The Nest

　

　

Of course, I have always wanted to become better acquainted with the gentle woodland creatures that inhabit the leafy places in our city. Noble oaks and elms grace my own backyard and the trees provide generous shade, a dense green canopy that conceals the sky. The ladders of tree trunks ascent upward into interlaced foliage where squirrels live and birds that cackle and shriek, invisible life concealed in the cloud of leaves and branches. The squirrels in particular have always fascinated me. I see them hopping around like rabbits on the lawn and, then, rocketing upward, climbing the tree trunk, scampering up the bark until they are hidden by foliage, and, then, discernible only by chattering sounds above and the rustle and crackle of displaced branches and twigs. Where do they go? What do they do in their green mansions above?

Once, I acquired at a garage sale a pair of binoculars. I sat on my back porch spying on the squirrels as they pursued one another over the grass and up the trees, moving with the uncanny vertical speed of a centipede or spider. I aimed the lenses at the places overhead where the canopy of leaves and branches were shuddering. But who could say whether that motion was caused by an animal diving from branch to branch or, merely, an aberration of the breeze. My neighbor said that he had studied squirrels – "they are," he told me, " an arboreal mammal, the monkeys of the temperate zone." I thought the phrase "arboreal mammal" was a pretty one and checked-out a book from the public library about squirrels, their biology and behavior. I read about fifteen pages of the book, but it was quite technical: there are many different species of squirrels with different Latin names and they have various, overlapping ranges and some of the words in the book were unfamiliar to me. The text was rather dryly written, inexpressive and scientific and so I set the book aside, read in it no more, and, I recall, ultimately paid a fine of four or six dollars to the library for returning the volume late. And I quickly found that I didn’t have the patience to be a naturalist – the squirrels seemed to do the same pointless things over and over again and I didn’t understand any of it. I thought that it would be rather wonderful to have a kind and helpful friend explain to me squirrel lore and I even imagined an avuncular, faintly professorial voice guiding me to knowledge on this subject, but, of course, I didn’t have the time, or, in all candor, the actual interest to pursue these studies even to the extent of reading slim book about the little beasts. There are so many things that we wish that we knew but that we aren’t willing to take the time to learn.

I think most people agree that our climate is warming and the flora and fauna subtly changing around us. This fact leads me to conclude that even if I learned about local species of birds and mammal, probably, this knowledge would be outdated in a decade or so. It seems beyond doubt that new kinds of creatures, hitherto unknown in these parts, are encountered now, more or less, every week. Near the county dump, people claim to have glimpsed a cougar stalking the thickets and I have seen fat, somnolent spiders with red bristly hair perching on brick walls, tarantulas, it seems, or some similar species. Tropical-looking centipedes scurry through decomposing leaf-litter – I am told that they are remarkable in that their many black eyes are also sexual organs. In the summer darkness, fist-sized beetles churn through the air and moths as big as bats flutter around the streetlights, haloing them with powder cast from their huge wings. Termites undermine houses and gawky ants covered in a kind of red velvet and with long stilt-like legs have colonized my side-yard. When the lawnmower rips through their mound that is like a tumor in the grass, the insects are flung about in stinging clouds and, recently, it seems to me that the utility poles have become shrouded in some kind of entangling vine – kudzu, I am told. A week ago, a clerk in Walmart found a rattlesnake coiled among the household furnishings for sale in the store. We don’t ordinarily encounter rattlesnakes in this climate. And, once, when I was walking my small white dog, I saw a huge winged shadow glide across the ground ahead of me. But when I looked skyward, nothing was there. Our cold climate is becoming warm and I suppose I may live to see monkeys dangling from our trees. Perhaps, another kind of arboreal mammal will displace the squirrels and occupy their habitat.

My backyard is fenced and, yesterday, when I put out my little dog, Snowball, I heard her yipping and howling. My wife was alarmed. Several smaller dogs, one of them a beagle puppy, have vanished from our neighborhood and so my wife was concerned that the mysterious dog-napper was molesting Snowball. "Why is she crying out like that?" my wife said. I was sitting on the back-porch with a drink, reading a magazine. "I suppose she is chasing a squirrel," I said. "If she ever catches a squirrel," my wife said, "the squirrel will probably injure Snowball." "She’s braver than she is wise," I said. I stood up and called for the dog, an exercise in futility since Snowball is not well-trained and doesn’t come when she is summoned. To my surprise, the dog trotted across the lawn with a satisfied mien, wagging her tail and grinning. There was something nasty entangled in Snowball’s teeth, perhaps, the carcass of a half-decayed bird or mouse. But she dropped the morsel, whatever it was, before she hopped up the steps to the backporch. "You stay by me," I said to Snowball. The little dog seemed to nod her head.

That night there was a bat in our house. Perhaps, it had erred in its nocturnal flight and, somehow, entered the home when I held the dog open for Snowball to come inside. The bat was large and distraught. It flew in disorderly loops through the living room, evading my attempts to knock it out of the air with a rolled-up magazine. Then, the creature vanished and, although I systematically searched every room in the house and, even, opened the doors to the closets, I couldn’t find the bat. My wife was frantic and said that unless I killed or captured the beast she would spend the night at a motel. She locked herself in the bathroom while I patrolled the house. After awhile, I shouted to her: "I’ve got it." Then, I went outside to pretend that I was disposing of the animal in the humid night. "Are you sure?" she asked me. "Yes," I lied. After we went to bed, I seemed to hear the squirrels darting about on the shingles of my house above the attic. Several thumps sounded in the ceiling. I turned on the air-conditioner so that I would not have to hear those noises.

Sometime after two in the morning, I got up to go to the toilet and found the bat in the bathtub, a greasy shadow like a huge leaf or a burnt mutilated hand. I picked up a magazine and stabbed at the bat, pinning it to the porcelain. The creature writhed and its wings twitched in a spasm and, then, it vomited blood and died. I scooped up the dead animal with a wad of paper towel. It was surprisingly warm to the touch – I could feel the bat’s body-heat through the clumped-up paper and I thought that it was unlucky to kill an animal like that and, also, perhaps, a bad omen. My wife was querulous: "What were you doing?" I said that I had killed a bat in the bathtub and, then, thrown it outside in the lilac bushes. "Another bat?" she cried. "And in the bathroom. Oh my God."

The next morning, my wife sat sullenly at her coffee. "We have to contact an exterminator," she said. "Two bats in one night...we must have a colony of them in our attic." "I don’t think so," I replied. "Well, you’ll have to go up there and look," she said.

It was stifling in the attic and the racks of old clothes that my wife stored there exuded a sort of feral heat, like a big, neglected animal panting in the darkness. Dust covered the boxes of children’s toys and abandoned books. The light bulb overhead radiated more heat down onto me and I was covered with sweat. Something thumped on the shingles overhead and I thought it sounded as if ripe fruit were falling from a tree. "What can that be?" I thought. But, in any event, it was outside the house and not within our walls.

Mid-afternoon, I let out Snowball. My wife said: "You go and stand with her when she does her business. I don’t want anyone snatching our dog." I opened the door and Snowball darted out into the fenced backyard. I followed her. It was warm and humid and the grass seemed slick as if with dew. Snowball trotted into the middle of the backyard, beneath the canopy of leaves, and, then, turned to cast an inquiring look at me. The dog grimaced and put her nose into a sort of globular wreath of tangled vine and dead leaves. "What is that?" I said to the dog.

I walked up to the heap of leaves lying on the grass. The leaves were long-dead, greyish and withered, and the pile of fallen foliage looked like a decomposing wreath. The dog rooted around at the edges of tangle of dead leaves and twigs and vine. With my toe, I tapped at the thing. It had a sort of structure, as if the individual withered leaves had been woven together somehow, and a kind of gummy, pasty substance made the twigs adhere together. Many of the leaves seemed to have been corroded to skeletons, brown veins like filigree radiating from a central vegetal spine.

"It’s some kind of nest," I thought to myself.

Undoubtedly, the nest had been generally globular where it had been built high overhead in the trees. But the thing had fallen from that height and lost its shape on impact with the glass and so, now, at my feet, the nest seemed to be a compact flattened mass of concentric rings made from packed twig and leaf. I could see among the leaves and wicker of twigs some fragments of a McDonald’s hamburger wrapper, part of a styrofoam cup, and a little shredded plastic from a grocery bag. A brownish bone with some blackened tissue scabbed on it was entangled in the leaves – it looked like a pelvis or scapular bone. The dog whined and mewled, dipping her white furry head into the heap of fallen leaves. Something glinted: it looked like the lense of an eyeglass. I prodded at the nest, then, recoiled. Eyeless and battered, the head of a beagle puppy lolled there in the debris.

I looked up to the canopy of leaves from which the nest had fallen. The green was dense, impenetrable, and something was stirring there but I couldn’t see what it was.