Cobscook Bay is like no other embayment in Maine. All of the rest of the bays of Maine trend generally north and south, with their outer edges merging into the Gulf of Maine along their southern margins. Cobscook, however, is formed by three concentric semi-circular inter-connected arms facing east toward Canada’s Passamaquoddy Bay. At the innermost edge of Cobscook, on its western shore is a smallish state park, where I went with four of my sons to celebrate three recent graduations with a canoe voyage.
We headed east in early June following a weekend gale that brought a trailing cold front with scudding clouds and brisk westerly winds Monday morning. We got to our campsite in the late afternoon, which was located at the tip of a little peninsula where we carried our gear, canoes and kayak from the parking spot into designated area. There was no one else on the peninsula and few in the entire park, and even better, the cool temperature discouraged the appearance of a single winged fury.
The idea was to use the peninsula as a base camp and then launch ourselves with light gear and small tents out into the semi-wilderness of Cobscook’s inner recesses and camp on islands for a few nights. We pitched the large tent, gathered dry spruce branches and dead standing shadbush stems from the shore and had a wonderful smoky Passamaquoddy dinner of corn and clams we dug from the expansive intertidal flats below the campsite.
The night was chilly but clear, and waking early to prepare breakfast before pushing off, we noticed that in the bottom of the clam bucket we had brought was a dead field mouse that had seemingly worked hard to scale the outside of the bucket, using the handle and little ridges around the lip to ascend to the edge of his demise. Two of the boys were particularly distressed at the sight of the rigid wet creature we had unwittingly trapped. Having caught as many of his cousins as I possibly could in our basement over the course of the winter, I was less distressed. But they seemed to consider it as an omen at the beginning of our voyage and could not stop staring at its lifeless form.
Suddenly one of them exclaimed, “Look! Its heart is beating!” And sure enough, under the sodden matted white fur of its undersides, you could just barely detect a slight rhythmic pulse from its chest, as it lay splayed on its back in apparent rigor mortis. Whereupon the boys transferred the otherwise lifeless creature on a birch bark stretcher to the edge of the fire amid the murmurs of general pathos from the five of us now assembled around Mr. Peromyscus. You are called to perform many miracles as a parent, but setting up a field hospital for small wounded wildlife, particularly for an apparently witless creature with a broken rear leg, was not in the repertory.
Nevertheless, there we were, preparing to mark the end of an extended childhood for three of the four of them who had been carefully (exhaustively?) educated their entire lives since pre-school and now were facing the test of reviving this half dead creature at their feet. What kind of metaphor was this?
The stones around the fire pit began to radiate heat outward as we adjusted the stretcher to warm first one flank and then the other of the sharp-snouted mouse whose eyes were still squeezed shut when one of its forepaws moved and then another. Quickly, we procured some crumbs of Parmesan cheese that we were intending to put in our scrambled eggs and laid it at the nose of the mouse. The nose began to quiver; the whiskers flinched. The undamaged rear leg suddenly curled up under the mouse to give him enough purchase to lean into the cheese. He nibbled and swallowed as we procured more crumbs. Somehow our hearts were all in our throats. This is not the way this wolf pack normally operates.
There was still the problem of the rear leg that had been damaged in the fall from the tall lip of the bucket. It splayed out behind the mouse at an awkward angle and I could not imagine constructing a split from little sticks and sitting up for the next three days of the voyage on mouse rehabilitation duty. But then in another miraculous turn of events, the rear leg began to twitch rather violently, perhaps as blood for the core of the mouse began to flow to its outmost limbs and then with one great shudder the leg came up under Mr. Peromyscus who could now just barely hobble. After a few more bites of breakfast, the mouse took its leave, weaving uncertainly at first, but then with greater confidence down over the edge of the bank to the immense satisfaction of the audience of nurses and doctors in the M.A.S.H. unit.
Hawkeye, has life ever been this good?
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.