Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
If you’re five years old, you are usually not all that excited about seeing very large wildlife. When you’re driving out of town in the truck and your Mom and Dad are talking about seeing moose and bears and muskoxen, you’re sitting very quietly in your seatbelt thinking. You’re thinking that it’s one thing to see something huge and with long teeth and curving claws from behind the iron railing of a public zoo, but it’s an entirely different thing to open your car door to a grizzly bear on the open tundra. Dinosaurs are large and ferocious but at least they’re extinct. When you’re five years old and venturing out into the wild countryside around Nome, you’d rather see something cute and furry with little round ears and dark bright eyes. You’d rather see a lemming.
Lemmings are cute, furry, have little round ears and dark bright eyes but they’re also stalked and eaten by lots of other animals. This gives them a tragic aspect not lost on my youngest son. So, while my husband and I are scanning the horizon for large carnivorous shapes, Monty is looking at his feet for small herbivorous ones. He’s looking into little holes, under rocks, shrubs, and wildflower roots. And maybe, if he’s very still while he works on a Hershey bar, a dicrostonyx torquatus will poke its head out of its tunnel to look around. What he’d really like to do is take one home and keep it as a pet. But no, his mean parents tell him, you can’t do that. No more wild animals in this house. Three is enough, they say, exchanging glances.
When we get home, Monty pulls out the “Alpine Tundra” poster we got by mail from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Anchorage. The sketches of the birds and animals are out of scale to each other: a ptarmigan is smaller than a ground squirrel and the Dall sheep is three times as large as a brown bear. Of course the bear is in the “background” but this concept is a little difficult to understand when you’re just five years old. There are two collared lemmings to color but one of them is in a weasel’s mouth. Boy, sometimes it can be pretty depressing trying to identify with lemmings.
The next day we go to a gift shop since some allowance is burning a sizeable home in his “I Survived Jurassic Park” sweatsuit pocket. Monty’s looking for a stuffed lemming. He wants something soft and cuddly with polyester filling: a little lemming friend to tuck into bed with him and ride in his backpack on walks to centennial Park. But I guess tourists don’t want to buy images of lemmings so he finds only orcas, seals, huskies, and bears in the cache of stuffed toys.
It can be really tough being little in a big person’s world. The chairs and tables are too high. You can’t see yourself in the mirrors because they’re too far above the sinks. You don’t read yet, you’re having some trouble with subtraction, and you’re having some trouble with pronouncing “TH” and “L” so even the word “lemming” doesn’t quite turn out right. And now you just can’t seem to find a lemming to share your life with. Maybe next weekend.
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