Chapter 5 Out of Town (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)
Once when my mom took a well-earned vacation to visit her brother and family at their vacation cottage on Peakes Island, Maine, leaving my Dad in charge of us children, I found a tiny newborn muskrat.
My brother Jerry, a year older than I, and myself were again investigating the brook. When we went to the brook, we’d take a tomato pole each. [My parents had a pile of trimmed saplings they used for bean and tomato poles to tie up the plants.] We would start at the spring which originated on the southeastern corner of our four acres of land. This spring drew us to our exploration because of its awesome reputation. As legend had it, there was supposedly a whole team of horses PLUS their wagon that fell into this bottom less spring in our swamp. A legend that grew with those who lived there before we moved in and wanted to impress. Mom didn’t deny the rumors as they kept us from getting too close to the edge of it’s black watery depths with its awesome dangers. In all the years of probing its black eerie morass, we never could feel the bottom with several six foot long tomato poles bound end to end.
From sod to sod we’d leap along the brook’s edge as it wound its way through our field and through a woodsy swamp of saplings, vaulting over the brook to wherever interest took us. Then we saw it--a huge dead muskrat. We didn’t know they grew so large. We poked it with our sticks to see if it was really dead. We vaulted over the brook exploring the woodsy, swampy area where a muskrat‘s home was possibly hidden. Suddenly Jerry called out all excited about something. When I hopped over to where he stood, and looked down, I saw the tiniest baby muskrats, blindly scurrying in all directions. They were about the size of a tip of an adult’s thumb. We caught one before it would have disappeared like the others. I took it home and fed it warm milk with an eye-dropper, using an old slipper for its bed. I couldn’t wait for Mom to come home. I must have missed her anyway, but as I remember, I was more disappointed that she didn’t get to see the baby muskrat while it was still alive, with its unopened eyes, tiny pink nose and mouth, as it died just before Mom came home. If she had been there, I was sure she could have kept it alive, like everything else broken and lost that we brought to her.
Once when my mom took a well-earned vacation to visit her brother and family at their vacation cottage on Peakes Island, Maine, leaving my Dad in charge of us children, I found a tiny newborn muskrat.
My brother Jerry, a year older than I, and myself were again investigating the brook. When we went to the brook, we’d take a tomato pole each. [My parents had a pile of trimmed saplings they used for bean and tomato poles to tie up the plants.] We would start at the spring which originated on the southeastern corner of our four acres of land. This spring drew us to our exploration because of its awesome reputation. As legend had it, there was supposedly a whole team of horses PLUS their wagon that fell into this bottom less spring in our swamp. A legend that grew with those who lived there before we moved in and wanted to impress. Mom didn’t deny the rumors as they kept us from getting too close to the edge of it’s black watery depths with its awesome dangers. In all the years of probing its black eerie morass, we never could feel the bottom with several six foot long tomato poles bound end to end.
From sod to sod we’d leap along the brook’s edge as it wound its way through our field and through a woodsy swamp of saplings, vaulting over the brook to wherever interest took us. Then we saw it--a huge dead muskrat. We didn’t know they grew so large. We poked it with our sticks to see if it was really dead. We vaulted over the brook exploring the woodsy, swampy area where a muskrat‘s home was possibly hidden. Suddenly Jerry called out all excited about something. When I hopped over to where he stood, and looked down, I saw the tiniest baby muskrats, blindly scurrying in all directions. They were about the size of a tip of an adult’s thumb. We caught one before it would have disappeared like the others. I took it home and fed it warm milk with an eye-dropper, using an old slipper for its bed. I couldn’t wait for Mom to come home. I must have missed her anyway, but as I remember, I was more disappointed that she didn’t get to see the baby muskrat while it was still alive, with its unopened eyes, tiny pink nose and mouth, as it died just before Mom came home. If she had been there, I was sure she could have kept it alive, like everything else broken and lost that we brought to her.
posted by Cranberry Jo @ 9/05/2007 08:39:00 PM
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