When the president told us that we were building an "ownership society," I thought of the shrew. On three successive visits to the cabin the shrew defiantly violated my personal space.

Defiance? Could it be that the shrew didn’t even know about ownership? Hmmm. You be the judge.

Dozing in the armchair next to the wood stove, a sudden presence on the corduroyed surface of my left leg, not a deer mouse. I’m familiar with deer mice, the feel of their quick nervous steps. This body on mine had a different cadence. Now it was on my right leg that was cocked up against my left so that my knee made a kind of peak and that’s where the shrew paused, just as I opened my eyes.

Blarina brevicauda, short-tailed shrew, one of twenty nine North American species, one of which is the smallest of all mammals. It raised its pointy snout to test the air around the knee summit, realizing that this was the highest point, a place to reconnoiter, make a decision. I moved slightly, surprised but also amused. The shrew was pantomiming a human climber’s reconnaissance. That’s usually the first thing a climber does. You raise your head from close attention to surfaces, you lift your snout to survey the grand scene.

Blarina scrambled into a turn and headed back down the corduroy rows to my shoe where it stopped and began to investigate. A mouse would never have done such a thing, would have scampered away without pause. But a mouse is basically an herbivore, shrews are predators. Blarina was on a hunt, sniffing at the carapaces of a warm-blooded creature. Never mind this creature’s size, it might be prey. Finding no easy access through my over-designed shoes it travelled to the bookcase, "as if it owned the whole place," I reported to Alison,. and there we were again, the ownership idea.

Do shrews, and other animals live their lives along lines of ownership, of property? Maybe property for them consists of whatever is useful, now: beetle grub, squiggly earthworm, millipede, a dead creature. Or an odor trail, resting place, sleep harbor, anything of use, to be returned to later, or not. Life as immediacy. And savoring? And then, always, the next move. A now world.

We can imagine a shrew’s universe as a survival place, its purpose is promotion of the shrew’s living to see and smell and feel another day. Rocks and fallen trees, swamp vegetation and its various odors, grasslands and its various odors, horned owls and feral cats ... all demanding acute awareness. A universe made of other presences, each with its own particular power, each as much "at home" as any other. No one of them is master of all. Living as total immersion in awareness, not one of perpetual entitlement. A complicated place. Any attitude of total mastery is simply too simple, totally unrealistic, impossible. A mastery attitude, ownership, would not be conducive to a shrew’s living long enough to see another sunrise, or sundown.

Speculation like that is what made me think of the shrew when I heard George W’s proclamation of an ownership society: the vivid difference. The president is promoting a world where the role of others ... rocks, trees, rivers, oceans, animals, us ... is to be passively dominated by oil drill rigs, bulldozers, humvees, weapons of mass destruction, and management techniques. In this promotion, humans are either foreigners who wait helplessly for gifts (democracy, freedom), or Americans, a chosen people, the givers of gifts. Also, glory be, there is that high prize we are duty bound to struggle for, the ultimate brass ring, the society of ownership. The shrew came back the next night, found me once again snoozing in my chair, but this time my right hand rested on the knee summit and Blarina bit my little finger. I reacted quickly enough to avoid full penetration, or my skin was a little too tough for Blarina’s tiny teeth. Blarina, shaken to the floor, continued its hunt as though nothing much had happened. It travelled to the near bookcase, disappeared, emerged at a cabin wall for a thorough examination and on to the computer/TV mess of cables and stands, vanished behind another bookcase, appeared again at the door’s threshold where it exited the cabin in a tiny disjunction between door and jamb.

I say travelled, because walking, trotting, running, pacing don’t fit the real motion of this animal who floats on the floor surfaces, small feet and ankles invisible beneath its sleek black pelage, very like a queen in some of the old movies who moves on rollers hidden beneath her skirts.

Shrew pelage is similar to that of moles, short hairs grown densely This particular shrew is black. Alison had seen it previously. She said that when lamplight strikes just right there is a sudden silver flash across its back, as though the black pelage is belted by a wide shimmer of silver. I hadn’t made much sense of her description, but on those nights of acquaintance with the shrew I saw, two or three times, the sudden flash, and it was like a belt of silver. Blarina returned two nights later. I’m standing near the stove. A black shape crosses the floor, stops at my shoes. Once again a thorough examination, the shrew’s relentlessly inquisitive nose leading its body to here to there, everywhere. Quick little bites of motion. From the imperial height of my eyes I can’t see its tiny eyes shielded by fur. I’m marveling at Blarina’s temerity, until it slinks across shoe lacings and proceeds to my pants and now its snout is exploring the cuff of my pants and my socks and now it’s inside, climbing. Enough. I reached down and shook Blarina out. In a half-second flash it’s on its back, tiny feet exposed and ready, its open mouth is at my hand. I withdraw and Blarina retreats, begins another investigative travel along the floor margins and into darkness behind legs of furniture.

This animal is a predator, searching for prey, dead or alive. It can’t afford to waste time getting upset and looking for a place to hide and quiver. Risks must be taken, opportunities can’t be refused. Wolves and weasels have similar life styles. I remember a trapper’s tale about a weasel climbing his pants to his belt and beyond, seeking a good bite hold. When I first heard that story it seemed a bit over the top; now I think it could very well be true. Back in the time of the "first" gulf war, Alison and I were part of a festive gathering, conversations ebbing and flowing, much laughter, lots of fun. I remember a fragment of overheard conversation about private property; maybe I recall it because I was saying to myself, "Here we go again. Wyoming, California, Oregon, Ohio, doesn’t matter where, that same sentence: ‘Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on my own land.’" Later in the day that speaker and another young man put on their boots and coats and picked up guns and went rabbit hunting. One of them, stepping through the doorway, said, "Maybe we’’ll shoot an Iraqi."

Are these remarks connected? I think so, but only by way of a nearly unanimous and unexamined sense, among us Americans, of American entitlement. As a nation we collectively believe we are entitled to do whatever the hell we want to; we stand tall and are not about to back off from anybody else. But here’s the catch: inside our borders that attitude translates mirrorwise: individual ownership, a right enshrined in law and custom, authenticated by documents, protected by courts. A right that sanctions opposition to any other citizen, in defense of individual holdings. A right securely bound into the framework of our thinking, it leads to this: "Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on my own land."

Our nation has always been an ownership society. George Washington speculated in Ohio lands and invested in a trans-Appalachian canal that would bring people and commerce to those lands. But George Bush and his people, both at home and in the face of other nations, have pushed entitlements to the limit, and beyond.

Those are some of the thoughts the shrew forced into my mind. However, I take full responsibility.

Ellen Meloy, in her 1999 book, "Last Cheater’’s Waltz," tells us of a journey across the bounds of ownership (8 acres of desert land). It’s a horror story, beginning with Meloy’s accidentally pouring hot tea into a mug where a side-blotched lizard was snoozing, boiling it to death. That little act of inattentiveness brings to the surface a profound feeling of dislocation. "I had surrounded myself with a much-loved, familiar place, but lately it and I floated apart ... as if we shared a world in which gravity had vanished." She suspects she’s "repressing a fury so terrible, it had rendered me catatonic."

She travels her beloved desert lands, finding and examining the ravages of the nuclear age; abandoned uranium diggings and the historic sites of scientific penetration into nature’s secrets, Alamagordo, White Sands, Los Alamos, Nevada test sites upwind of Salt Lake City. She notes that she is of the generation of school children who were taught to hide under their desks.

The horror unfolds, she witnesses the complacency of Americans as they are herded through Los Alamos where there are little chocolates shaped as miniatures of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The ultimate terror is the recognition that nucleotides now encircling the earth and hiding in wind-blown sands of the desert are as much integral to the nature of Nature as the Jurassic and Triassic rock that began their formations 245 million years prior to the Christian era. We created these new atomic and subatomic distributions, but that happened inside Nature, colluding with its powers. Nature is now "complicit."

One page before the book ends, this: "I look into my coffee cup before I pour, and I try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do. Everyone’’s home is the heartland of consequence." (My italics).

That brought back a curious pair of sentences, way back at the beginning: "Had I forgotten the point of consciousness? Was there a point to consciousness?"

Of course there is a point, and Meloy highlights a facet of it. We are animals, but, unlike shrews and deer mice and side-blotched lizards, we are burdened/blessed with consequences recognized, suppressed, celebrated, hidden in secret files.

And so, there is much more to a "sense of place" than scoring high on a quiz about the names of species on your lot or two lots or ten acres of earth your condo sits on. We are conscious beings. We can, if we put our minds and bodies into action, make journeys. The possibilities are there, to get out into the open, whether canyon country, polar snow or just standing still, to tremendously expand that "sense of place" thing. Often, out there, I see something very like an invitation. not from the ownership society; we’ve been there, we are there. It’s more like an opening to Nature and its dislocations and uncertainties where we live with lizards and Tyranosaurus rex bones and bats, where 245-million-year rocks challenge our comprehension.

Meloy’s book is like a poem, where images and thoughts hover around and about and away from and return to, an amorphous subject. I have taken extracts from it, violating poetic vibrations. In recompense, a slightly longer extraction:

"I stood up and started to move in a slow, waltzing rhythm. A Navajo friend once told me that his people do not sin. Rather, they are ‘out of order.’ I liked the way that ‘out of order’ implied a sense of mechanical failure as well as a misalignment with all of nature. Only when someone was in a sacred situation, at a sing or ceremonial, my friend said, was harmony restored, and even then, residue remained outside the ceremonial membrane, usually in the form of ghosts, so you had to keep singing, all your life." I hope Blarina is still alive out there under the snow, hunting. Small animals have high metabolisms. There is little margin between life and death.