An Uninvited Visitor

Our apartment has three bedrooms. Because Ben works from home, that means the rooms are divided as follows- our bedroom, Ben’s office, and one bedroom for the girls to share. Five girls in one room was a tall order- literally. To give them all their own sleeping space, going vertical was our best option; we decided to build a three story, tiered bunk bed.

We didn’t have a lot of spare money to invest in a store-bought, several hundred dollar bunk, and Ben had wanted to build a custom bed for a long time anyway. He had the design already in mind, but lumber prices were crazy; building from scratch wasn’t going to be much cheaper. So we started brainstorming.

Eventually, we figured out a way to make it work- we could get a used bunk bed and a used loft bed, and then cut the loft bed to nestle it in to make the bed that we were envisioning. We were given a used bunk bed but we still needed to find the right loft bed. In the meantime, we had half the kids sleeping on mattresses on the floors in both the girls room and Ben’s office.

One night, while Jess was sleeping on the floor in the office, she was awakened by a disturbing sound- a scritch-scratching inside the wall. “It sounds huge- like a raccoon!” she told us. Of course, when Ben went to investigate, there were no sounds. In a new place, sleeping alone for the first time in a long time, we thought maybe her imagination was getting the best of her; everything sounds bigger at night. We reassured her that she was perfectly safe, and told her we’d look into it first thing in the morning.

The next night, she came into our room again. “It’s doing it again!” This time, we heard it, too. We realized, after some quick sleuthing, that the sound was likely coming from the dryer duct. We had no idea how it could have gotten in there, but she was right- it did sound big. Maybe not a raccoon, but definitely bigger than a mouse.

First thing the next morning, we called the landlord and asked him to help us with the intruder. Due to the nature of the sounds, we figured the creature was probably trapped in the vent, which meant that (hopefully) it was not likely to get out. Our landlord was as confused as we were about how it could have gotten there; the only way in would be through the dryer air vent on the side of the house, but it was elevated high enough that it would be difficult for any rodent to get through. Regardless, he told us he would be contacting someone to come take care of the problem.

That night, Jess came into our room again. She was sure that the sound was getting closer to her- like it wasn’t in the duct anymore. Fear does funny things to you, especially when you’re alone in the dark, and it still sounded like it was where we expected it to be, so we reassured her that the rodent only sounded closer, but was still trapped. “Don’t worry,” we told her. “Just go to sleep.”

The next day was Saturday. Saturday morning is our time to deep clean the house, go on individual dates with the kiddos, and have general fun. Ben took Liz out on the town for a daddy-daughter date, and the rest of the girls and I started on the deep clean. After finishing the bathroom and kitchen, the girls picked up the toys and things on the floors, and I started on the vacuuming. As I worked on vacuuming the living room, they picked up their bedroom. Sooner than I expected, they were filing out, and moving on to other things.

“Is your room completely clean?” I called to the girls. They assured me it was ready. They often miss things, so I wasn’t convinced, but it was the next place that needed my attention, so on I went. “Ready or not, I’m going in! There better not be anything on the floor!” I pushed open their door, vacuum in hand, surveying the floor for anything they had missed- and there, in the middle of the room, was a massive rodent.

Now… don’t judge me too harshly for my reaction. I have come a long way from my childhood zoophobia, but I am still not very brave when it comes to animals, especially when they are in my territory. I kind of freaked out. I leapt like kitten in one of those startled YouTube “cucumber cat” videos onto the bottom rung of the bunk and let out a shriek that may have startled our neighbors across the cul-de-sac, then screamed for Jess to come help.

Yes, I asked my 11-year old to come rescue me. To be fair, she has never been very afraid of creatures, so I knew I could count on her. Of course, as soon as she saw it, she scolded me, “I told you it wasn’t in the walls anymore.”

I was less worried about her ‘I told you so’ than I was about the massive, wild creature that was now in my children’s bedroom. “Great, Jess. Now grab a bucket and help me catch it.”

Surprisingly, the critter hadn’t scurried off as soon as it saw me. In fact, it just stayed right, smack dab in the middle of the room, and stared at me. The insolence! It was like it felt it belonged there- and expected me to let it stay. Just before Jess returned, however, it casually hopped under the bed.

A moment later, Jess came back with two buckets- one for me and one for her, because as the adult in the room I was expected to lead this encounter. Gingerly, I leapt from the bed far enough away that it couldn’t attack me as I dismounted, and we peeked under the bed. There it was, just sitting there, like it hadn’t a care in the world.

We snuck up, one on each side. The tricky part, was going to be to get it in the bucket. “I’ll scare it toward you, and you trap it, okay?” I told Jess. Grimly, she agreed. She tilted her bucket toward it, preparing. We locked eyes. “Ready? One… two…” Before I could get to three, though, it moved on its own… right into the bucket!

Success!!! Jess immediately tipped the bucket upside down and put her weight on it while I grabbed the phone to call “Mr. Superman.”

“Oh my goodness, Ben! There’s a mouse! It was in the girls’ room! We caught it under a bucket! Drop what you’re doing! I need you here right away! Hurry!”

Then Jess and I settled in to wait for Ben to return. We took turns sitting on the bucket, but it was nerve-wracking. The entire time, it sounded like it was trying to bite a hole through it’s makeshift enclosure. The minutes crawled by. What was taking him so long?

After what seemed like ages, he and Liz finally waltzed in the door with a bag full of mouse traps and rat poisons. *Eye roll* Way to solve the problem, dude. “What the heck, Ben?! Where have you been?! We’ve been sitting on that bucket forever!”

“It’s been a half hour at most.”

“Honestly! It’s trying to escape! Can you please get it out of the house! Now. Please.”

“Alright, let’s see what we’re working with here.” Ben carefully slipped a piece of cardboard under the bucket, flipped it right side up, and peaked inside. The creature leaped toward the sliver of light, and Ben closed the makeshift lid back in place as it slammed into it. “What is this thing? It’s huge! There’s no way it’s a mouse.”

Ben took it out to the front yard and started showing the neighbors. “What’ve you got there?” one asked. Ben shrugged. “Not sure- it’s too big to be a mouse, and besides- it’s got a furry tail.” The neighbor peaked in. “Looks like a big field mouse to me.”

At this point Liz (our animal lover) started asking for us to keep it. “It looks like a house mouse. I think it likes me,” she said. Just barely starting to recover at this point, I notified her that there are no house mice, not in my house anyway, and it could not stay. We didn’t want to kill it outright, either, though; it wasn’t its fault that our house was warmer than the frozen dirt it probably was used to.

We decided to release the creature into a large field nearby. Maybe it would become a meal to a falcon or cat, but at least it would have a fighting chance to live out the rest of it’s rodent life in peace. Ben and Liz walked to the field and then Ben removed the cardboard and took a quick step back, expecting it to leap out after being trapped for so long… but it didn’t. This creature was very docile. In fact, Ben had to shake it out of the bucket. And it still wouldn’t leave.

It just looked at them, like it was confused. Ben tried to shoo it into the grass, but it kept coming back to them, jumping around their feet. Both Ben and Liz had a weird feeling about the way it was acting… it just seemed wrong to drive away such a friendly creature. But friendly or not, there was no way we would let a wild rodent stay in our home or be around our kids, so Ben persisted in driving it away, and, after some more coaxing, was finally able to persuade it into the tall grass. With a last, confused look at them, it disappeared into the field.

Ben came back into the house, and this time he was the one with a super confused look on his face. “Did you release it?” I asked. He confirmed its departure, then proceeded to tell me about how strange that creature, and really the whole experience, was. It wasn’t like any mouse he’d ever seen, but he acknowledged that, having grown up in a different part of the state, he couldn’t be certain what kind of creatures are native to this part of Utah. “I’m just glad it’s gone,” I said.

Ben proceeded to send a photo he had taken to our landlord and let him know that there was no need to worry about sending an exterminator, unless we kept hearing more mice in the walls. A moment later, the landlord’s response was, “What is that? That’s not a mouse.”

Wait- our local, native landlord does not recognize this creature as a common pest? It was at this point we started questioning our preconceived notions.

There’s a riddle that goes like this. “There’s a boy driving with his father, when their car is in a horrible crash. They are both taken to the emergency room for immediate attention. When the surgeon arrives and sees the boy waiting for an operation, the surgeon says ‘I can not do the surgery, because this is my son’. How is this possible?” I am ashamed to say that when I heard this riddle for the first time, it stumped me for quite a while, because the answer to the riddle breaks the preconceived notions I grew up with. The same was true here.

In looking for an answer as to what it was, we looked up all the possible rodents native to Utah. It had a fuzzy tail, which narrowed down the options considerably. The only thing we could find that made any sense was maybe a juvenile pack rat… it was much too small to be a fully grown one. But it didn’t exactly fit the description either. See, we had assumed that this creature was a pest, a wild animal that came in from the streets. We had not explored any other possibilities until this point, when our landlord didn’t recognize it. We were so certain of what we assumed, that we missed the obvious.

You know when you see someone at church in a suit and tie, but then see them at the grocery store and have no idea who they are? That’s exactly what happened. Now, we reflected on how it seemed almost tame. Wait a second. It was not a pest. It was a pet. Suddenly it came to us. “Look up gerbil,” I told Ben. Sure enough… this creature that had entered my home, was a common, domesticated gerbil. We had just released a peaceful, tame gerbil into the wild, in January, to be victim to a hungry raptor. *face palm*

As soon as we were able to, we ran outside to try to find him, but to no avail. He was gone. To this day, Ben still feels crazy guilty every time he thinks about it, and the death sentence he gave it by releasing it that day.

But now we had a new question… who had lost a gerbil, and how did it get into our home? After much deliberating, we decided that the only explanation that made sense was that the gerbil must have belonged to our upstairs neighbor. The next day, hat-in-hand, Ben and Liz humbly went to her door.

“Hi! We’re your downstairs neighbors. We just moved in a couple months ago. We’ve been meaning to come introduce ourselves. Also, we were wondering… by any chance, do you happen to be missing… a gerbil?”

“Oh no. What happened?”

The story of her long lost gerbil followed; how he had kept us up with his burrowing in the walls for the last week, how he scared me out of my shoes, and how we had accidentally relocated him to the wild. We explained that we thought we were being merciful, but now that we knew he was hers, we felt absolutely awful. We apologized for our part in the loss of her pet and went back downstairs to our apartment.

We thought for sure she was going to hate us. But our neighbor (we’ll call her Bree) reacted in a very unexpected way. The very next evening, she brought us a couple loaves of homemade bread.

Since the gerbil fiasco we have become quite good friends with Bree. In fact, any time she leaves town she leaves our girls in charge of pet sitting. The children have loved feeling like they have occasional pet gerbils. Winnie has a bit of zoophobia that she likely learned from me. These little guys have helped her immensely. She now can hold them in her hands.

Our kiddos have also witnessed several of them attempt (and occasionally succeed) at great escapes of their own, and have had their fair share of chasing them down. Luckily, no gerbils have escaped into the dryer vent or random hole in the wall – which is what we think might have happened with the previous escapee. I have been so grateful for our friendship with Bree, that started because of an unfortunate incident.

We still feel bad about that poor gerbil, but beautiful things can sometimes come out of tragedy. And to all you animal lovers out there… I hope you can forgive me like Bree has.