Concerning the Glitter Weaver

One morning several years ago when I was living in a small rental house in a Missouri field, I got out of bed to answer the phone. I picked up the receiver, sat down on the couch, and a mouse leaped from beneath the cushion onto my bare foot and vanished into the kitchen. I felt its claws on my skin. I called into the phone, Hold it! while I lifted the cushion: in the new sofa was a gnawed pit, and laid out neatly like nested spoons were five pink mouslings, unhaired, eyes unopened, each uttering faint squeaks, their tiny barbed mouths opening and closing to find a hot teat. Good god, I said to my friend. In irritation, revulsion, fascination, I described what I’d found. With full seriousness, he said, The mother won’t come back now that you’ve upset her—you’ll have to raise them. Raise them! I shouted, and then, Will this new couch make them a goddamn good enough nest?

For the previous three months, figuring we all could get along in some form of commensalism, I’d shared the house with mice and tolerated feculence and pungent dried urine in a shoe, accepted waking in the night to see a rodent inches away scratching around the lighted face of the clock. Calm down, my friend said. They’re only frigging mice. It was, of course, future frigging that gave me concern. I put the squirming nestlings onto a dustpan and carried them outside to die in the sun, but then decided a coup de grace was more “humane” (that word we use when we’re about to do something worse than bestial). I took a brick and, with one fell stroke, jellied them.

From that day on, rodents and I have had our territorial disputes, both in houses and, twice, in my little on-the-road truck; since that morning, I’ve been a setter of traps. I tell you all this so you’ll understand my surprise when, on one of my early trips into Chase County, I found myself becoming curious about wood rats, small beasts as engaging as any here.

Still, I can’t imagine that you would want to join in what I’m doing now: trying to disassemble a wood-rat nest built along and into a low rock ledge not far from Cedar Point. After all, who cares for rats? They are things we care against, like blackflies and ticks, only bigger. Last night I called my mother on her eightieth birthday and, in the course of our conversation, mentioned my plans for today. She, who often despairs of the materials that go into my writing, said, Oh, William! (Her maternal disappointments always turn me into William.) Can’t you find something uplifting to write about?

In all my time in the county, I’ve seen many wood-rat nests but never, even once, the animal, so for me it’s a kind of living fossil, something like the fusulinid tests I see in the Cottonwood Limestone of the courthouse walls, and I believe in its existence as I do in extinct sea critters: because of what they have built. For similar reasons I also believe in history. I’m trying, as I pull at this stick nest, not to break the pieces because I hope to tell you the precise number the rat has used, and I’d like to discover how the animal has interlaced them to make disassembly so difficult. I’ve wanted to do this since my first guided tour through the county several years ago when Larry Wagner, the Tallgrass Prairie Park advocate, gave me a wonderfully informed two days here. As his father bounced us down a lane in southern Chase, we passed an isolated Osage-orange tree: twelve feet up in it and woven among the branches was a huge conglomeration of sticks, enough material to fill a couple of fifty-gallon oil drums. If pigs could fly, they would build nests such as that one. Larry said it was a wood-rat lodge, but it looked more as if a crazed beaver had decided to go arboreal. I’d seen wood-rat nests before, but they had always been inside abandoned houses and outbuildings, at the bases of trees, along rock ledges and inside caves, and once even in the back seat of a derelict Buick. He could have told me, as believably, that a robin would just as soon build its nest at the bottom of a pond as in a tree.

Not long afterward I returned to that aerial nest and tried and failed to climb the thorned limbs. (The wood rat, weighing about a pound, is a native of this region but Osage orange is not, yet the rodent now takes to hedge like an eagle to a snag, and it may help spread certain trees into the prairie.) I found a long stick and poked at the lodge in hopes a resident would scurry out and reveal itself, but nothing stirred. Later I said to myself, you spend fifteen years killing rodents and then expect them to show themselves to you? You might as well wrap yourself in neon, the blood lust they must smell on you. Perhaps, but I’m not an eater of their flesh, as are some native peoples of the Southwest (the meat, so I hear, is better than quail).

Now: I’m laying the sticks of this rock-ledge nest in stacks of ten, but with all the breakage my count will be imprecise. It has taken an hour of untangling just to get four piles.

Countians call these animals pack rats or sometimes field rats but never trade rats, a name more common farther west. The number of citizens having a story about them is comparable to those people with tornado tales, although their favorite rodents are the rather rare black squirrels, found around here only in the twin towns. Pat Sauble, whose farm of classic stone buildings is nearby, told me of his father one night years ago hearing slow and heavy footfalls on the stair leading up to his bedroom in the old farmhouse; he lay and listened, then, with trepidation, rose quietly, got his gun, and crept to the head of the steps: he saw a wood rat struggling backwards down the risers and tugging a gunnysack with several potatoes in it: thump, thump, thump.

More commonly, wood rats keep their distance from people, and most of the big nests in Chase are in the relatively isolated southwest corner of the county. For this reason, as much as any other, the animals are not usually a nuisance unless you leave a vehicle unattended in a pasture for a year as one countian did: when he went to move his old pickup, he lifted the hood and saw nothing but sticks massed exactly into its shape as if they had been poured into a mold. And Frank Gaddie of Bazaar left a truck out for some time and then drove it into Cottonwood to have it worked on; when the mechanic put it on the rack and lifted it to look at the undercarriage, he found himself nose to snout with a big-eyed wood rat and whunked his head in recoiling.

These timid and reclusive animals, which keep a certain distance even from their own kind, are mostly nocturnal, occasionally crepuscular, rarely diurnal, and many countians who think they have seen one in broad daylight have, in fact, seen a Norway rat—the so-called house rat (Rattus norvegicus)—a destructive non-native species that has spread over all of America.

From a distance, the indigenous eastern wood rat does look something like the European rat, but it belongs to a different family and its habits and behavior are signally distinct. What Walt Disney did to the house mouse to turn it into Mickey, evolution has done to the pack rat to distinguish it from distant Old World relations: its ears are bigger and rounder and fuzzy, its tail shorter (but long enough to curl around its feet when it sleeps) and furred and not hairless and scaly; its face is a little blunter, its eyes larger and more innocent, its pelt softer and thicker and prettier; its belly and feet are white so that when it stands it looks as if it were wearing a tux and spats. But its milder disposition renders it no match for a house rat, and some of its aggressive behavior consists of nothing more than grinding teeth, vibrating lips, or rhythmically stamping feet (Thumper in Bambi). Unlike norvegicus it will not cram together or eat swill or live in filth: a wood rat in the wild usually has a separate chamber in its lodge, and special locations outside, for a latrine. (I know some Native Americans who have their own private understanding about why imported European species are so vile yet so successful.) These characteristics coupled with its preference for solitary life make it a winning little pet. John James Audubon wrote of a female and her three young he kept: They became very gentle, especially one of them which was in a separate cage. It was our custom at dark to release it from confinement, upon which it would run around the room in circles, mount the table we were in the habit of writing at, and always make efforts to open a particular drawer in which we kept some of its choicest food.

The pack rat earns its name from its habit of picking up objects, especially its kleptomania for bright and gleaming ones, and building them into its lodge: a bit of broken glass or china, a button, coin, bottle opener, small screwdriver. It is this avidity for glistering or metallic things that often makes it unnecessary for a farmer wanting the rats out of an old barn to bait his traps. A few years ago, a man living near the county line went to his shed to start the tractor but the ignition key wasn’t hanging on its nail, and he couldn’t find it anywhere about, so he had to write the manufacturer to get another; when he was cleaning an outbuilding the following summer, he found the old key and also some missing tools in a pack-rat den. He said later, I believe if the little devil’s legs had been long enough to reach the pedals, he’d have taken the tractor too.

Dawn and Donald Kaufman, zoologists doing research in the northern end of the Flint Hills, wrote a monograph entitled “Size Preference for Novel Objects by the Eastern Woodrat Under Field Conditions”: on several nights they set out tinfoil balls of four different sizes at various distances from lodges and learned that the animals preferred to make off with small and medium spheres when close to the nest but, farther away, took the biggest ones; the Kaufmans concluded that the cost of transport increases with distance and object size and . . . large items are of greater net value than small items at the greater distance; that is, if you have to walk a mile to the grocery you’ll probably return not with one peach but a bagful. I assume that’s why Sauble’s wood rat quite sensibly carried off the whole gunnysack of potatoes.

The other common name, trade rat, derives from the rodent putting down some ordinary object it’s hauling to the lodge in exchange for one more unusual it happens across: campers have awakened in the morning to find a pocketknife or compass traded for a pinecone or deer turd.

Yet wood rats are fussy about what they allow in their dens. One researcher noticed a laboratory specimen carry a certain stick out of its nest box; he put it back, and the rat dragged it out again, and the observer returned it, and right back out it came; after a dozen times, the scientist gave up.

The scientific name, Neotoma floridana, so I’ve read, literally means “new-cut + of Florida”: a new species with cutting teeth first identified in Florida. But other accounts relate that members of the Lewis and Clark expedition were the first to write about the wood rat in 1804, when they were along the Missouri River in northeastern Kansas, and that Meriwether Lewis gave the earliest description during the winter the men spent near the Pacific coast in 1806. (It is almost certain that William Clark preserved several specimens of floridana and sent them downriver to Thomas Jefferson; of the 122 animal species and subspecies then unknown to science the expedition discovered, the eastern wood rat was the first.) Some years after Lewis wrote his description, the rodent received its scientific name. Now, I’m not so much as even an amateur Latinist, but I’ll still suggest another translation, one that may be correct only as a double entendre or, at the least, a pun among classically educated men of the early nineteenth century who knew their Vergil: “interweave-cut/pack + glittering,” that is, freely, “cut-and-pack weaver of glittering things.”

To support this translation, I offer evidence from my slow-going dismantling: sticks nipped or gnawed to workable lengths (longer ones, up to three feet, show natural breaks) and so packed in as to interlink; in the conglomeration, along with a few small rocks and cow chips, are two pull tabs, a piece of beer bottle, half a tire-mashed chrome ballpoint pen, a plastic lens cap, and a spent (bright yellow) shotgun cartridge.

A lodge built in the open woods or in a tree is typically a domeshaped structure remarkably efficient in shedding rain and keeping out predators, an abode cozy enough to attract mice, shrews, lizards, toads, turtles, cottontails—all of which a wood rat will tolerate even though it will not share quarters with its own kind. Adult pack rats regard solitary life highly enough that they exchange scarred faces and torn ears for the pleasures of hermitry. Among their ways of fighting, incidentally, is a kind of sparring in which they stand and pummel each other like tiny pugilists and, tiring, rest their paws on the other’s “shoulders.”

I have eight stacks of sticks now, and this tedious labor is wearing thin, and, worse, I’m beginning to suspect that the nest of soft fibers and grasses, which I should be able to see by now, actually lies out of sight underneath the ledge; with it are other chambers for storing food. A Kansas biologist, E. Raymond Hall, once opened a den to find four dozen hickory nuts, two gallons of hazelnuts, a gallon of wild grapes, a quart of dried mushrooms, and twenty sprays of bittersweet, with some of the food placed so the sybaritic little resident could reach it while reclining. But such a cache can mislead you: the vegetarian wood rat (unlike norvegicus, it doesn’t prey on bird eggs) is a light eater, consuming daily only about five percent of its weight.

I didn’t really think I’d scare up a woody, and that means, of course, I hoped I would. I’ve also been wishing to find a truly peculiar object stashed away (such as I’ve heard about them picking up): a pocket watch, perfume bottle, false teeth—something to make you say, “You found that in a pack-rat nest?” (In the American desert, scientists are studying thirty-thousand-year-old pack-rat middens sheltered in dry caves and crevices to reconstruct ice-age climates and vegetation that may reveal ecological effects of global changes; some biochemists even hope to extract DNA from the fossil materials.)

Not long ago I received a letter from a stranger who gave me jessie for several failures in my writing, one of them that I never include sex in my work (he wrote as if it were a subject that had never before crossed my mind), a flaw, said he, that causes me to distort topics. My first response was, let him—after a thorough reading of statutes on invasion of privacy and libel—walk into Cottonwood or Strong and start probing bedrooms and teenagers’ back seats.

I digress here to say—but not to draw any generalizations—that in my time in Chase County I’ve not heard sex discussed (animal breeding excepted), and only once have I heard something approximating a dirty joke, a story alleged to be true: a female zoologist with a keen sympathy for wild animals came to the county to help a rancher having a coyote problem; she told him it was probably but a single male taking the calves and suggested not eradication but live trapping and castration; the fellow, with only slightly less than the cattleman’s traditional deference in language before women, said, Hell, lady, he’s killing my calves—not fornicating them.

But my topic (you see how the mind wanders when engaged in the humdrum—like pulling at sticks—of inquiry): I hereby answer and forever refute my correspondent’s charge that I never write about sex: the retractable penis of a wood rat contains a small bone for an erection, and its testicles are so protected—except during breeding periods when they enlarge—that zoologists speak of its having a temporary scrotum. (Such anatomical design seems to me surpassingly practical even for man, eliminating, as it would, athletic supporters and the agony after a foot slips off a bicycle pedal.)

The female wood rat also has eminently sensible—if not desirable for womankind—physiological structures: four elongated teats a newborn can clamp on to with a distinctive diamond-shaped dental gap formed by closing its incisors; if five arrive in a litter, sometimes the odd baby out will fasten to and suckle the mother’s clitoris. For the first three weeks after bearing young, a female suddenly fleeing the nest will drag along to safety her four—or five—clamped-on young; their toothy grip is so secure and perpetual during the pups’ first twenty days before the gap disappears that, when she wants to go off alone, she must bite them in the jaw or put a foot on them to twist them loose. It may be this prospect of having offspring clinging to her nipples that makes the smaller female such a danger to her mate: following cheek-to-cheek nuzzling and several rapid-fire mountings, he will frequently beat a quick exit to escape her killing him. (One day when I was talking about wood rats and mentioned this detail to a city woman, she said, I’d kill some sonofabitch too that wanted to run off and leave me with a couple of kids hanging by their teeth from my tits.)

One of the reasons I’m not a zoologist, beyond soreness from hours of bent backs, is now manifest: as I begin to see I’m not going to uncover what I’d hoped for and my guilt about pillaging the small den increases, I don’t want to continue. I have a dozen stacks of sticks. Trying to replace the ones I’ve removed serves only to break everything so I stop, but there are still enough to keep out ancient enemies: the coyote, fox, skunk, owl, hawk, all of them except snakes—but then, they get in even the best of dens.

Unlike the wood rat, a female house rat has six teats and her litter may be as large as fourteen, her gestation about a week shorter, and her estrus not seasonal but continual: in every way, she will outpro-pagate a pack rat. Some zoologists believe that floridana secures its future generations not by aggressiveness and overbreeding but by intelligently and harmoniously adapting its habitat, continuously attending its young, not fouling its nest, and perhaps even by living commensally. I’m just now remembering Wes Jackson’s paradigms: for humankind, there is surely one, beyond the gathering of glittering objects, in the wood rat.

I start down the slope, turn to look at the mess I’ve made of the den—all for the sake of my curiosity—and I go back up to the ledge, and, about ten feet from the opening, reach into my pocket and lay down, just out of sight, the shiniest dime I have.