Photo of a desert packrat by Jules Jardinier – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikipedia.
He lies, a lump of disheveled grey fur, in a patch of ice, his long pink tale extended, his face caught in a sort of grin.
Why do I assume it is a male?
I think it’s because his body has a certain weight and depth to it, even now in death, taking up space on my frozen porch and in the world. A female rat would have worried about her weight and girth, would have tried hard to diminish herself. And would she have given up and died with that ferocious grin?
No, I still think it’s a male.
How and why did he die?
It couldn’t have been the deep cold here in the high desert. He would have known how to deal with that, digging down deeper in the nest of leaves in my gutter.
Some disease, maybe? But what are the diseases of creatures who live in the wild?
Starvation? His girth precludes that as well as the easily accessible scatter of seeds under my bird feeder.
A fall from the gutter overhead? But the gutter has probably been his home for ages and negotiating his exits and returns would have been easy for him.
And finally, does any of this matter? In the canyon below, snow lies two feet deep and many creatures will be starving, freezing and dying down there. I don’t think of them.
When children bombed in a far-off country are having their legs amputated without anesthesia, what is the value of one pack rat’s death?
I read somewhere that the world is divided between those who only care about family and friends and those whose empathy extends to include people far away, strangers, never to be included in the near and dear.
This makes sense to me. Many of the women I know and have known, talented and particular, are completely absorbed by family, worrying, debating, feeding, caretaking with friends at a slight remove.
If we care about a dead pack rat, strange, even abhorrent, can we care about the world?
The Wikipedia entry for pack rats has this info: “very few females (less than 5%) live beyond 3 years of age.” No longevity info is provided for males, so I guess the entry is sexist.
Very insightful, our human Fluctuating Capacity to care for those near & dear (one’s identified tribe, gender, nationality, religion…extending even to species)…
Or ignore our common connection with ‘other’ humans & even reviled creatures.
Where does compassion come from, how does it flourish…?
Thankfully, women inevitably will usher in the best of what we all know in our hearts is possible for “the whole earth,” over time, in solidarity with innate visionary wisdom gleaned from lifetimes of suffering & survival.