Rodent on the loose

Angel is usually a well-mannered, stay-in-one-corner-of-the-cage type of hamster. While she was at my mom's house during our recent 10 day vacation, she hid the entire time under one large clump of shavings. My mom was worried that she had died, so on the eighth day, she finally dug Angel out to make sure she was still breathing. And then Angel went right back into hiding. When we picked up the cage, the only sign of life was all of the hamster droppings that Angel had managed to kick through the bars. And might I add, for a hamster that is hardly ever seen, she sure produces a lot of poop.

To be honest, I think that Angel is extremely lazy. She won't run on her wheel or in her exercise ball. She doesn't even chew on the bars of her cage at night anymore. She pretty much seems to exist solely to eat, drink and make little grains of black rice.

But deep inside of Angel lives the sole of a rodent. They look docile and sweet, but they are conniving escape artists. Just ask my sister and her kids. While we were visiting them, we regularly saw the pet mouse that had escaped a couple of weeks earlier but had yet to be caught. My sister nearly threw a party the day that her boys managed to chase it outside (some time during the first week we were there), where it dove from the upper deck into the forest, gone forever. Then the degus got out in the garage. It took a couple of days of scheming and plotting by seven boys to corner and capture them. The three boys who managed to do it were instantly elevated to hero status.

Angel herself has managed escapes, albeit not lately. When we first got her, she found a broken bar in her cage and squeezed through the incredibly tiny opening. It took three escapes before we finally figured out her secret. Since then, she has been escape free. And with her lack of desire for activity, I thought her escape artist days were over.

Then Little J decided to buy a new cage at a garage sale. It was one of those plastic jobbies with all the tubes and satellite cages. I have little faith in those cages. They break way too easily, and then you have loose rodent somewhere in the house. With our last hamster, it was loose for nearly a week. It lived under the stove for a few days, leaving a scattering of droppings, and then found a hole in the wood floor that dropped into the gas fireplace in the basement. We found it a couple of days later when we went to turn on the fire. Good thing we saw him scurrying about before we turned up flame.

Back to Angel. Little J and her friend spent a few hours getting the new cage set up and cleaning out the old one. J-Girl declared that she was going to sell the old cage immediately. I told her it was better to keep it handy for when the new cage failed. Both Js looked at me like I had lost my marbles. But when we went to put Little J to bed early tonight so that she would be ready for the first day of school tomorrow, Angel was gone. Sure enough, one of the satellite cages had come apart, and even the laziest of hamsters couldn't resist that. We had no idea how long she had been out or where in the house she might be. We looked all over Little J's room, as well as the bedroom close by, and then gave up. After all, it was the first school night of the year. Fortunately for us, Little J heard Angel scurrying around on a table and managed to catch her. We then duct-taped everything up as tight as we could and then put Angel back into her new cage. I wasn't brave enough to insist on the old metal cage. I know that it's going to take at least two more escapes before either J will admit that the old man might have been right.