More Stoat Stories

The mustelidae family has been getting a big blogpress lately.You know how you wait ages for a bus and then 3 come all at once? Well, first there was Annie Dillard's epiphanic weasel; then there were my own running stoats; and now comes Chris Townsend's dramatic stoat event in his garden (Stoat Encounters of the Third Kind?) involving 2 stoats, 3 pheasants, a coal tit and a sparrow hawk. A word about Chris Townsend, a member of the UK hiking community's blogerati. An outdoors enthusiast, he's been gear guru for tgo magazine since 1991. He's also a photographer, and author of 16 walking-related books. Chris has trekked many trails and long-distance paths including the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Arizona Trail in the USA; and he's walked from the toe to the tip of Britain, from Land's End to John O'Groats. I remember reading what I think was his first book, The Great Backpacking Adventure (Oxford Illustrated Press, 1987), which I enjoyed very much at the time. But his writing style and ability have improved by leaps and bounds since then. A book of his that's become a bit of a classic is The Backpacker's Handbook published by Ragged Mountain Press, one of the McGraw-Hill group of companies. As I write I'm looking up at my own copy on the shelf above my desk. It's a 440 page practical guide to backpacking equipment and technique. Indispensable. This sentence comes from the chapter On the Move: Skills and Hazards: One bear-country saying is that the way to tell the difference between black bears and grizzly bears is to climb a tree - black bears will climb up after you, grizzlies will knock the tree down!

Stoat Encounter

After writing about Annie Dillard's encounter with a weasel, I thought I might describe my own. Or with 2 stoats in my case. But first some background information - I've been doing research. Family: Mustelidae (meaning the weasel family, from mustela, the Latin for weasel); Order: Carnivora (carnivores, obviously). The stoat is chestnut brown with an off-white belly; in winter its coat becomes thicker furred and changes to pure white all over. (This coat, called ermine, was highly prized at one time for its use in judicial robe-making.) Its body is adapted for speed - long and thin, with short legs and a long, black-tipped tail. The male is much larger than the female. The stoat is highly territorial, and travels alone, except in the mating season or unless it's a mother with her older offspring. Its sense of smell is highly developed, but its vision is not so good - particularly in the daytime. When alarmed it will emit a musky odour from glands near the anus. Stoats are opportunistic carnivores and will eat almost anything - birds, eggs, rodents, rabbits, insects, fish, reptiles - and kill, in the case of vertebrates, with a swift bite to the base of the skull, sometimes after administering other disabling bites to the body of the prey. Their breeding cycle is fascinating. Stoats breed once a year; the female is on heat for only a few weeks in May/June. After mating, her fertilised egg is stored ex utero for 11 months. Actual gestation then takes place over 1 month, after which between 5 and 10 young stoats, known as kittens, are born. A different male will then mate with the mother and also, after 2 or 3 weeks, with the family's young females which, though blind and toothless, will already have reached the pubertal stage. The annual cycle then restarts.

But back to my own meeting with stoats. On the morning of Wednesday 6 June this year I was climbing up to Calf Top (609m), the highest point on Middleton Fell, which forms the high ground between Dentdale, Barbondale and the Lune Valley. The going was quite steep at first so I paused for a rest near Eskholme Pike above Barbon Park on Thorn Moor. No sooner had I stopped than 2 stoats appeared, winding sinuously downhill obliquely above me. They were moving fast down hidden, narrow trackways in the turf and between the rocks. Each was like a mirror image of the other. They ran side by side, close - very close - but never touching. It was the mating season, so they must have been a male and female engaged in some kind of running courtship ritual. So absorbed were they in their intricate weaving dance that they paid no heed to me at all - I doubt if they even saw me (their eyesight is dim anyway in daylight) - as they rushed right past, intent on some unknown goal, until they twisted and turned out of sight. I felt privileged to see this - I've seen stoats and weasels in the wild before, but only as quick streaks of fur - and continued my walk energised, blessed that a window on the often-so-secretive natural world had briefly opened up before me...

Living Like Weasels

I came across the name Annie Dillard some time ago but had never read anything by her until now. I'm deep into her dazzling collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982, published as a HarperPerennial paperback in 1993). It's richly rewarding. She writes about her (our) ambiguous, complex yet palpably real relationship with the natural world and with the divine. I'll be eagerly tracking down 2 more of her books as soon as I can - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Writing Life. Here's an extract from a short but brilliant piece in Teaching a Stone to Talk entitled Living like Weasels: Weasel! I had never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I did not see, any more than you see a window. The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild-rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness, twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. After a few more paragraphs ratcheting up her weasel encounter, Dillard continues: I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular - shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands? - but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. Notice how she repeats the adjectives "fierce" and "pointed" at the end, echoing the beginning, reinforcing her identification with the weasel. This is quality writing of the very highest order.