As a small boy of about 5 I had my first encounter with death. It wasn’t a person. It was simply a mouse. It was a field mouse at that…. Not even a pet mouse. Well it became my pet for a few days but needless to say it wasn’t bought at the local pet shop.
I lived in a small trailer park in Opportunity, Montana. Population approx. 200. Apparently, only a few families got taken in by the name. This little town was a few miles outside of Anaconda which housed the largest smelter stack in the world (at the time). And at one point Anaconda was a booming little town but that is a story that I will not divulge at this point.
My trailer park sat across from a field that had a coral for cows. There was a large batch of trees on the far end of the field with a stream that ran for miles. Many a day was spent building forts in the trees and fishing in the streams. Not to mention the occasional swim on hot summer days.
Well during one of those summer days I found myself alone with nothing to do. I went outside to the back of the trailer where there was a fence that separated the trailer park property from an old couple’s large house and their land. They had a huge field of grass that was about 4 feet in height.
As I stood at the fence, I noticed a hole at the base of the grass. The hole was like a doorway into the grassy field. Out of this doorway popped the head of a little field mouse. Oddly enough the mouse didn’t run. It just sat and stared at me. Maybe it was in shock, thinking “Holy Shit….he is huge! What the hell do I do now?” Either way, I knelt down and stared at this mouse who was either brave or frozen in fear. Before I knew it the mouse started coming out towards me. And before long I had a summer friend that I visited each day for an hour or so. He was always there when I would visit.
It was only a few days later when I came out to play with my new found friend that I found a bloodied chewed up corpse with my cat sitting idly by. I swear the cat had a smug grin of gloating satisfaction that he had caught his unsuspecting prey. All I could think was ‘the cat is a bastard’.
What caught me off guard was how sad I became. It was the first memory I have of actually feeling like I was losing something I could never get back. And for the first time I cried because of that loss. It wasn’t like losing a watch or even a friend. With both of those there was the possibility of retrieval. But this time it was final. I recognized that nothing was bringing that mouse back to life and nothing could change what had occurred. It was final. And that is where the sadness came from. No control. No say. Nothing. All I could do was cry.
What I didn’t know at that point was that this little mouse was merely preparation for something that would become much more significant in my life. That little mouse would become the beginning of a life long lesson.
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