We had just returned from St. John, USVI. The trip is long, with many modes. We rose at the crack of dawn. Drove down to the ferry to St. Thomas. A limo to the airport. Fly to Miami, and from there to Austin.
When we finally had made it home, we found some creature had somehow made it into our house, presumably down through the fireplace. What a mess! After that exceptionally long and involved multi-stage trip to finally arrive home only to find rodent shit everywhere, and broken glass, candy wrappers, tiny footprints on the toilet seat, and God knows what and where ever else?
Exploring from one disastrous room to another we soon found ourselves upstairs in the master bedroom, looking for the little fellow when I heard three simultaneous shrieks like banshees. “For God’s sake, what? Where did he go?” I asked at the top of my lungs. But they only screamed louder, “A rat! a rat! he ran right across my feet!” “Stop screaming, and tell me which way he went!” I shouted through the shrill chorus.
Anita pointed down the hall with a shaking finger. It turned out to be a squirrel, and I trapped him the playroom. After about half an hour of chasing the little fellow around the room with gloved hands, moving furniture, trying to catch him in a blanket like a doomed gladiator from Spartacus, during which he alternately jumped from above the doorsill halfway across the room, lurked under a dresser, and hurled himself directly at my face a number of times, I barely ducked out of the way in time, pitying the desparate little fellow even as I was enraged at the havoc he had caused in my house less than the annoyance of having to deal with this bullshit after what? eighteen hours of traveling? This may account for my slow realization that this chasing around a room full of furniture and obstacles was never going to work. I laughed at myself, as I actually pondered words I had read in the Art of War from the ancient Sun Tzu, General of Wu: “when the terrain favors your opponent, allow him a retreat which draws him into terrain which favors yourself.”
I wonder what the old fellow would think of the use to which his words would be put 2300 years after they had been written?
So I allowed the squirrel an escape into the much smaller and less obstructed adjacent washroom. It did not take me long to catch him then, thanks to Sun Tzu. Although he made a complete disaster out of the kid’s toiletries, fortunately nothing broke. Once I had him in my gloved hands, I made the mistake of not holding him quite tightly enough, out of concern for injuring him, and he wriggled around just enough to get his teeth into one of my fingers. And he chomped with all his might, no doubt believing his life depended on it.
Up until this point, I had planned to release him in compassion, and forgive the mess as inevitable, but with this bite, I must say he sealed his own fate.
It was deep and bloody, but I was sure a little soap and water, antibiotic and a band-aid would do. But Anita continued shrieking, “what if he has rabies? you’ve got to go to the hospital right away!” I stuffed the vermin into a box and thought how Jed Clampett might make a dinner, or at least an appetizer out of him. Anita and I argued for a few minutes, but my victory over rodentia was to be quickly followed by defeat at the hands of the weaker sex. I was too tired to fight, and allowed myself to be driven to the emergency room at ten o’clock with the box that was to turn out to be squirrel’s coffin in back.
Two hours and a $200 band-aid later, animal control had the now suffocated squirrel for perfunctory testing, and we were driving home with the new knowledge that squirrels were not known to have ever infected a human with rabies. I made sure the nurse practitioner repeated that fact as clearly as possible to Anita.
When we arrived home, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the girls had, on their own initiative, cleaned most of the house, vacuumed up most of the rodent turds and remade the beds, which promptly received two exhausted bodies lost in a fitful and restive sleep.