California long-tailed weasel. "When I went out to see him, the weasel stuck his head out of the pipe and studied me."

On the morning of the pregnancy test, we saw a weasel under the bird of paradise. In another age this would have been a sign. No doctor, no fertility clinic, just a weasel in my path.

Once upon a time in Ireland, to see a weasel in the morning was bad luck. In Bohemia its glance would have blighted me. In Germany, on the roof, my luck would have been good, but the Swiss considered him a conjurer. In London, I’d have known him for a witch. In Macedonia, I wouldn't dare to say his name, and Carpathian farmers would never kill him, because to murder a weasel is to call all his kin upon your grain and cattle. In medieval times he was a symbol of Christ because he was the enemy, like Jesus, of the satanic snake. Medieval Christians believed that the weasel, like the Virgin Mary, conceived through the canal of her ear. Despite these divine connections, the weasel was a symbol of unfaithfulness.

Perhaps that is how the American weasel became the symbol of trickery, evasion, and deceit. The term “weasel word” appears in magazines like BioScience, Nuclear News, and Pesticide & Chemical News. It means to lie while pretending to tell the truth. In the 1840s dance song “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” “weasel” may mean “whore,” but to a child, weasel-popping is just the moment when a jack-in-the-box comes out:

All around the cobbler’s bench

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The monkey chased the weasel

The preacher kissed the cobbler’s wife

Pop! goes the weasel!

Outside my American window, the weasel was winding himself through the bird of paradise and dashing into the mouths of buried plastic conduits. We put the conduits there for our own use, but the animals use them as subway tunnels, evacuation routes, and smooth-sided mobile homes.

When I went out to see him, the weasel stuck his head out of the pipe and studied me. No animal in the garden behaves this way. Squirrels, birds, snakes, and lizards flee like I'm the devil himself. But not the weasel. I stepped closer, and he stood on his hind legs. I tried the courtship methods of an author who has befriended foxes, snakes, and other predators. The author said to talk out loud to the animals, to say the times tables in a low, pleasant voice.

Four times 4, I said, is 16.

The weasel stared, then dashed back into the shallow pit that serves as a subway stop for burrowers like himself. The pit is a dry concrete basin covered by a metal grill that looks like an industrial gazebo. From there the black pipe leads to the south garden, and the white pipe leads to the east garden.

From within the gazebo, the weasel approached and retreated, then approached again. He had the ears and nose of a kitten and a white butterfly patch between his eyes, the common birthmark of the long-tailed weasel. Like the cat, the weasel hunts mice, and his scientific name combines the Latin words for “mouse” and “to pick up.” His eyes, however, were nothing like a cat's. They were black as beetles.

He showed me his belly by standing on the edge of the irrigation grill and staring at me, raising himself up to his full height. Like a tall adolescent boy, his body was pure torso. Even his neck was torso. His belly fur was buttercup yellow and his back was brown, all of it finer than a rabbit’s. He looked like the changeling he is — both Mustela frenata and Mustela ermine, the ermine weasel, turn white in snowy places and become the symbol of chastity. In Renaissance folklore, an ermine was said to choose capture over a filthy dash through the mud, and even in his summer coat the weasel looked too pure to kill warm-blooded vertebrates. His whiskers fanned out in a perfect spray, eight or nine immaculate, transparent hairs on either side of his kitten nose.

I wanted to own him until he opened his mouth: two points like a pair of glass needles, highly specialized, say the books, for a diet of flesh. Wild rats and squirrels are the main reservoirs for bubonic plague, keeping the virus alive from century to century, but while I wondered if the weasel carried plague in his pink mouth (which he didn’t open again), I couldn’t stop admiring the ripple of fur on his neck, as soft as the clouds called Altocumulus undulates. I followed him to his burrow on the bank and watched him pop his head out of doors number 1,2, and 3.

We went to the fertility clinic in the afternoon, where a doctor in red lipstick and heels pushed the sonogram wand up to my ovaries and said I was either pregnant or had a big cyst. Sounds I couldn’t hear were bumping into me, making outlines of everything that lies like a burrow in the dark. The magnified circles on the screen stretched and rippled under a haze of white straw. Then she turned off the sound waves, and we moved to another mom for a lab test that would tell whether the dark place was a baby or what the doctor called a corpus luteum, a yellow body.

“Well, you’re not pregnant,” the doctor said. “Your brain thinks you’re pregnant, but you’re not.

There is and isn’t a scientific explanation. When my doctor uses the true names for all my parts and I look at her with medieval ignorance, she turns to metaphors about Wiffle balls and baseball bats, organs who speak and are misunderstood. Perhaps my brain and ovaries play a constant game of telephone, in which the brain says, “Are you making the egg?” and the ovary says, “I’m making the egg,” but there’s too much interference, too much static on the line. Meanwhile the eggs, who are supposed to be armed with baseball bats, hit each other with Wiffle bats, survive en masse, and die because there isn’t enough food for everyone.

Six days later, on a cool early morning when the air was light blue, the weasel left his kill on the driveway, a young opossum so dead that his stiff tail seemed to grow straight out of the concrete. I say the weasel killed him, but I’m going by his bad reputation in hen houses, his preference for blood and brains when food is plentiful, his tendency to grab the neck and bite the soft parts of the skull. The precise, white paws of the opossum only emphasized, with their dental cleanliness, the brutality done to its head.

Opossums are the only marsupials in North America, and when the mothers give birth to a litter of 50, the young embryos, small as a woman’s fingernails, crawl up her fur to the pouch, where they find a maximum of 17 nipples. Perhaps 14 will live to grow fur and ride around on the mother’s back, where the hairs are long and white. Should they survive moving cars, owls, coyotes, and weasels, opossums will, in their fuzzy adulthood, have the lowest brain capacity of any mammal their size. By day they’ll sleep in the pile of twigs by the orange grove or under the tool shed. By night they’ll use their 50 teeth on snails and mice, an organic pesticide on four legs.

A month after the young opossum died, we replaced him with three adult opossums trapped in a senior citizen’s mobile home park. We brought them here in wire Hav-a-heart traps and set them down in the orange grove, where they were so dazed by the sunlight or the car trip or the extreme limitations of their brains that they stayed in their separate cages a long time before they saw that the doors had been opened. They stood on their pink chicken feet and waited for death. One showed me his 50 teeth, but the others just brooded and stared in the wrong direction, away from the open door. Finally, one at a time, they left the cages and waddled away, one to the wood-pile where the squirrels live, one to the bank of poppies and acacias, and one to the leaf-strewn darkness of the grove.

The hunter has never shown himself again, having heard, perhaps, all the times tables he cares to hear. The shock of his appearance, like the finger of God, is fading. I’ve begun to forget what it was like to touch a weasel with a dried stalk of society garlic. The garlic has a purple flower, but the stalks are long and thin, and when they dry they turn the color of hot sand. With the stalk I reached out to the weasel’s smooth and curious head. He stood very still while I stroked his left ear, the channel of immaculate conception. At the time I had no idea that weasels are born in the month of June after some 300 days of gestation, that in July, a pair of weasels may embrace for two hours while mating, or that the male weasel, who helps build a nest for the coming young, will sometimes line the burrow with the fur of prey.