JUST WRITE!
A day at the zoo
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

It wasn’t the cage I noticed first. It was the pile of black earth and sunflower seeds on the washing machine.

I had just returned home from a blissfully grown-up weekend in Toronto and stepped into the laundry room to what looked like a potting disaster. But instead of a planter, there was a modified plastic rodent enclosure.

I immediately phoned my son, who had been left to his own 22-year-old devices at home all weekend.

“Do we have a new pet?” I asked him.

“We sure do!” he replied.

“Is it the vole from the garage?’ I asked.

“It sure is!” he replied. “His name is Dennis.”

Dennis had been very busy of late, scuttling around amongst our junk and bumping into walls in his quest for fast food and affordable shelter. Apparently his travels had taken him into the bowels of our garbage can, where Matthew had heard him rustling about.

The plan had been to ‘humanely euthanize’ the little varmint but there he was, very much alive and contained. Matthew rummaged around in the litter and captured him in a discarded paper cup. At this point, killing him seemed cruel and releasing him wasn’t an option, so Matthew and a few of his buddies spent the next 12 hours they were supposed to be cleaning the basement creating a luxurious habitat for our newest addition.

Dennis is shy, and although we waited patiently for him to emerge, he rarely appeared above ground.

Until 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

I awoke with a start to a high-pitched squeaking. It only took me a second to figure out that Dennis was on the loose.

With myopic eyes the size of pencil dots, Dennis is blind. He uses echolocation and a finely tuned sense of touch to navigate, both of which are apparently broken. Dennis was cornered and couldn’t feel his way out.

I listened in the dark, pinpointing his whereabouts, then switched on the light, picked up a sweater and crept over to where I knew he was hiding. He was a little hard to spot at first, but I eventually picked him out, wedged between the vaccum cleaner and the wall, flattened with fear but very much alive - a fact I discovered as soon as I tried to wrap him up in my sweater. Dennis might have wandered far from his nest but he was in no mood to go home.

Like a streak of lightning, he scooted up out of the folds of my sweater, over my hand and into my bathroom, evacuating his bowels and bladder along the way. He was now pinned between the toilet plunger and the shower stall, so I took the drinking glass off my counter and using my sweater to block his escape, herded him into the cup.

What a darling little thing, all soft and small and squinting! I made a beeline for the kitchen, dumped the contents of the recycling bin on the floor, added a soft cloth and gently poured in Dennis. I placed the whole works in the bathtub, where the little fellow remained until Matthew, realizing that new digs would have to be devised ASAP, returned Dennis to his temporarily reinforced subterranean world on the washing machine.

As it turns out, it’s a good thing Dennis wasn’t feeling particularly hostile on the morning of our encounter. After a little Internet research, Matthew discovered that Dennis is not a vole at all, but a northern short-tailed shrew - a venomous omnivore capable of delivering a fatal bite (it’s the saliva that kills you) to creatures up to four times his size. Anyone who read my last column knows that my expanding waistline would have spared me from an untimely death (although on the upside, I would have fed Dennis and all of his ravenous shrew relatives for generations), but I’d have been plenty sore for the next few weeks.

Dennis is now safely enshrined in a glass aquarium and back in the garage where the cooler temperatures suit his metabolism. And if he ever manages another daring escape before spring when he is returned to the wild, there will be leather gloves involved.