Bonding with a Beast

In keeping with the pet animal theme of the past few weeks, the family is cringing, for fear that I’ll write about Beast but here goes.
My two little boys went down to the gully bridge on Fourth Street right after a hurricane and the rushing water was pushing all sorts of debris on to the levee. That’s where they found this little tiny furry beast and brought her home.
I assumed she was a baby squirrel but as the weeks went by and there was no sign of a bushy tail, I was advised that Beast could very well be a plain old every day version of a gray Norwegian rat. Like that mattered.
By this time, she was growing by leaps and bounds and even went to work with me each day in a large glass fishbowl so I could continue her hourly feedings.
Rat or no rat, Beast and I had bonded. She loved to curl up in your pocket and would spend hours ridding herself of all human smells when we put her back in her cage.
She did manage to escape once or twice but all I had to do was put her empty tennis ball can on the floor and she went right back in.
She lived with us for quite a few years until she nipped at one of the grandsons. All I needed was the gossip on the street to state that visitors to my home were being bitten by rats.
We bought a year’s supply of mixed nuts and took her out to an old abandoned house in the country, right next to a rice field full of water. If there’s one thing rodents do is drink a lot so we made sure she had ample water. It wasn’t easy to leave her but from all indications, there were quite a few of her kind in that old house.
I think of her more at Christmas ‘cause my dad called her “Not Even”. You know, ‘not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse‘.

Georgie Manuel
December 28, 2014