He heard the mouse rustling in the shock and he tried to imagine what life as a mouse might mean. Fear first of all, of course, the ever-present, quivering, overriding fear of other life, of owl and hawk, of mink and fox and skunk. And the fear of Man and cat and dog. And the fear of Man, he said. All things fear Man. Man has made all things to fear him.
Then there would be hunger, or at least the fear and threat of hunger. And the urge to reproduce. There would be the urgency and the happiness of life, the thrill of swiftly moving feet and the sleek contentment of the well-filled belly and the sweetness of sleep…and what else? What else might there be to fill a mouse's life?
He crouched in a place of safety and listened and knew that all was well. All was safe and there was food and shelter against the coming cold. For he knew about the cold, not so much from the experience of other winters as from an instinct handed down through many generations of shivering in the cold and dying of the cold.
To his ears came the soft rustlings in the shock as others of his kind moved softly on their business. He smelled the sweetness of the sun-cured grass that had been brought in to fashion nests for warm and easy sleeping. And he smelled, as well, the grains of corn and the succulent weed seeds that would keep their bellies full.
All is well, he thought. All is as it should be. But one must keep watch, one must never lower one's guard, for security is a thing that can be swept away in a single instant. And we are so soft…we are so soft and frail, and we make good eating. A paw-step in the dark can spell swift and sure disaster. A whir of wings is the song of death.
He closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail around him…
Sutton sat with his back against the tree and suddenly, without knowing how or when he had become so, he was rigid with the knowledge of what had happened to him.
He had closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail about him and he had known the simple fears and the artless, ambitionless contentment of another life…of a life that hid in a corn shock from the paw-steps and the wings, that slept in sun-scented grass and felt a vague but vital happiness in the sure and fundamental knowledge that there was food and warmth and shelter.
He had not felt it merely, or known it alone…he had been the little creature, he had been the mouse that the corn shock sheltered; and at one and the same time he had been Asher Sutton, sitting with his back against a straight-trunked shellbark hickory tree, gazing out across the autumn-painted valley.
There were two of us, said Sutton. I, myself, and I, the mouse. There were two of us at once, each with his separate identity. The mouse, the real mouse, did not know it, for if he had known or guessed I would have known as well, for I was as much the mouse as I was myself.