’m not great at impressions, so don’t laugh — but it sounded like, “Whey ya goin little buddy? Ok, see ya later.” And then his own beast roared to life and he sped away.
I have nothing more to tell.”
He was fast. In his world, he was fast, his little legs so short that there was no light between his soft underbelly and the ground he moved along like a soft and fuzzy hovercraft. And yet, unseen, those legs must have worked. How quickly must four little digits with a combined length of a fingernail move to propel him along at a pace equivalent to man’s great stride. Magnify this creature 90,000 times and he would make a horse look indistinguishable from a frozen monument to the pale heroism of man and animal’s partnerships in those olden battles that this mouse knows are minor in comparison to what he would have been capable of if given their size, if only he were a little bit taller.
What can that little thing teach me? His world small — to me — a lifetime entirely within this forest, and likely entirely within an area of it that I might have walked all throughout as part of my morning trip to the campground outhouse.
And all around us the mountains, huge and hard and immovable things, precursors to the grander tetons in the park proper, some miles north of here, where I will head tomorrow.
And does that mouse (he was likely a shrew, America’s smallest mammal!) ever wonder why, what is the purpose of my little life here in the forest? Nosing around among the fallen pines, several months old now and more than halfway through my life, have I lived as well as I could have? Were these sticks and moss I gathered for my nest of the best quality, or were they just the nearest? Have I taken the right path? Is there still time to look back while moving forward?
And looking up he remembers, and he thinks, Yes, yes, there is still time. (There will be no taming of this wild shrew!)
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