Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Dillard describes the instincts and patterns of a wild weasel—how it hunts and clamps onto its prey without letting go. She recounts Ernest Thompson Seton’s story of an eagle shot out of the sky with a weasel’s skull embedded in its throat. Dillard encounters a weasel at a local pond near her home in Virginia. She sits at the water’s edge, observing nature, when, “inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me” (65). Both Dillard and the weasel are stunned into silence at the sight of the other, their gazes locked together, until the weasel abruptly runs away. Dillard knows it sounds unbelievable, but she posits, “I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine” (67).

Dillard welcomes the experience, since she came to Hollins Pond “not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it” (67). Dillard believes that we shouldn’t strictly live like weasels, hunting like them and walking like them and so forth, but that humans could learn “something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive” (67). Dillard wishes she had clamped onto the weasel’s throat and could live as a weasel does.