Prairie dog

The prairie dog is a small, burrowing rodent of the Great Plains, and in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath it appears only in passing, yet its single mention carries the weight of a dispossessed man's desperate subsistence. Muley Graves, the stubborn tenant who refuses to leave his home country after the bank tractors him off, tells Tom Joad and Jim Casy that he has been reduced to catching whatever small game he can find. "For a while I et frogs an' squirrels an' prairie dogs sometimes," he says, listing the creatures that have kept him alive. The prairie dog here is not a symbol of the wild or a picturesque feature of the landscape; it is food, a last resort for a man who will not abandon the land where his father died and his children were born. The animal belongs to the same stripped-down world as the rabbits, the frogs, and the squirrels—all of them prey for a solitary man who has become, in his own words, "like a damn ol' graveyard ghos'." Muley's mention of the prairie dog is matter-of-fact, without sentiment or elaboration, and that very flatness underscores the extremity of his condition: a man who once farmed forty acres now lives by snaring rodents. The prairie dog thus enters the novel not as a creature of the ecological whole that Jim Casy comes to revere, but as a grim index of how far a man can fall when the agricultural system that once sustained him has collapsed. It is one of the small, unglamorous casualties of the Dust Bowl and the corporate takeover of the land—an animal eaten not out of choice but out of necessity, and its brief appearance helps define the brutal arithmetic of survival on the abandoned plains.