12/28/2023 0 Comments Back river quiver read onlineIn her busy life, always looking for things to eat, she had been everywhere in her small homeland. Her acre of ground was as crisscrossed by her comings and goings as her acre of sky by all the blades and stems and branches overhead. Her native country was about an acre of ground overhung by about an acre of sky crisscrossed by grass blades, weed stems, the stems and twigs of low bushes, and the limbs of trees. She did not know that only a few hundred yards away the river ran between its high, wooded banks. She lived at the briary edge of a wooded hollow on what was known as the old Keith place in the bottomland not far from Port William - but she did not know that either. She had been cautious and clever in keeping herself out of the sight of larger creatures. She had fed herself well on nuts and seeds and insects. In comparison to a white oak, or even a human, she would not live long, perhaps not a year, almost certainly not two, but the little life she had she loved dearly, and so far she had taken excellent care of it. In the spring, if she escaped her many enemies, she would have her first litter of maybe six baby mice. She was born in the fall, and now the winter was ending. She took a small feminine pleasure in being beautiful. She had a graceful tail, a set of long elegant whiskers, perfect ever-listening ears, a fastidious nose, and black profound eyes shining with sight. Her coat, above, was a reddish brindly tan. The name fits because her four small feet and all the underside of her were a pure, clean white. Because I don’t know her name in Mouse, I will call her Whitefoot. Her language was a dialect of Mouse, a tongue for which we humans have never developed a vocabulary or a grammar. I think it had been a long time since the mice around Port William spoke English, let alone Latin. Her name was Peromyscus leucopus, but she did not know it.
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