Monsters

When you are in the outdoors during the day is sounds so magical. The buzz of insects and the rustle of critters makes the whole area come alive.

Nighttime is a different story. While I imagine the actually noises aren't terribly different at night, the way they sound is quite a bit more terrifying.

On one of my first nights out, I discovered, auditorially, the resident monster. Now, its hard to judge the size of something moving through dried leaves. Every creature makes a loud rustle. Each night, I would set up my tent in relative silence, but as soon as I was safely in my tent, the monster would come out.

It would rustle from its home to investigate this tent intruder, crunching leaves as it passed. It took particular interest in my stash box, moving around it and... making a sound I can only describe as snorting, around its base.

Was it some sort of pig? A boar? Perhaps it was a possum or a skunk. Whatever it was, I was somewhat terrified to startle it (particularly if it was a boar or skunk), but I was also curious about what it really was. While there are countless sounds in the night, this one was the most constant, the most curious, and the closest to home.

So I started leaving the bottom of my tent door unzipped, so that when I heard the beast I could fling back the rain fly and shine my headlamp in the direction of the noise. But try as I might, it eluded my surprise peekings. It must be really fast or really stealthy.

This wonder went on for two months, when one night, in what ended up being simultaneously far more terrifying and far less terrifying than I would have imagined. I had been having some trouble falling asleep, and I was laying, staring in the very dull light up at the roof of my tent, when quite suddenly something leapt into my tent.

I jolted into a sitting position, and quickly grasped for my headlamp (though somewhat afraid because whatever it was had gone toward that side of the tent. I manage to find the lamp after a few tenative grabs, and as I click it on I revealed my intruder.

A field mouse.

Of course this creature is stairing at me with horror. He has just jumped into what he considered a shealter, only to find it inhabited by a creature hundreds of times his size. I, not interested in shairng my home with a mouse, tried to shoo him out with my shoe. This does not go well, as he is fast and the lip of the tent is about as tall as him. So he runs from me in every direction, even a few times getting behind me (which freaks me out in my one person tent). I consider just grabbing him and throwing him out, but I don't really want to get bitten and diseased by some mouse. So I continue with the shoe.

Unfortunatly, one of my gentle shoe guidings ends up being more like a kick, and this sends the mouse into a panic. He dives at me, or rather, toward me, and starts burrowing between my sleeping mat and the tent floor, scrambling desperatly for whatever cover he can manage. It is at that moment when I hear it.

The sound. That... snort like sound. It is his little paws as they scrape along plastic. In a rush, I realize that he, the little feild mouse, is my monster. The noise that eluded my identification, rusting the tarp and at the base of the plastic box, not the snuffling of some giant beast, but the scamperings and attempted climbings of a tiny one.

I am now his monster. As he is hidden and finally still, I slowly reach to the tent door, open it completely, and pull in the rain fly so that a clear exit is now in sight. I then pull back the mattress and with my teeth against my lip I make a soft "ffft" sound. The mouse runs toward the exit, stoping at the lip of the tent door.

"Fffft," I say again, and he leaps out of the tent into the night.

I'm struck by the fact that it was the door I left open so I could find out what the creature's idenity was the door it leapt in through.

I'm struck by the fact that forcing the mouse out was far less effective than showing him the way out.

Most of all, I'm struck by the fact that it was my ignorance of reality that caused me to fear that monster mouse.