The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

  The Burrow

  The burrow is my own design, and I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. The only visible trace of it from outside is a big hole, but that in fact goes nowhere; after a couple of feet you encounter bedrock. I don’t want to claim it was done that way on purpose, it’s just what was left over from one of my many false starts, but in the end I thought it would be a good ruse to leave this one hole unfilled. Many ruses are so obvious that they are self-defeating, that’s something I know better than most, and it’s certainly a bold stroke to leave the hole to indicate that there may be something worth investigating in the vicinity. But anyone who suspects me of cowardice and my burrow of being a monument to my cowardice misunderstands me. Perhaps a thousand paces from that hole, concealed under a removable flap of moss is the actual entrance to the burrow, it’s as secure as anything in this world can be; of course, someone can happen to tread on the moss or push through it, and then my burrow is wide open, and whoever wants to can walk in and destroy it for all time – though it should be pointed out that this requires certain rather rare aptitudes. I understand all that, and even now at its zenith, my life enjoys hardly a single hour of complete quiet; in that place in the dark moss I feel myself mortal, and in my dreams there is often a greedy snout rootling persistently around in it. People will say I should have filled in this actual entrance as well, a thin layer of compact soil at the top, a little looser further down, so that it wouldn’t require much effort for me to dig my way out afresh each time. But that isn’t possible; prudence actually demands that I have an instantaneous egress, prudence as so often demands the riskier approach; these are all laborious and time-consuming calculations, and the pleasure the shrewd brain takes in itself is sometimes the only reason one goes on calculating. I need instantaneous egress, because is it not conceivable that for all my vigilance I might find myself under attack from some unexpected quarter? There I am, living in peace in the innermost bowels of my burrow, and meanwhile the foe is silently and slowly tunnelling towards me. I am not saying his instincts are keener than mine, it’s possible that he is as unaware of my existence as I am of his, but there are passionate house-breakers who blindly churn through soil, and given the massive extension of my burrow there is every chance of running into one of my pathways somewhere. Admittedly I have the home advantage here: I have minute knowledge of all the paths and directions. The burglar may very easily become my victim – and a tasty one at that – but I am getting on, there are many who are stronger than I am and the number of my foes is infinite; it could happen that I am running from one of them and wind up in the clutches of another – oh, so many things could happen – at any rate I require the certainty that somewhere there is an easily accessible, fully open exit for me, that requires no further work on my part to reach, so that I never – please God! – find myself digging panic-stricken through loose soil, and feel the pursuer’s teeth clamped on my thighs. Nor is it only external foes that threaten me, there are also some within the earth itself. I have never seen them, but I have heard stories about them, and I firmly believe in their existence. These are creatures from within the earth; not even legend can describe them, even their victims can barely have seen them; they come, you hear the scratch of their claws just below you in the ground, which is their element, and already you are lost. It makes no difference here that you are in your home, because it’s really their dwelling. My exit will not save me from them, as it probably wouldn’t save me under any circumstances, but rather ruin me; still, it remains a source of hope, and I am unable to live without it.

  Apart from that one main highway, I am connected to the outside world by other, very narrow, fairly harmless byways, which keep me provided with breathable air. They are the work of forest voles and I have cleverly incorporated them into my overall design. They offer me the opportunity of sniffing the air some way off, and thus afford me further protection; also they are conduits for all sorts of small creatures which I eat up, so that I enjoy a certain modest amount of game, sufficient to keep body and soul together, without even having to leave my burrow, which of course is a considerable asset.

  The most delightful aspect of the burrow, though, is its silence – a deceptive silence, admittedly, one that can suddenly be broken, and then all bets are off, but for the time being it still endures. I can creep for hours on end through my passageways and hear nothing beyond the occasional rustle of some small creature which I can put a sudden stop to with my teeth, or the trickling of some loose soil that serves to indicate the timeliness of some repair or other – otherwise all is silence. The forest air blows in, it’s simultaneously warm and cool; sometimes I lie down and roll around in a passage for the sheer joy of it. It’s a fine thing to have such a burrow as old age approaches, to have a roof over one’s head as the autumn begins.

  Every hundred yards or so I widen out the passageways to little round plazas, where I can comfortably curl up, warm myself and rest. There I sleep the sweet sleep of peace, of assuaged appetite, of an objective attained, of home ownership. I don’t know whether it’s an atavistic instinct or whether the perils of even this edifice are still such as to rouse me, but periodically I wake up in panic out of a deep sleep, listen to the silence, which day and night never varies, smile with relief, and lapse back with limbs relaxed into a still deeper sleep. Poor vagrants, without a home, on the roads, in the forests, at best finding temporary refuge in a pile of leaves or amongst a horde of fellow creatures, exposed to the full vindictiveness of heaven and earth! While I lie here in a plaza secured in every direction – I have more than fifty of them in my burrow – and between drowsing and profound unconsciousness I pass the hours that I select for the purpose.

  Not quite at the heart of the burrow, well selected for the eventuality of extreme danger, perhaps not of pursuit, but certainly of a siege is my central plaza. While everything else may be the work more of a concentrated mind than body, this citadel is in all its parts the product of the very hardest manual labour. Several times extreme physical exhaustion almost led me to abandon the task; I rolled on my back and cursed the project, dragged myself outside and left the burrow untenanted. I could afford to do so, seeing as I had no intention of returning to it, until, hours or even days later, I ruefully returned to it, almost raising a hymn on finding the structure intact, and joyfully resumed my labours. The work on the citadel was more difficult than it had to be, by which I mean that the burrow as a whole did not benefit from it; it was simply that the earth at the place where I had decided to situate my citadel happened to be very loose and sandy and needed to be pounded down, to create a large, beautiful curved surface. I spent whole days and nights ramming my forehead thousands of times into the soil, I was happiest when bloodied, because that meant the walls were beginning to acquire firmness, and so, as may be conceded, I earned the rights to my citadel.

  In this citadel I keep my provisions: everything I manage to hunt down within the burrow that exceeds my immediate demands, and also everything I bring back from outside is piled up here. The citadel is so spacious that half a year’s supplies do not fill it. This enables me to keep my holdings nicely spread out, so that I can walk up and down among them, play with them, rejoice at their quantity and their various odours, and retain an overall sense of what is what. Then I can always make adjustments and, according to the season, make the necessary advance calculations and foraging plans. There are times when I am so abundantly catered for that, out of indifference towards food, I don’t lay a finger on the small fry that like to scuttle around here, though that may be incautious for other reasons. Because I am so regularly preoccupied with defensive preparations, my views regarding the exploitation of the burrow for such purposes are subject to constant revision, though within narrow parameters. Then it will seem to me to be asking for trouble to base the defences entirely around the citadel: the extension of the burrow offers similarly extensive possibilities, and it seems more in accord with prudence to keep my provisions a little spread
out, and to keep various smaller plazas stocked with them; and then I will decree that every third plaza is to be a reserve storage depot, or every fourth one a principal depot and every second one an auxiliary depot, and so on and so forth. Or I will keep some pathways clear – for reasons of deception – of the piles of supplies, or I will make spontaneous selections of a mere handful of plazas, purely according to their position vis-à-vis the exit. Every successive plan entails much onerous lifting work; I need to make the calculations and then carry the goods back and forth. Of course I can do so in my own sweet time, without undue haste, and it’s not such a hardship to carry the good things in one’s mouth, stop for a rest when one feels like it, and have a nibble of whatever happens to take one’s fancy. What’s worse are certain times, usually when I wake in panic, when it seems to me that the current disposition is wholly mistaken, fraught with danger, and needs to be instantly corrected, without regard to my general fatigue and exhaustion, because then I will hurry, then I will fly, because I have no time to make any calculations as I move to execute some carefully honed new plan. I grab randomly what I can between my teeth, drag, lug, sigh, groan, stumble, until some chance shift in my prevailing, excessively dangerous state of mind puts a stop to this, and I gradually come round, sober sense returns, and I barely understand my over-hastiness. Then I inhale deeply the peace of my home that I have myself disturbed, return to my sleeping place, fall asleep on the spot in new-won exhaustion, and when I wake find I have as incontrovertible proof of my almost dream-like night’s work, a rat or something hanging from my teeth. Then there are other times when the siting of all provisions in one place is the way to go. What use to me are the supplies in little out-of-the-way plazas, how much is it even possible to store there, however much I take, it will only get in the way and perhaps even obstruct me in my effort either to defend myself or else to run away. Moreover, it’s a foolish but true fact that one’s morale suffers when one cannot see all one’s stockpiles in one place, taking in at a glance what one has. Is it not possible, too, for things to get lost in the course of constant moving? I can’t forever be galloping along my cross-passageways and rat-runs to see that everything is in proper order. The basic idea of a distribution of supplies may be correct, but really only when one has several sites at one’s disposal like my citadel. Several such sites! If only! But who could build on such a scale? Also, it would be impossible retrospectively to integrate them in the overall plan.

  I will admit that this is a flaw in the design, just as it is always a flaw to have no more than one of anything. And I concede too, that during the original construction, I had a dim sense, though clear enough when I thought about it, that on some level I had a yen for a plurality of citadels; I didn’t give into it, I didn’t feel up to such an enormous task; yes, I felt too weak even to imagine the required labour, and somehow consoled myself with other feelings no less vague that what would ordinarily not be sufficient, would in my own exceptional case, by special grace, be so, probably because providence had a particular interest in the preservation of my steam-hammer brow. And so it is that I have only the one citadel, while the vague feelings that this one of all would this time be sufficient – they no longer exist. With things as they are, I must needs content myself with the one, the little plazas can’t possibly replace it, and so I then begin again, when the feeling has grown in me, to drag everything back out of the little plazas to my citadel. For a little while then, it’s a great comfort to me to have all the passageways and nodal points free, to watch the quantities of meat once again piling up in the citadel, wafting out to the outermost passageways their mingled odours which delight me as I stand far away identifying their respective provenances. Outstandingly peaceful times have often followed, in which slowly and step by step I move my sleeping-sites back from the outer periphery to the interior, diving deeper into the world of the odours, until I can no longer stand it, and one night I charge to the citadel, conduct a massive clean-up operation, and gorge myself to the point of utter insensibility on the best things I have. Happy days, but dangerous, and anyone with the ability to exploit them could easily destroy me at little risk to themselves. Here too, the want of a second or third citadel makes itself felt, as it is the great and singular accumulation of provisions that undoes me. I seek variously to protect myself – the allocation of foods to the smaller plazas being one such stratagem – unfortunately, like the other strategies, it leads through privation to even greater rapacity, which overpowers my logical mind and leads me to make unwarranted changes to the overall defences.

  After such episodes, I tend to review the burrow in a bid to pull myself together, and after the needful repairs have been effected, I will often leave it altogether, if only for a brief stretch. The punishment of being gone for long seems to me too harsh, though I accept the need for occasional absences. There is always a certain feeling of formality when I approach the exit. During periods of domesticity I tend not to go there, even avoiding the upper reaches of the passageway altogether, nor is it at all easy to wander about there, because of the crazy zigzag of passageways I laid out; that was where my burrow began, back when I had little hope of ever fully realizing my blueprints, so I began almost a little whimsically, and the early pleasure I took in the work found expression in a labyrinth that at the time seemed to me the crown of all edifices, but which I deem today, probably more correctly, as a rather baroque bit of decoration, not really up to the standard of the whole thing, though perhaps amusing enough when viewed independently – here, make yourselves at home, I liked to quip to my invisible foes, and thought of them all choking to death in the initial labyrinth – but in reality it was no more than a rickety bit of ornamentation that would hardly be able to withstand a serious onslaught or a foe desperately struggling for his life.

  Should I therefore rebuild it? I keep postponing the decision, and expect it will probably stay the way it is. Apart from the labour it would entail, it would also be about the most dangerous project one could imagine; at the time I embarked on the burrow, I was able to work there relatively undisturbed, the risk was not appreciably greater than any other time, whereas today it would amount to almost wantonly alerting the whole world to the existence of my burrow; today it’s no longer possible. I am almost glad about this, a certain sentimental regard for this first example of my handiwork is of course also a factor. Besides, if a great attack should come, what style of entrance would save me? An entrance can deceive, distract, torment an attacker, and this one does some of all three. But a really concerted attack is something I would have to seek to oppose immediately with all the resources of the burrow as a whole and all the forces of my body and soul – just to state the obvious. So let the entrance stay the way it is. The burrow has so many naturally occurring weaknesses anyway, let it also keep this one that was all my own work, as I have belatedly but now all too well come to recognize. All this is, of course, not to say that I’m not occasionally, or even permanently, disquieted by this weakness. If I avoid this section of the burrow in the course of my wanderings, then it is principally because its aspect is disagreeable to me; I don’t always care to be confronted by visible evidence of a shortcoming of the burrow when such shortcomings are too much present in my awareness anyway. Even if the mistake up there at the entrance endures forever, I would like to be spared the sight of it for as long as I may. Even if I am only heading in the general direction of the exit, and whole plazas and passageways still separate me from it, I still have the sense I am entering into an atmosphere of great danger; it feels sometimes as though my fur were thinning out, as though I might be standing there stripped to my moulted flesh, and be at that moment greeted by the howls of my enemies. Yes, perhaps the mere fact of an exit is enough to precipitate such unhealthy feelings, it marks the limits of the protections of home, but it is also this specific entryway that especially pains me. Sometimes I dream I have converted it, rebuilt it radically, from the ground up, or down, rapidly, with a giant’s strength, unnot
iced by anyone, and now it is impregnable; and there is no sweeter sleep than on such nights, tears of joy and relief still glitter in the hairs of my beard when I awake from it.

  I need to overcome the ordeal of this labyrinth when I go out, and then I find it both irritating and moving to get lost for a moment in my construction, and see the work still striving to justify its existence to me, even though my opinion of it was fixed long ago. But then I arrive under the moss cover, which I sometimes allow – that shows how long a period I don’t leave my home for – to knit together with the forest floor, and now all that is needed is just a little bunt of the head, and I am out in the open. For a long time I forbear to make the required movement, and if I didn’t have the labyrinth to negotiate, then who knows, I might just turn tail and go back inside. After all, why not? Your home is secure and well protected; you live in peace, are warm and well-fed, the master – sole master – of a multiplicity of passageways and plazas, and all that you are willing, if not to sacrifice, then at least to put at risk; you have every possibility of being able to reconquer it, but you agree to play a dangerous, even a madcap game with it. Are there any sensible reasons for doing so? No, there can be no sensible reasons for such a risk. But then I cautiously push open the trapdoor and I’m outside; I slowly let it fall back, and, as quickly as I can, sprint away from the tell-tale spot.