  Weak gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) carries
imprints of the physics operating at redshifts much lower than that of
recombination and serves as an important probe of cosmological structure
formation, dark matter physics, and the mass of neutrinos. Reconstruction of
the CMB lensing deflection field through use of quadratic estimators has proven
successful with existing data but is known to be sub-optimal on small angular
scales ($\ell > 3000$) for experiments with low noise levels. Future
experiments will provide better observations in this regime, but these
techniques will remain statistically limited by their approximations. We show
that correlations between fluctuations of the large-scale temperature gradient
power of the CMB sourced by $\ell < 2000$, and fluctuations to the local
small-scale temperature power reveal a lensing signal which is prominent in
even the real-space pixel statistics across a CMB temperature map. We present
the development of the Small Correlated Against Large Estimator (SCALE), a
novel estimator for the CMB lensing spectrum which offers promising
complementary analysis alongside other reconstruction techniques in this
regime. The SCALE method computes correlations between both the
large/small-scale temperature gradient power in harmonic space, and it is able
to quantitatively recover unbiased statistics of the CMB lensing field without
the need for map-level reconstruction. SCALE can outperform quadratic estimator
signal-to-noise by a factor of up to 1.5 in current and upcoming experiments
for CMB lensing power spectra $C_{6000<L<8000}^{\phi\phi}$.
