By T. W. Burger
Dan Stoneburner and I walked along the two tracks of what passed for a road on that barrier island off the coast of Georgia.
“There!” he exclaimed every few feet. Bending over, he would pick something up and show it to me, another serrated black triangle, a fossilized shark tooth.
We walked about half a mile, all told. When we were done, he had a whole pocketful of shark teeth. I had none.
I never saw them, no matter how much I squinted and cursed.
Stoneburner got a good laugh out of it, anyway. He gave me one of the teeth, by way of remembering that looking and seeing are not the same thing.
We like to think they are, of course. We pretend that the signals sent flashing down our optic nerves to our brains are somehow the sum total of the world as it is.
Actually, given the limitations of our equipment, we only see a narrow slice of the various wavelengths of light out there. We’ll never know what the world really looks, smells, or sounds like. It is as though we were born in a barrel, and forced to make sense of it all from what we can see through the bung hole.
Worse, it’s not as though we use even this limited equipment to its full advantage. The “wiring” from eye to mind varies widely from one individual to the other. Hence the invisible shark teeth that must have seemed to flash in neon to Stoneburner.
And so it seems to go with me and weasels.
I am told by people who are supposed to know these things that the area where I live is simply teeming with weasels. To hear my expert friends talk, I should be tripping over them out here.
In three-quarters of a century of living, I have never seen one weasel, discounting a few encountered during elections, when one is usually required to choose between the lesser of two weasels.
I can only assume that either the entire weasel population has been wiped out by some rare viral plague, or through some strange alchemy of inattention, I simply do not see them.
It can’t be the weasels’ fault. I can’t imagine them crouching behind tree trunks, snickering among themselves as I pass by, visually weasel-less.
It must be me. I just don’t see weasels.
I can’t complain too much. Here at the creek I have seen snow geese, muskrats, blue herons, white egrets, bald eagles, osprey, deer, bats, snakes and snapping turtles.
In other places I have seen bears and wildcats, raccoons, opossums, water moccasins as big around as my arm, alligators, and buffalo. I have even ridden an elephant, but that’s another story.
But I’ve never seen a weasel.
Perhaps I am not worthy. Perhaps I should read everything I can about weasels, study their diet, mating habits, learn where they prefer to live. Maybe it is simply a matter of paying my dues.
If I do all that, maybe one fine summer day I will be slipping quietly along the edge of a cornfield, or along the banks of the stream. Something will catch my eye, some shift of the slanting afternoon sunlight. I will move, quietly, slowly, to the side of a large rock. Parting the fronds of a tall fern, I will see it, sitting motionless behind a small grouping of stones and a piece of stump, a perfectly formed and flawless shark’s tooth.
But still no weasel.
T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.
Burger is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.
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