The little fluffy stoat is famous for its iron grip. If he clings to something with his teeth, he will never let go. “Live like stoats,” urges naturalist writer Annie Dillard in her classic American essay.
“Ermine is wild. Who knows what he’s thinking? He sleeps in his underground dwelling with his tail wrapped around his nose. Sometimes it stays in its burrow for two days in a row. Outside, he pursues rabbits, mice, nutmeg rats, and birds, killing more animals than he can eat warm, and often dragging their carcasses into his home,” begins the essay Teaching a Stone to Speak: Expeditions and Encounters. Talk: Expeditions and Encounters” by Annie Dillard.
The writer admires the incredible ability of the animal to bite into its prey with its teeth and not open its jaws, no matter what happens. She retells the stories of other naturalists.
One stoat had to be soaked in the river to loosen its teeth that had closed on the scientist’s hand. And another, just as stubborn, was carried high into the sky by an eagle, and the little predator remained circling there until its skeleton was found on the neck of a shot bird …
Grab your teeth at your destiny and don’t let it go, wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard recalls her meeting with a stoat at sunset by a pond: “We looked at each other like two lovers or sworn enemies who suddenly met unexpectedly on an overgrown path, each immersed in his own thoughts.”
She manages to penetrate the ermine’s mind, to feel its uncompromising animal nature, its life according to the principle of “here and now”.
“I would like to learn or remember how to live,” the writer continues. “I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in the literal sense of the word — I won’t drink warm blood, hold my tail up, step footsteps — but I could learn more about carelessness, about the purity of the physical existence and the dignity of life without prejudice or motive.
The ermine lives out of necessity, but we have a choice, and we hate necessity and shamefully die in its claws. I would like to live as it should, just like the stoat who lives as he should. And I suspect that we have a common path – to painlessly open ourselves to time and death, to notice everything, to remember nothing, to choose what is offered by the effort of a passionate and directed will.
At the end of the essay, Annie Dillard advises us all: “We can, you can. We can live how we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – or even a vow of silence – of their own free will. The point is to pursue your destiny in a special and gentle way, to find that very tender and alive point and connect to its pulsation. This is a surrender, not a fight. The ermine does not “attack” anyone, the ermine lives as it is intended for him, at every moment of his life surrendering to the mercy of a single necessity.
Grab your teeth for your destiny and do not let it go, hang on it like a dead weight, wherever it takes you. Grab onto it and let it lift you up into the sky…
Annie Dillard Prose writer, essayist and poet. Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction book on nature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.