Praise Song for Mole Hands in Coyote Scat

It’s their hands that kill me every time. How hopefully I check the trail camera for a glimpse of the dear, nearsighted opossum resting her small pink fingers on the water dish I set out on a stump during droughts, the dainty way she holds the rim of the dish while she leans forward to drink. How careful I am not to let the dog outside when the squirrel, her nipples puffed from nursing, sits up on her hind legs and holds her thumbless hands close to her chest when she sees me at the back door. How still the deer mouse in the toolshed holds her own hands, for only the barest instant, when I open the door to flood the room with light. The deer mouse is the wild neighbor I see most fleetingly of all the fleet creatures who share our yard.

But I love the mole hands best of all. I delight in their absurd fleshy pinkness, six-fingered but so human, as though a child putting together a kit had attached the wrong parts to the mole’s velvet body. I love those hands, though I’ve only ever seen a mole in photos or in death, poisoned by a neighbor and crawled to the surface to die. Perhaps that heartbreak is why the photo I saw of little pink mole hands poking out of coyote scat didn’t break my heart.

Somebody was hungry. Somebody fed the hungry one.