St Kilda Mouse

The golden shovel

The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven’s free wilderness.

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

His fur is a little raggedy now. I consider him, the
phantom house mouse - mus musculus muralis, feeling this unquiet
of a creature that doesn’t exist any longer, his body a tiny republic
surrounded by glass and Victorian hand writing, alabaster skulls of
other rodents propped like fractured dice. His heart taken long ago, the
ruby pendulum stopped and sewn, the once wet-leaf maze
of arteries and veins meticulously curled, dried, emptied of
crumbs he scratched from the post office floor; host of planets
and galaxies that were his all vanished, but the struggling
wariness of the eye gleams yet. He outlived islanders, fierce
gaze waiting now, pocket ears pinkish, as if still trying to scuttle towards
his nest, a favourite corner, that door frame, to sense heaven’s
tempest outside – a trick of ninety years and I can’t set him free:
miracle of a bird-soaked island, memento of nature’s forgetful wilderness.

The St Kilda mouse, now extinct, was found on the remote St Kilda archipelago off northwest Scotland, 41 miles west of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and is on display at the Bell Pettigrewmuseum at the University of St Andrews.

Olga Dermott-Bond