Tell Me You Forgive Me,
Professor Grzimek

One of the most embarrassing aspects of advancing years is the increasing difficulty of ignoring one’s own hypocrisies. In a way, hypocrisy can be seen as the defining quality of modern life: politicians apologize for things their governments did a century ago; news agencies apologize for having run stories that had no relation to truth; our friends give elaborate justifications for their bad behavior. And thus a person is well armed to detect it in her own behavior.

For years, I’ve read a broad spectrum of magazines about animals, have contributed to various animal protection agencies, have even worked myself up to a state of high moral indignation when learning of those terribly selfish peasants in India (or Nepal, or Nigeria; it doesn’t matter much where they are, so long as they are far away) who refuse to allow animals to destroy their land, who fight back when the protection of elephants (or tigers, or hooded owls, or horned toads, or just about any animal you can mention) is declared by a governmental agency to be a greater good than their own economic survival. I’ve seen the photos of the dead beasts, slaughtered by the unfeeling humans, and my loyalty has always been on the side of the animals.

Until the ghiro. A ghiro is a darling little gray animal, a relative of the squirrel, only smaller and far more adorable. He hops lightly from branch to branch, picking up nuts here and there, is quite thoroughly irresistible and no doubt huggable. He is so cute that he has charmed his way into Italian idiom, for one who sleeps deeply and well is said to “dormire come un ghiro.” He attended the Mad Hatter’s tea party as the dormouse. He is also, alas, a rodent. This means he chews and gnaws away at wood and cannot be stopped from entering into any house or attic whenever he pleases. And there she nests, and there she raises her young.

I discovered them nesting on the beams of my mountain house when I opened it this week. Below them, like soiled snow, lay small piles of chewed wood, remnants of my sixteenth-­century beams. There was also urine and excrement but that can be cleaned away. Ghiri themselves are far more difficult to displace.

I called Mirto, my friend the mason, and he came over and had a look.

“You’ve got to get rid of them, Mirto.”

“But they’re a protected species,” he explained, just like the badgers for whom I do battle all summer long.

The words were out before I could stop them: “Nothing’s protected in my house.”

So Mirto is coming this weekend and bringing along a four-meter ladder to climb up and destroy the nest. Then he is going to close up any hole through which they might be slipping, even one as small as the diameter of a quarter, with a mixture of fast-setting cement and smashed glass, for this is the only thing that will prevent their gnawing their way back in again.

And if that doesn’t work and they come back? The options are the same ones offered to those ignorant, ecologically insensitive peasants in far-off lands: violence or the continued destruction of my property. The words are out before I can stop them: nothing’s protected in my house.