The Book of Deadly Animals

On Mice
He had taken the bait from my traps and left unscathed. He had skittered around noisily inside my kitchen range, crackling under the foil lining. I think I went a little mad. Finally I turned on the oven, meaning to cook him out, but the smell was soon intolerable, and my wife made me turn it off. I opened the oven—how much work would it be to scrape him off the heating element? None, as it turned out, for I had only cooked his droppings. “A mouse’s calling card,” my grandmother used to say when she found the tiny dark dunce caps in a cabinet. But I had no time for reminiscing, because my enemy leapt from the top oven rack and bounced off the open door. It looked like those elaborate gymnastic dives one sees in the Olympics, I noticed, even as I screamed like a child and slapped at the linoleum with a miniature baseball bat.
This happened the weekend of our anniversary. Tracy made me a strawberry pie to celebrate. She went out of town the next day, so only the mouse and I were there to share the apartment. The fridge was full of food, this being also the weekend after our Thanksgiving feast, so the pie sat on the counter, covered in foil. I noticed, as I dished up a piece of pie the next day, that I must have left a strawberry mess on the counter the night before. I relished the first few bites of the pie—its flaky crust, its tart-sweet insides, the seedy counterpoint to the general smoothness of its textures. But something was picking at my memory. I pictured the mess on the counter, a random smear of red syrup. But it wasn't random. It held some meaning. It was a code tantalizingly on the verge of coming clear. Doubtless you have already guessed its significance, but I didn't. I pushed the mystery out of my mind to concentrate on the book I was reading. The fork moved from the plate to my mouth over and over, steadily diminishing the slice of pie. When I had finished, I ran my index finger around the plate a few times, the sticky red adhering to me, then the last few crust crumbs sticking to that. I licked my finger clean.
It was so good that I judged a second piece advisable. At the counter again, I wondered when I could have left the smear there. I remembered cleaning up the night before. It was in fact quite impossible for a mess to exist there, because only I had been in the apartment. I saw everything then. Through the smear ran a curving line, a drag-mark in the red. A tail-track. My eyes followed this tail-mark to the point where it left the general mess. Yes, it went on, faintly, a slight strand of red curving all the way to the range. I opened the top of the range, and there the mouse was, zigzagging among the burners. I dropped the top. Then, gathering my courage, I lifted it back up, but in that second he had disappeared, presumably finding a hole down into the oven.
It was not nausea that hit me then so much as moral indignation. I know, intellectually, that I have often eaten food on which a mouse or rat has trod, wallowed, defecated. So have you. One accepts that, if one knows anything at all about the conditions of food manufacture. The FDA specifies how many insect parts are allowed in a jar of apple butter, how many kernels of popcorn may show the tooth-marks of rodents before a batch is rejected as unfit for people. The box of macaroni in my pantry may hold nine rodent hairs. A kilogram of wheat is allowed nine milligrams of rodent excrement. These “defects,” as the FDA calls them, are unavoidable. When a batch of food is rejected for having higher levels than these, the problem is one of aesthetics, not health. We simply eat, and have to eat, many things we’d prefer not to think about.
This, however, was quite different. Tracy had made the pie for me, an anniversary gift, a token of love. She’d even drawn a heart in the top crust. The mouse had contaminated it. Of course I knew at the same time that this kind of resentment gains me nothing. Mice are mice, and in this world it is impossible to avoid vermin. We are made of them, really: our bodies host headfuls of dust mites, gutfuls of bacteria, a pocket of Staphylococcus here, a toenail’s worth of fungus there. But I wanted the mouse out of my apartment, even though the word my was problematic.
He died early the following morning, his spine broken in a snap-trap I'd set days before, one he'd already robbed successfully at least once. The bait was a chunk of peanut butter that had dried so thoroughly it crumbled like a cookie when I stepped on it accidentally -- the trap had thrown it clear as it sprung. Nothing personal, sir, I thought as I looked at the mouse bent backward in the trap, already dead. Just you and me wanting the same food. But what I actually said was, “Take that, you little bastard.”
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Did he say repugnatorial gland? What a wealth of information Gordon Grice is, and what a fine, beguiling writer. This book is a must for anyone even remotely thinking of getting a monkey, a sea lion, or, heaven forbid, a dog. – David Sedaris

Grice eagerly seeks encounters that most of us would gladly avoid. The book is good when describing creatures that are patently murderous—sharks, crocodiles, bears—but even better when recounting the hazards of those regarded as cuddly and benign.  . . . The author clearly adores the fearsome creatures he corrals here. – Brad Leithouser, “Five Best: Dispatches from the Natural World,” Wall Street Journal
When it comes to the most deadly animals on the planet it is best to be prepared. With The Book of Deadly Animals forewarned is forearmed! - Bear Grylls

Gordon Grice writes about animals with a wit that relies on tone of voice, his ironically exact diction and an instinct for analogy. . . . Vivid language never fails him. The author has limitless interest in the fierce side of nature. – Michael Sims, The Washington Post
If Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing, the results might sound something like Grice. –Mark Dery, True/Slant
A wonderful, slightly terrifying, utterly captivating encounter with the animal world—not quite like anything I’ve ever read before.—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

A highlight reel of anthropophagy spiced up with dashes of science. . . . Read it for lines like this: "Men sped across the face of the water, propelled by unseen sharks. – “Hot Type: Best New Books of Summer,” Outside Magazine

An excellent, addictive read. – The Animal Review
Deadly Kingdom is an engagingly original field guide to the venomous, the sharp-clawed, the infectious, and the downright predatory. It’s a witty, fascinating, and playfully macabre read. – David Baron, author of The Beast in the Garden

Deadly Kingdom is sometimes gory, always gorgeous, and really great. Gordon Grice is a warm and funny guide, his fingers always on the facts. There are amazing stories here, fascinating people and places, but above all, there are the animals we thought we knew, and the ones we’ve never heard of: hagfish, guinea worms, eyelash vipers, blister beetles. You’ll never go barefoot in the barnyard again. – Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey
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Read an excerpt on Gizmodo