Little Creatures

When my sister was five years old, the family had a hamster called Mr. Moose. He was named for the sidekick puppet character on Captain Kangaroo. Mr. Moose was an escape artist and got out of his cage several times. Once he had been missing for more than a week, and nobody could figure out where he was hiding. My dad put out little bowls of food surrounded by flour in various rooms, and in the morning he’d find little hamster footprints in the flour, indicating Mr. Moose was still alive and creeping around.

One day, my mom was about to wash some clothes and surprised Mr. Moose scrabbling around the little closet-sized laundry room. Turns out he’d been shacked up behind the machines in there, having chewed several holes in the walls. One of these led to the air duct for the dryer, which had a little trapdoor on the outside that would stay closed unless the dryer was blowing out hot air. Chased by my mom’s arm reaching behind the dryer, Mr. Moose wriggled into the air duct itself, out of reach but cornered.

Reasoning quickly, my mom jammed a towel into the hole leading into the duct, then shut the dryer for good measure after making sure the lint screen was in place. Her idea was to run the dryer, which would blow Mr. Moose outside, where my sister would be waiting to capture him. She eagerly ran out to crouch by the duct exit while my mom shouted “ready?” through an open window.

Mom turned the dryer on high. What she didn’t know was the duct had a fan at the exit to pull hot air outside. Mr. Moose was indeed blown out by the dryer, but also sucked into the fan and thus mangled by the fan blades, and his messy remains were ejected into my sister’s waiting five-year-old hands. She screamed, my mom ran outside and also screamed. My father had to be summoned home from work to deal with the situation. He buried Mr. Moose in an undisclosed location, figuring it was better for the grave to go discreetly unmarked.

In second grade I was very excited when it was my turn to bring home the class mouse for a weekend, a tiny white-furred red-eyed specimen named Shirley. She was easy to care for, requiring only food pellets, water in her dispenser bottle, and some fresh wood shavings each day as we weren’t trusted to fully change and clean her cage.

We also had three cats, all of which were outside cats, though every once in awhile they were allowed in to be played with or just to luxuriate indoors. One of them, a black tortoiseshell cat named Molly, had been allowed inside that weekend and immediately went to watch Shirley in her cage. She didn’t grab at the cage, but her predatory interest was clear, as was Shirley’s terror.

I remembered we still had a plastic hamster ball used by Mr. Moose and his hamster successors, and I thought it would be fun to see how cat and mouse would react to this safe bit of interaction. I managed to get Shirley into the ball and set it down on the kitchen floor. She was almost too small to make it move, but was rolling around a little bit when Molly strolled over and stopped the ball with one paw.

Then Molly wrapped her body around the ball, picked it up with her front paws, and gently rapped it on the floor. The ball promptly split in half along the seams, and Molly scooped the frozen Shirley out and curled up, lazily administering a series back-foot disemboweling kicks. Fortunately she was just pummeling the mouse with no claws extended, and I managed to rescue Shirley without apparent injury. I felt tremendous guilt about the whole incident but Shirley seemed no worse for wear, and I returned her to school on Monday without admitting to anything.

Moving into a new apartment in my twenties, I had no furniture at first and so it was easy to spot the small brown mouse running panicky and exposed along the baseboards when I came home one day. With difficulty I managed to capture it with one of the few objects in the place so far, a tall lidded cardboard box for printer paper. With the box securely closed, I went out to the elevator to go seven floors down to the street to release the mouse.

I had only gone down two floors when the elevator stopped and a woman got on. As the ride down resumed, the mouse started scratching inside the box. The woman turned and asked what was inside. I told her I caught a mouse and opened the lid so she could see, assuming the tall box would keep the mouse captive.

I didn’t reckon with how high mice can jump, and this one immediately sprang straight up several inches clear of the box rim, about face level with the lady. She screamed, and through some miracle I managed to angle the box just right to catch the mouse as it fell back down, slamming the lid on and recapturing it. Now the mouse was running frantically around inside the box, and the woman was running frantically around inside the elevator, still screaming. I kept trying to tell her I had the mouse back in the box, but she was beyond listening.

She slapped at the buttons and the elevator opened at the second floor, and she tumbled out, whirling back to stare balefully at me as the doors closed, me apologizing profusely the whole time. I went down the rest of the way and opened the box on the ground, and mouse ran off in the gutter and into some bushes. I would see that woman often as long as I lived in the building, and she would never speak to me, and would pointedly refuse to ride the elevator with me.

Our current house had a mouse problem when we moved in, particularly in a room on the end where they would come up from the crawlspace into a built-in cabinet and scratch around. By this time we had cats again, indoor only though, and Oliver the cat in particular was very focused on mouse noise whenever detected. We saw Oliver staring fixedly at the cabinet one morning, and even though we couldn’t hear anything, I opened the cabinet door for him. In a flash he charged in and pounced, and all we could see were his rolling hindquarters. I pulled him out and he dashed away, a gray fieldmouse firmly lodged in his jaws.

We chased Oliver through a few rooms till he stopped to crouch and drop the mouse, holding it to the floor possessively with his paws. I managed to push him away and scoop up the mouse in a big plastic cup. I couldn’t see any blood or wounds on the mouse but I still expected it to be dead, and it didn’t move, so I went outside to dispose of the body. On the way out it rolled over, though it didn’t move much, just breathing rapidly and regarding its predicament with little bugged-out black eyes. I walked over to a corner of the yard and dumped it out in the lawn. The mouse sat there for a minute, then struggled away through the grass, leaves, and twigs. Maybe it died eventually, but I prefer to think it survived, though changed like people who have near-death experiences, getting all philosophical or even spiritual with its mouse friends, telling weird and unsettling stories the other mice indulge patiently even as they privately think that mouse has gone weird and a bit sad.