THE MOLE IN THE SNOW

by Steve Steinbock

I was chased by a mole yesterday. Not the kind of mole you read about in spy stories, but a real rodent-type mole. He was actually a cute little guy, so even if you’re squeamish, stick with me now.

I went out to get the mail. The driveway is pretty icy this time of year, and the grass is covered in snow. We won’t see any green on the lawn until March or April. So I was halfway to the mailbox when I catch in my peripheral vision something black in a sea of white. I turned and it was gone. Then it popped up again. It was a tiny critter. I thought at first that it was a field mouse. He stood there looking at me, and I stood there looking at him, when suddenly he began skittering across the snow toward me.

He got about two yards away from me and stopped. That was when I noticed that he didn’t have a tail, or at least not much of one. I looked closer and saw that his face wasn’t the face of a mouse. (To tell the truth, I couldn’t see his face at all. I couldn’t swear to it, but it seemed to have a scrunched up little face, without the big beady eyes of a mouse). Granted, when I think of moles, I think of bigger, uglier creatures. Even now, I’m not certain that it was a mole.1 I couldn’t see its eyes, and moles are supposed to be mostly blind, but this guy saw me, for sure.

There he was, standing there looking at me, with me looking down at him. Then what does he do? He starts scurrying toward me. Damn, I thought. I wasn’t ready for that. The guy was cute, but I sure didn’t want him crawling up my leg. I jumped. I must have been pretty silly looking doing a little dance on the icy tarmac in my down coat. It came at me again, and again I dodged it. Then it must have gotten close enough to realize that I wasn’t its mother, or its next meal, or whatever it was that had driven him to come after me. He took one last look at me and dashed across down the rest of the driveway and across the street, into a patch of woods.

This story isn’t apropos of anything in particular. But it sure was amusing, or would have been had it happened to someone else.

Le “detective novel” et l’influence de la pensée scientifique

I wish I could fool you with my linguistic agility with French. But I couldn’t really fool a mole. I can look at a page of French and gather a good portion of its meaning based on my limited knowledge of Spanish. But hearing it, or trying to pronounce it, I’d appear about as silly as I was on the driveway being chased by a small furry varmint.

I’ve been reading P.D. James’ new non-fiction book, Talking about Detective Fiction. I like the book. It doesn’t pretend to be encyclopedic in scope, and never claims to be anything but one woman’s tastes and observations. She does a very good job at it. Each chapter begins with a cartoon and an epigraph. The cartoons are cute but forgettable. The epigraphs alone, though, are worth the price of the book. The final chapter of the book, for instance, begins with:

The detective novel . . . is aimed above all at the intelligence; and this could constitute for it a title to nobility. It is in any case perhaps one of the reasons for the favour it enjoys. A good detective story possesses certain qualities of harmony, internal organisation and balance, which respond to certain needs of the spirit, needs which some modern literature, priding itself on being superior, very often neglect.

The passage is taken from Le “detective novel” et l’influence de la pensée scientifique by Régis Messac, published in 1929. Having never heard of Messac, I did what I do whenever I’m curious, which is usually thirty or forty times a day, I Googled him. I learned very little. In 1914 during the Great War, he took a bullet to the head, and went into academics. Talk about poetic justice. He died in 1945. It was while he was on the faculty (or perhaps a doctoral candidate) at McGill University between 1924 and 1929, just 250 miles from where the mole chased me yesterday, that he wrote the treatise quoted above. In addition to Le “detective novel” et l’influence de la pensée scientifique, thought to be the first academic treatment of detective fiction, he wrote science fiction novels. I wish I knew more about Messac, but I can’t find any of his work in English.

Messac is another one to add, along with Boileau-Narcejac, of French writers whom I want to read but can’t because they aren’t available in English. C’est dommage!

1. I just did a little research—what I should have done before finishing the column. The little varmint was definitely not a mole. It was a small rodent, likely a short-tailed shrew or a vole. I kind of like the idea of being chased by a shrew. [↩]