The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (9 page)

17. BEREFT

the snail
has vanished! where it’s gone
nobody knows

— Y
OSA
B
USON
(1716 – 1783)

O
NE MORNING
I searched for the snail, but as usual it was hard to find. I looked again among the ferns and mosses and around some lichened branches. It was not foraging for calcium near the pile of crumbled eggshell. It was not by the little tree, nor was it near the mushroom. It was not high on the terrarium glass, nor was it by the mussel shell. It was not by the little batch of eggs it had laid several weeks earlier. It was not in any of its many hiding places. It had vanished.

There was no glass top on the terrarium. Since it was the home of a living, breathing creature, I thought ventilation might be important. As far as I knew, the snail had never before left the terrarium. Even while sleeping in the pot of violets, it had always returned from its farthest expeditions.

Now, inexplicably, it was gone. Perhaps, with its eggs laid, it was finally determined to head back to its wild woods. It was probably as homesick as I was. But I simply couldn’t fathom my existence without it. Its tiny sleeping presence had comforted me by day, and its explorations had entertained me by night.

I wondered if I could find and follow its slime trail, but the dry wood of the crate left no trace, and I was too weak to get down on the floor and search for further clues. From my bed I dropped pieces of mushroom onto the floor, hoping that the snail would appear. There were endless places in the room where it could hide—it could be anywhere—and I feared someone might step on it. I dreaded the sound of a terrible crunch.

As the hours passed, the situation seemed more and more futile, and I realized that I was almost more attached to the snail than to my own tenuous life.

T
HERE IS A CERTAIN
depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are. Sometimes the people you know well withdraw, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change.

There were times when I wished that my viral invader had claimed me completely. How much better to live an exuberant life and then leave as one exits a party, simply opening a door and stepping out. Instead, the virus took me to the edge of life and then left me trapped in its pernicious shadow, with symptoms that, barely tolerable one day, became too severe the next, and with the unjustness of unexpected relapses that, overnight, erased years of gradual improvement.

In a March 2009 article in the
New Yorker,
Atul Gawande wrote, “All human beings experience isolation as torture.” Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail . . . the snail kept my spirit from evaporating. Between the two of us, we were a society all our own, and that kept isolation at bay. The snail was missing, and as the day waned, I was bereft.

18. OFFSPRING

[
The snail
]
drops a cluster of thirty
to fifty eggs looking like homeopathic pills . . .
Under the microscope the translucent egg-envelopes present
a beautiful appearance, being studded with glistening crystals
of lime, so that the infant within seems to wear a gown
embroidered with diamonds.

— E
RNEST
I
NGERSOLL
, “In a Snailery,” 1881

T
HAT EVENING
I was expecting a friend who had traveled a long way to see me. But all I could think about was the missing snail. When my friend arrived, she looked into the terrarium and lifted up a piece of moss. There, in a hole it had dug, was the snail, along with another, much larger clutch of eggs.

I had allowed the terrarium to dry out just a bit and its condition was now more favorable for egg laying. Thus the snail had burrowed under the moss and deposited its eggs where they would be well hidden and stay evenly moist. The terrarium was an expectant snail’s dream, a safe nursery for hatching offspring.

My snail had recognized and dealt competently with the changing humidity, which it continued to monitor—periodically tending the eggs laid on the surface, but visiting the buried eggs only a couple of times. Though why assume that a gastropod would be any less skilled at planning for offspring than a
Homo sapiens
?

Eventually I would learn that I may be the first person to have recorded observations of a snail tending its eggs. Malacologists would have guessed that a snail visiting its eggs was more likely to eat them than to provide care. Because the first clutch was laid on the surface of the soil and numbered so few, I could see that none of the eggs were missing after the snail’s visits. In the wild, revisiting eggs could give a predator a fresh trail to follow, but my snail was free from those concerns. Since it was separated from its colony, the survival of its genes was critical; perhaps this had triggered more attentive egg care.

While too much moisture can endanger eggs, they can withstand surprisingly dry conditions. “The vitality of snails’ eggs almost passes belief,” says Ernest Ingersoll:

They have been so completely dried as to be friable between the fingers, and desiccated in a furnace until reduced to almost invisible minuteness, yet always have regained their original bulk upon exposure to damp, and the young have been developed with the same success.

As a result of so much egg laying, my snail lost a noticeable amount of weight; its whole body shrank in comparison to its shell size. For about a week it spent more time than usual sleeping, and then it began to eat mushroom ravenously.

I
NEVER SAW THE
first clutch of eggs hatch. This probably occurred at night, and in addition to my flashlight, I would have needed a magnifying glass. One morning I noticed that some of the original eggs had disappeared, and when I looked closer, I saw a few tiny snails moving around; if they hadn’t been moving, I wouldn’t have detected them. “The young one[s] emerge in a lovely bubble-like shell,” wrote the author of “Snails and Their Houses.” Their shells are translucent and “so delicate,” William Kirby notes, “that a sun-stroke destroys them.”

The hatchlings liked to hang out on the underside of the mussel shell, probably because of the moisture, darkness, and available calcium. Sometimes they would sleep beneath a slab of portobello, where they were out of view until they climbed up for breakfast in the evening and then were noticeable against the mushroom’s white flesh. The number of hatchlings increased as the weeks passed, and I realized that additional clutches of eggs must have been laid. Perhaps the snail had deposited them at the site of the original buried group, since it revisited that site several times, though I couldn’t see precisely what was happening. Or there may have been other buried egg sites.

As the tiny snails grew, their shells increased in size and slowly became opaque. There must have been several weeks between hatchings, as it was easy to tell the clutches apart. One night, a younger hatchling followed one of its older siblings across the terrarium’s glass side. It then crawled onto the older sibling’s shell. The older sibling turned and looked at the younger one, and they waved their tentacle-noses wildly at each other, but there was no way for the older snail to get the youngster off its back. It seemed to be a case of sibling conflict. I didn’t want to interfere, but I finally managed to sit up just long enough to detach the smaller snail and place it by the pile of crushed eggshells. It spent the evening there, eating contentedly, which made me think perhaps it was after the calcium in the older sibling’s shell.

I
WONDERED HOW SOON
the little snails would mature, and I watched them closely. The thought of ending up with some hundred or so fertile snails was a bit mind boggling; it was an outcome best avoided. Highsmith’s story “The Snail-Watcher” opens with one of her foreboding first lines: “When Mr. Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time.”

While the bathroom habits of my original snail had not been bothersome—a small, neat squiggle now and then on the mussel shell or terrarium glass—the casts of so many at once, especially with their fast rate of growth, was leading to a rather splotched look everywhere.

Given its solitary nature, I wondered how my snail was coping with a population explosion of its own creation. In the wild, nearly half an egg clutch is lost to weather, predators, or hungry first-hatched siblings, but in the terrarium the outcome was far more successful. I could only guess at the total number of offspring, as they were impossible to count; by day, each one had its own hiding place, and at night they were out and about, moving around in all directions at once. While watching my solitary snail had been peaceful and calming, watching a plethora of its young in simultaneous motion was nearly hypnotic. I had to admit that
I
was just a bit overwhelmed.

O
VER SEVERAL MONTHS, THERE
was a gradual improvement in my condition—not so much that it was noticeable day to day, or even week to week, but I could now sit in a chair for a few minutes a couple of times a day. I wanted to try moving home, though I wasn’t certain I’d be able to manage with less help. Since the prospect was daunting, I decided to leave the original snail and one of its offspring with my caregiver. Several friends, amused and intrigued by my enthusiastic “snail reports,” eagerly adopted a few of the offspring as well. The rest of the numerous progeny were released into the wild where their parent snail had been found. It was only then that an official count was made: 118 offspring had hatched.

Part 6
FAMILIAR TERRITORY

The crucial first step to survival in all
organisms is habitat selection.

If you get to the right place,
everything else is likely to be easier.

— E
DWARD
O. W
ILSON
,
Biophilia,
1984

19. RELEASE

Climb Mount Fuji
O snail
but slowly, slowly

— K
OBAYASHI
I
SSA
(1763 – 1828)

B
Y MIDSUMMER
, my dog, Brandy, and I were moved home. It was hard to say which of us was happier. Her cedar bed was in its familiar place, positioned in the living room to catch the morning sun. From my own bed in this same room, there was so much to take in that it was hard to know where to look first. There were the sturdy posts and beams that framed the space around me; the art on the walls by friends and relatives, so full of color and life; and the window at my bedside, with its view of the natural world.

In the middle of the night, I was sometimes startled awake by an always mysterious bang coming from somewhere upstairs, but I felt only amused fondness for the escapades of the resident centuries-old ghost. I was used to the familiar eccentricities of my house, and this eased the transition of the move, though the adjustment to less day help was difficult.

I missed the companionship of my original snail, but the time had come to return it to its wild woods. I hoped that by fall I’d be managing well enough that its single remaining offspring could come to stay with me for the winter.

Snails with the longest life spans are often found in the most rugged climates. Given New England’s deep winters, my snail would probably live several more years. There would be further lengthy courtships and additional generations of offspring. After its sheltered life in the terrarium, it would have to readjust to the challenges of the woods, the dangerous predators, and the unpredictable weather. But with its many methods of defense and its dormancy skills, it had survived before, and I felt certain that it would do so again.

I wished I could attend the snail’s release, but now that I was home, I was too far away. A letter arrived from my previous caregiver, describing how she had left the one remaining offspring in the terrarium and carried the original snail back to the place in the woods where it had been found:

On a misty day I took the snail out to a spot beneath an old oak tree. I set it on top of a wild mushroom. The snail became interested in the situation. It came partway out of its shell and then extended its head out over thin air, gradually moving its body downward, until it touched ground while still having its tail up on the mushroom’s cap. Gracefully, it brought down its shell and tail, and with its tentacles pointed straight ahead, it made steady progress over leaves and twigs for the shelter of a downed oak limb.

The original snail and I had been fellow captives, but now we had both returned to our natural habitats. As I tried to make my life livable within a few rooms of my house, I wondered how the snail was coping in its native woods. Though I was home, I was still not free from the boundaries of illness. I thought of the terrarium’s limited space, and how the snail had seemed content as it ate, explored, and fulfilled a life cycle. This gave me hope that perhaps I, too, could still fulfill dreams, even if they were changed dreams.

Being home again was the next best thing to a cure, and though my physical limitations were still great, I was no longer completely bedridden. I was able to make occasional, brief but satisfying journeys within the house. I might retrieve some papers from a few yards away in the late morning, and then in late afternoon I’d try a rash trip around the corner to the kitchen for a fresh glass of water. I was elated to be able to manage these tiny tasks, though I paid dearly in exacerbated symptoms.

From my bedside window I could follow the ever-changing weather—the wind’s gentle stirrings and rages, the varied moods of rain, the interplay of sun and moon and clouds. And in the midsummer heat, the gardens surrounding my farmhouse were alive with color.

There was the constant activity of small creatures flying among my perennials: hummingbirds and butterflies, moths, wasps, bumblebees, and countless other insects. There were so many different flight patterns, and the variety of wing shapes, body sizes and structures, and types of landing gear was impressive. The flow of aerial activity was so dense that I thought of it as a miniature version of New York’s La Guardia Airport. Given the chaos of different species whooshing by all at the same time, it was astonishing that there weren’t constant collisions.

As I window-watched, I observed the comings and goings of my neighbors; they, too, were part of the rhythm of my familiar rural landscape. They would depart for work or errands and later return, walk their dogs, cut firewood, and check their roadside mailboxes. As twilight deepened, the low dart of a nighthawk over the field would catch my eye. Darkness brought the sparking of secret codes from the mate-seeking fireflies. Then, black on black, the swift shapes of bats would swoop for late-night morsels, and the hooting of owls would come softly, softly, from the woods—until all was quiet and still beneath the ancient brightness of distant stars and the shape-shifting moon.