The Mole

THE cool earth pressed down upon him, and was under him, and bore upon his tiny flanks. The Mole rested. In the damp darkness he was motionless, save for the twitching of his small snout. With his snout and with his pink tail, like a worm, he apprehended the universe. And with, of course, the little skull holes that were his ears. In this threefold way he knew the world, and it was to him a pungence of roots and a cold darkness, through which now and again a shudder ran. And when this shudder came it was communicated from the earth through the Mole’s ear holes and through the nerves of his naked little tail, and he felt an impelling urgence in his thick-toed forefeet and fell to digging with all his might.

The Mole stirred now, under the sod. The earth tunnel was cool, for it was night. In the summer days the tunnel grew hot, hot and airless as an oven, and the Mole dug deep downward in torment. But now in the nights it was cool, and the walls of the earth tunnel were damp. The Mole crouched half erect and swayed from side to side, testing the blackness with his snout, feeling in his small skull a blurred message of discomfort.

To the Mole the message had no meaning. He felt it, so to say, only as a kind of unpeace. In his subterranean universe, which was without sight and without hearing, there were but two states of being, and these were peace and unpeace. Sensibility of the one state or of the other was the most that that tiny brain mechanism could compass. And now the Mole crouched in the damp tunnel, the claws of his clumsy forefeet working spasmodically, his snout waving and quivering in the darkness, his head full of a misty message of discontent. The Mole was hungry.

The stubby little forefeet began flailing faster now, in a motion like the breast stroke of a swimmer, and a little wake of ridged soil streamed out behind the Mole’s pink tail as he labored. His tiny ribs swelled with quick deep breaths of the underground air, and now and again he pawed away adhering crumbs of dirt from his muzzle and gave vent to an infinitesimal sneeze. In unresting and furious concentration he bored the earth. Presently he stopped. There was a tremor in the earth. It was no great shudder of the ground, but a vibrance so delicate and tiny that only to the Mole, with his ears pressed against the tunnel wall, could it have been apparent. It was the passing of a beetle.

Faster and faster the Mole worked his legs, until he seemed to move like one of those spasmodic tin monkeys that children jiggle on a stick. In the darkness and silence he quivered with awareness — awareness of what he could not see, of what he could not even hear — awareness that registered simply as a faint, faint pressure on his tympanum, filling him with obscure desire. He hunched his thimble-wide shoulders and thrust himself forward into the earth with fierce resolve.

Presently, in a tangle of crab-grass roots, he uncovered the beetle. It was a small black beetle, with orange spots on its wings, and it lay now kicking on its back on the floor of the tunnel. The Mole nuzzled it, unseeing, and held it with his forefeet, and gripped it tightly with his sharp pin-point teeth. Quickly, like a receding tide, the vague aching unpeace departed from the Mole. A blessed content settled upon his small body and permeated it to the tips of his toes and the extremity of his pink tail — such a content as he had felt on that spring day when, tunneling fast and far from home in the grip of an uncomprehended impulse, he had found in the steamy underground beneath the delphinium bed a female of his kind, or such a content as he was wont to know when, exhausted from tunneling, he fell asleep. These were the apexes of the Mole’s life. Unhurriedly now he sat half erect in his soundless world of unending night, nibbling, and full of grave content.

Above him, in the Otherworld, stars shone and moonlight lay across the garden. Hawk moths hovered on dusty wings about the beds of white and crimson phlox. And there was, too, a man in the moonlight. He leaned upon a garden spade, and stared at the sod and at the tortuous ridgings in it. Intently he watched, holding his breath, and then he thrust his spade edge into the earth with a great blow.

And, as the spade edge struck, so slight was the transition, so blurred and uncomprehending the consciousness which it erased, hardly it seemed that death had really happened, under the stars.