If the Ferret Crosses the Road
LAWRENCE LENHART is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19) and a dozen essays about the black-footed ferret. His prose appears in Conjunctions, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, teaches creative nonfiction and cli-fi at Northern Arizona University, and is the reviews editor of DIAGRAM.
WINNER!
Best Essay Prize
THE LINE FOR THE FREE LUNCH is dozens of uniformed employees from state and federal agencies, who are apparently starving. They shuffle through in their straw hats, broad vests, faded jeans, and cruddy boots, and fling gobs of various casseroles onto their Styrofoam plates. One woman, either a member of the media or an invited volunteer like me, asks no one in particular, “Isn’t there any elk?”
As a vegetarian, I’m accustomed to picnic disappointments, to peeking over rims of bowls only to find meat and more meat, ham in the potatoes, bacon crumbled on the salad. By the time I’ve reached the end of the buffet, I realize the only things I can eat are the sugar cookies. I set my naked plate down, a little self-conscious, and take a cookie for each palm.
There are two types of cookies, actually. In my left palm, I am holding a black-footed ferret (BFF). Black icing accentuates its bandit mask. I nibble its paws. The other cookie is meant to look like the ferret’s prairie dog prey. These two species are, after all, the occasion for this afternoon gathering on Double O Ranch in Seligman, Arizona, just northwest of Prescott, the capital of the former Arizona Territory. Almost two-thirds of Double O’s high desert landholdings are leased to the Arizona State Trust, and in a matter of minutes, through the auspices of a Safe Harbor Agreement, it will become the twenty-sixth, and newest, BFF reintroduction site in the country.
I gnaw the limbs of one cookie or another while ogling a makeshift wall of memorabilia leaning against the outside of a trailer. These poster-board collages depicting twenty years of BFF conservation here in the Aubrey Valley will likely be forgotten until needed for subsequent anniversaries. Everybody’s favorite part of the exhibit is the taxidermy duo—a ferret’s limber body mid-ambush, arched over a prairie dog nearly its own size. Transferring the cookies to my left hand, I step toward the taxidermy and pet the pelage of each with my right. The fur is coarse. The static enactment of the food chain before me, just a gasp before the ferret’s fossorial teeth puncture the prairie dog’s neckline, feels ironic considering I’m the one doing all the chewing. By now, I’ve eaten all but the heads of the cookies, not sure whose dignity I’m trying to preserve—mine as a vegetarian, or theirs. It’s yet another
