Hey mama wolf

Ellen told me a story today that I'm pretty sure possesses at least one moral and, at the very least, is a good accounting of the resiliency of nature in its seemingly fragile form. The story begins with Ellen spying her cat on top of the bird feeder hanging from a tree in her backyard, with its paws around a small bird. She ran outside to coax the cat away from the bird before death claimed it's everlasting soul, but it appeared she was too late -- the cat had brought it down to the lawn and was feasting.

Hoping there was still time, Ellen rushed to the scene, scared off her cat, and inspected the damage. The bird, a tufted tit mouse, was a mangled, red mess. It was hard to tell where exactly the bird was injured because of all the blood, but one of it's wings was definitely in rough shape. Ellen made the determination that the kindest thing she could do for this bird would be to kill it.

"And then I went inside and found a little box to bury it in", she said.

"Wait, how did you kill it?" The first thing that had come to my mind was a vision of her stomping on the bird, and I wanted to see how far off the mark I was. How does a middle-aged, Fox News watching, salty-tongued, woman, murder a tufted tit mouse? I was about to find out.

She extended her thumb and made a pushing gesture with it, as if she was tacking something to a wall.

"You crushed its head?"

"No, I broke it's neck."

A brutal game, nature. I asked her if she buried the poor bird.

"I was about to when I got a phone call. I was on the phone for, I don't know, maybe an hour. When the call ended, I went over to the box that had the bird in it and lifted the lid. And the bird rises out of it like a jack-in-the-box , one wing flapping desperately, right at my face. Well, it didn't get far because of it's lame wing. I can't tell you how startled that made me. "

"So, the bird, this cute little tufted tit mouse, survived two assassination attempts by creatures much larger, and far more cunning, than it?"

"Yeah, can you believe it?"

"Well, what did you do with it? Don't tell me you finished it off after all that."

"No, I brought it to the humane society and they mended it's wing. It's at my house recuperating in a cage. It seems pretty happy. "

"Good for you. That bird earned the reprieve."

"After the cat had finished with the bird and before I tried to kill it, my neighbor had stood over it and said a prayer. Looks like it worked."

"I'll say. Tell me, does the bird flinch every time you come near it?"

"You'd think so", she said, "but it seems to like me."

"No kidding. Did you name it?"

"Yeah. Rocky."

I haven't the slightest clue why she gave it that name, but whatever. If it were up to me, I would have named it Tuff Lil' Tit Mouse or Tuff Lil' Tittay. Or how about Mighty (tufted tit) Mouse?

Ok, for reals, I would have named it Lincoln, as in Abraham. Why? One, they look alike. Ask anyone what bird Lincoln resembled and they'll say tufted tit mouse ten times out of ten. And two, they both survived consecutive assassination attempts by a cat and a human. Ah, but Tuff Lil' Tittay has a nicer ring. We'll go with that.