This Tiny, Perfect Creature is a Baby Stoat

For Joe Amies

Stoats don’t open their eyes until they are at least a month old, so the darling orphan creature in the Facebook video has never seen one of her kind before. This is a tragedy, since she is so cute and has tiny, tiny paws.

The stoat remembers her mother as the lowland: all sweet, furry marsh. Her mother: the soft lapel of a ladies’ evening coat, matches a quilted designer bag.

Shallow, satin-slipped pockets are nested with the coloured foils of after-dinner mints. There are no more parties tonight (there are fewer, as you get older), and the lady in the coat considers whether she will go on with the man who is buying her another drink, when this final bar closes. She applies more perfume under the table.

The blossomy fragrance on her wrist is a strange cousin to those early wildflowers, growing from the empty burrows into the woods where the stoat-mother laid her kits.

Her painted fingers move from the sticky bar top  to smooth a twitch at her collar, and she smiles back at the man holding two glasses of something sparkling. Over ice, the fizzy cocktails make bubbles the shape of kisses:    x

x

                                                                                               x

o                       x               x

                                      o

                                            x

xo   x.

The baby stoat in the Facebook video is going to be introduced to another orphan, so she will have a friend.  She, like the other, is a dear thing.  They gave her a boy’s name by mistake: Stuart.

At six weeks, sight has recently come to her as a surprise. Her new eyes are souvenir snow-globes from the wild, shaking with tiny sequin stars. The man from the Weasel Rehabilitation Centre has the animal in his flat pink hand and is pleased. In his palm, she makes small, repeated movements that could only be gestures to dance.

The meeting goes well. They had almost given up on catching another, so Stuart is like a miracle. The man videotapes their playing - a cartoon barfight that shakes the cardboard toilet paper tubes. Scrappy and sharp-toothed and ecstatic. I am a thing like you! FLASH-BAM, shutter click, I thought I was the littlest thing in the world before, but here you are!

They could only ever fall in love. It could not have been otherwise. Everybody watching the video agrees that they will cherish this memory; the first real thing on the internet.

The man moves the stoat babies to a bigger cage, with a window onto a garden. This is part of his plan: “Re-wilding”. Being a pet is brief. They are joint now in their littleness. Together they could kill a cat.

 Instead, the man brings them warm eggs and hairless new-born mice that taste faintly of hand-soap. The outside forms vague heart-shaped shadows on the glass of their enclosure and shades their artificial branches with suggestions of weather. It sometimes rains for days in that part of the country. Forests much bigger than the ones we know used to grow under the sea. A future somebody will find their two bleached skulls in the sand of some beach and think maybe there used to be miniature tigers, before the ocean took. For now, there is the sleepy tick of sleet at the walls.  

The first animal grows whiter from her belly. Her second month. At thirty, forty centimetres, she and Stuart share enough fur to survive a winter.

On a singular bright Thursday, the man comes down and opens the doggy door onto the world.

Here: the rest! Wide meadows of desire that stretch to the all-night truck stop at the A-road. Stuart and the other leave the farmland running, their low bodies skimming wet grass and open mouths slack in happy triangles. The flashing tails of disappearing rabbits promise a chase.

The tank at the rescue centre will be left empty a while. Mustelid piss settles in the sawdust and knotted rope. The hatch is stuck open just enough to stir a slight breeze through the too-green plastic leaves.