About a month ago, on a Saturday night, R and I noticed his cat behaving rather strangely. His eyes were fixed onto the ceiling with a predatory intensity. His ears twitched and he paced around R’s bed.

We shrugged the behavior off, spent the night watching TV and snacking as usual.

The next day I come over R’s place to see our old hamster cage resurrected, inhabited by a bunch of socks, fruit and a cup filled with water with a sock wrapped around it. Upon closer examination, R showed me the cause of his cat’s interest from the night before: a baby mouse was lying still between the socks. R guessed that he fell from inside the ceiling (his room is in a basement.)

R rescued the baby mouse, who I named Tumbles, from the jaws of his cat the night before and was desperately trying to nurse it back to health. My first reaction upon seeing Tumbles was that he was dead, but some prodding showed that he was simply exhausted. We assumed that Tumbles’ mother had been the victim of R’s cat the previous week. The little fellow probably came out of his hiding in search for food and his mother, where he was helpless against the jaws of a 20 pound cat. R tirelessly filled the cup with hot water every two hours, wrapping it around with a sock so that Tumbles – which was frigid to the touch the morning after he rescued it – could have some form of comfort.

Tumbles took right away to the warm cup and slept the day away, awaking here and there to nibble as some oyster crackers and blueberries. His head was disproportionately bigger than his body, which added to the cuteness factor. His bulgy eyes were in constant slits as Tumbles was in a state of perpetual sleepiness.

Tumbles didn’t make it until morning, R e-mailed me the next day. And then my iPod chose to play this song:

We buried Tumbles that night with tears and sadness and the hopeful thought that maybe, just maybe Tumbles passed into the night thinking that instead of the sock-covered cup, he knew that the warm being he slept next to was his mother.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment