The weasel eats its body weight in meat every day and apologizes to no one. A tunnel built for a vole becomes a hallway. A vole becomes lunch. The skull is small enough to fit through a wedding ring, which sounds like a party trick until you remember what it's for: getting into places where something warm-blooded thought it was safe.

Old European farmers swore weasels could curdle milk with a look and steal the breath from a sleeping man, which is nonsense, obviously, but they kept saying it anyway, generation after generation, because it explained the sound in the henhouse. In Aesop, the weasel is the one who slips into the grain store fat and slips out again before anyone notices the grain store had a weasel problem. That's not a flaw in the story. That's the whole story.

It doesn't hibernate. It doesn't stockpile. It just keeps hunting, an animal built like an exclamation point that never learned to rest on the joke. Thirteen ounces of muscle and nerve, no wasted motion, no wasted breath.

You already know if this is you. Nothing left on the plate.