Animal Crackers
There are a couple of animals around the house who are doing their best to drive me loopy this summer. I don’t mean the two who seem to need new shoes every other week. I refer instead to the furry kind that pad around on four legs and occasionally submit to being petted. Specifically, I’m talking about a cat and a hamster, who are clearly engaged in a conspiracy to send me up the wall and around the bend.
At 6:30 the other morning, for example, I was enjoying a quiet breakfast when the cat began wailing in a piteous tenor outside the front door. As a generous and caring man who recognizes that cats, too, must eat, I hurried to let him in. Enter the cat. Enter with the cat, held captive in his jaws, one large and very much alive lizard.
As the proud cat rearranged his vocal chords to whine gloatingly over his catch--thousands of years of domestication haven’t erased the old jungle instincts--the lizard slipped free. It hit the floor running, and in a flash had disappeared from sight. The cat, an astoundingly lazy beast who does not know the meaning of the word persevere, gave a few perfunctory sniffs and then lost all interest in his former prey. Off he trotted to his food dish, not in the least upset about trading the meat that he had snared on the hoof for that awful-smelling stuff that comes out of a can.
Now I, as it happens, suffer from the character flaw of having no great affection for any creature who thinks that the best way to get from here to there is to slither or to creep. My ideal view of animals is that they ought to be either big enough to pet or small enough to step on. Things that crawl and scuttle make me queasy.
In consequence, with the lizard still apparently at large somewhere in the house, I have endured in a state of more or less chronic queasiness. Whatever the alleged dietary habits of the species, I am convinced that by now the lizard has grown ravenous enough to have developed a growing passion for human flesh. Mine, to be precise.
All this happened at a time when I was not in the best of moods anyway, since my sleep over several successive nights had been rudely disturbed. The problem was a hamster--not the longtime pet who knows his place, but a temporary boarder brought home from school for the summer by one of the kids. Hamsters, of course, are nocturnal creatures. What this means is that just about the time at which decent people are bedding down for the night, hamsters come awake and, like jogging enthusiasts at break of day, set off in pursuit of aerobic pleasures.
In the still of the night, a six-ounce hamster galloping around an exercise wheel can approximate the noise of a freight train barreling through the bedroom.
The guest hamster scorns such conventional behavior, probably because it doesn’t consider it tormenting enough. It has found a new form of activity. Having gnawed a hole through its plastic cage, this hamster slips out every night and (though hamsters aren’t supposed to be climbing animals) makes its way to a nut bowl atop a living-room table. There it selects a nut, usually a pecan or a walnut. But, instead of returning with this stolen prize promptly to its cage, which is already abundantly stocked with every kind of edible seed known to agriculture, the hamster engages in sport. Hockey is its game of choice, and a vinyl or wooden floor--never a carpeted one--is its chosen field of play.
What is the sound of a nut being rolled and bounced across hard floors and caromed off baseboards? At midnight it is like the sound of a bowling alley with all lanes in use.
Measures taken to patch up the hamster’s cage and secure it against further unexcused absences have proved only briefly effective. Some overwhelming impulse drives the hamster toward more wide-open spaces, and eventually, after a circuitous and noisy journey, lures it back to its nest with yet another nut to add to its hoard.
This hamster, it should be said, is not the first in our home who has gone exploring in the night. But at least the last one who wandered from its cage was considerate enough to slip away silently, without so much as a goodby note to mark its departure. This disappearing act prompted speculation that somehow the hamster had been able to make its way out of the house--a suspicion that deepened the next morning when the cat didn’t bother to come in for breakfast.
Maybe, one of these nights, something similar will occur. Or maybe--who knows?--the hamster and the lizard will have a chance encounter in the dark, culminating in an experience that it is probably best not to think about. At this point I don’t much care what happens, just so long as it happens quietly and lets me get through the night undisturbed.
