It was Christmas morning, and time for the traditional feast for our flock of hens. As Tess chewed her celebratory rawhide in the house and Christopher slurped his hot mash in his pen, I brought the Ladies a big bowl of hot, fresh popcorn to start the holiday, as I always did. But on this morning, I was greeted with a sad surprise. One of my Ladies, a beloved older black-and-white hen of the heritage Dominique breed, was dead on the floor, her head wedged into a hole in the corner of the coop.

I stooped to lift the fallen chicken up by her scaly yellow legs. But I couldn’t. Something—or someone—had ahold of her head and wouldn’t let go. I pulled and pulled. Finally, her body came free. An instant later, out from the hole popped a white head smaller than a walnut, with coal-black eyes, a pink nose . . . and flecks of crimson blood on the white fur around its mouth. It was an ermine, a tiny weasel in its winter-white color phase. It stared directly into my eyes.

I had never seen one before. It was gorgeous. The ermine’s fur was the purest white I had ever seen, whiter than snow or cloud or sea foam—so white it seemed to glow, like the garment of an angel. No wonder kings trimmed their robes in ermine fur. But even more impressive was its gaze—a look so bold and fearless that it knocked the breath from my lungs. Here was a creature the length of my hand, who weighed little more than a handful of change, but who had come out of its hole expressly to challenge me even as I towered menacingly above. What are you doing with my chicken? those coal eyes said to me. Give it back!

Of course, I had been thinking it was my chicken. Like my friend had done with the first flock of hens she gave me, I had hand-raised this hen, as I had all of her sisters, from a fluffy chick still egg-shaped two days after hatching. Our chicks grow up in my home office, cheerfully perching on my lap and shoulders as I write, or racing around the floor after one another, spreading wood shavings and feather dust. They occasionally add to my prose by walking across my computer keyboard.

As a result of their upbringing, everyone in the flock was remarkably affectionate. After I had moved their headquarters from my office to their coop in the barn and they began their free-range careers in the yard, they would rush to mob Howard and me whenever we stepped outside. They made us feel like rock stars. Then they’d squat in front of us to be stroked or picked up and kissed on their combs. They’d hang out with Christopher Hogwood when he was out on his tether, sometimes stealing scraps. They were unperturbed by Tess, who was too focused on the Frisbee to chase them. They followed Howard and me as we did yard work, commenting constantly in their lilting chicken voices: Here I am. Where are you? Any worms? Oh, a bug! Over here . . . At night when I closed them into their coop, they’d fly up to their perches—each has a regular position, next to her best friends—and I’d stroke them and let their contented nighttime clucks and trills sweep over me like a lullaby.

The dead hen was one of the Ladies who’d been with us longest. She had helped to teach the younger chicks the parameters of our joint property with Kate, Jane, and Lila, warned the babies about crossing the street, called to them when she spotted a hawk. She was one who came most eagerly to be petted and fed, and had even taken to perching on the folding chairs beside the table we set outside beneath the big silver maple, where we’d eat in summer.

Her body was still warm as I held her in my hands. Before me was her killer. You’d think I’d have been overwhelmed with anger, out for vengeance. It had happened before. My first day of kindergarten, I saw a little boy pulling the legs off a daddy longlegs. I bit him, and to my parents’ horror, I was sent home in ignominy. In college, I’d had another incident. Furious when I’d learned that a former boyfriend’s roommate had lied about him to authorities, I set out to confront him. But I unexpectedly ran into the guy on my way up the stairs to find him. To our mutual surprise—I’m small with birdlike bones—I grabbed the man by his collar and threw him against the wall. I was shaking with rage and shocked at the strength it gave me.

As a young adult, I feared anger, because I thought it was in my blood. Though my father was so respected that I heard a subordinate once fainted with fear before him, he was even-tempered. But my mother was capable of dizzying wrath. When I was in high school, I’d invited a boyfriend to join me at a Saturday-night Bible study a few blocks from our house. He’d told his parents to pick him up at our house afterward. My parents were out that night—and though we never went inside our house, when my parents came home first, my mother, who had been drinking, shrieked at us with rage. I had been strictly told not to let any boy in the house when my parents weren’t home. I hadn’t. Nonetheless, my mother threatened to take me to the hospital to determine whether I had lost my virginity. Somehow my father dissuaded her from this errand, but I was banned from seeing the boy, and from attending Bible study, for a long time afterward. (Many years later, I realized why my mother was so angry. With the aid of several martinis, she worried that a neighbor might have seen a boy standing outside the empty house with her daughter and concluded we were the “wrong kind” of family.)

Anger haunted my mother as my father lay dying from cancer. One afternoon while we were on opposite sides of my father’s bed, at the mention of some ordinary financial detail, my mother clenched her slender, manicured hand into a claw and took a swipe at my face. I caught her delicate wrist in midair. She had swung at me so hard that my hand, stopping hers, left a bruise on her skin. My father made me apologize to her.

 

 

But toward the ermine, who had killed someone I loved, I felt no anger at all.

Here before me was one of the world’s smallest carnivores. It is as if all the ferocity of the world’s wild hunters—lions, tigers, wolverines—has been concentrated into a creature who weighs less than half a pound. Quick as lightning, an ermine can leap into the air to kill a bird as it takes flight, or follow a lemming down a tunnel. It can swim, climb trees, and bring down an animal many times its size with a single bite to the neck—and then drag it away. An ermine consumes five to ten meals a day. It needs to eat at least a quarter to a third of its own weight just to survive in captivity, and much more in the wild, especially during the cold winter. These little animals’ hearts beat nearly four hundred times a minute. No wonder they kill everything they can at every opportunity. They are glorious in their single-minded ferocity.

I then understood something important about my mother. She was, in her way, as fierce as that ermine. She was the only child of a postmaster and an ice man in a tiny town in Arkansas. She grew up with three strikes against her: she was poor, she lived in a rural area, and she was a female. Yet at a time when girls were discouraged from education and adventure, she had learned to fly a plane, had gone to college, made valedictorian of her class, landed a job at the FBI, and married an army officer. She’d grown up in a house where she could see chickens scratching in the dirt beneath the floorboards of the kitchen. Sometimes she had hunted squirrels to eat; her old shotgun still rested in the corner of a bedroom closet in each house where my family had lived. But through the force of her will and her intellect, she had transformed it all: the military gave her servants to clean the house, mow the lawn; a chef cooked at her parties. Her husband had a staff car, a yacht, and a plane at his disposal. As a child, I had always looked to my father, a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a decorated war hero, as my model of courage and persistence, but my mother’s example, too, had helped me to grow up believing that if anything could be done by a human, it could be done by me. Her achievement was a feat as staggering as an ermine taking down a hen.

My mother had died of pancreatic cancer earlier that year. In the hospital in Virginia, I held her hand as she fearlessly breathed her last. Since the doctors at Fort Belvoir had diagnosed her with this painful terminal disease, she had not once whined or wept. As I looked into the piercing black eyes of that white weasel, I realized how much I had admired my mother, and how much I missed her.

✧

The ermine held my gaze for perhaps thirty seconds. Then it popped back into the hole. I desperately wanted to run to the house to get Howard so he could see it. What were the chances the tiny animal would still be there, much less show itself again, when I came back? I put down the hen where I had found her, ran the hundred feet to the house, and alerted Howard. Together we returned to the coop. Again I picked up the hen. And again the ermine shot its head from the hole, its black eyes blazing from that luminous white face as its laser stare fearlessly met ours.

Even in the wake of tragedy, we could not have felt more amazed had we been visited by an angel that Christmas morning. When the angel met the shepherds in Bethlehem, the shepherds “were sore afraid.” When I was a child, that phrase had always seemed odd to me. In my illustrated Bible, the angels looked like pretty ladies in nightgowns with wings, and on our Christmas tree, they were always playing harps or blowing trumpets. Though the flying was impressive, nothing about those angels would have scared me, even as a little girl. But now that I have thought more deeply about these words of scripture, it seems to me that the angels must have been more like our Christmas weasel: glorious in purity, strength, and holy perfection.

In our barn we beheld a great wonder, as did the shepherds who flocked to a different barn so long ago. Our Christmas blessing came down not from heaven but up from a burrow in the earth. With dazzlingly white fur, a hammering pulse, and a bottomless appetite, the ermine was ablaze with life. Like a struck match chases away darkness, this creature’s incandescent presence left no room for anger in my heart—for it had been stretched wide with awe, and flooded with the balm of forgiveness.