Safari

1.

The woman appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties. She was dressed simply and inexpensively but with some sense of style. She walked into Professor Harmon Griffin’s office at the University of Chicago and dropped a clear sealed plastic bag on his desk. The bag contained the partially decomposed remains of a rodent.

Griffin looked at the bag without moving his head. He had been reading and grading essay tests. His “Come in” had been offhand when he heard the knock on his open door. Slowly, he turned and looked up at the woman at the side of his desk. She was no one he had ever seen before.

“There’d be a whole lot more left of that mouse if someone had paid attention sooner,” she said.

Harmon blinked. “You must be Mrs. Beloit.”

“Marietta Beloit. I’ve been trying to get someone to look at that mouse for three weeks. The Chicago Housing Authority wouldn’t come. They said I was imagining things, wouldn’t send someone to look. ‘It’s just a mouse,’ they told me. How would they know? That isn’t just a mouse. At least, it’s like no mouse I ever saw or heard of before.”

Griffin leaned forward. His slow movements and the touch of gray in his hair made him seem older than his thirty-four years—along with the fact that he was halfway through grading 150 midterm exams. He looked at the dead animal. There was a noticeable odor of rotting flesh even though the plastic bag seemed to be properly sealed.

“I’ve got your letter here, somewhere,” Griffin said, moving his attention to a stack of papers at the left side of the desk. He did not have to rummage far. Her letter was the third one down. “It only got to me yesterday.”

“I mailed it eight days ago, and I’ve called here a half dozen times since.”

“Frankly, Mrs. Beloit, I didn’t know what to make of your letter. None of us in the department did.” He glanced through the short letter, then set it aside and looked at the object Mrs. Beloit had dropped on his desk. He had discussed it with several colleagues on the biology faculty. No one had taken the note seriously. Sounds like a prank had been the consensus.

“I know it’s a little funky now,” she said, “but that mouse has a trunk like an elephant, long as its tail. And it dragged the trap I caught it in clear across the room before it died—ten, maybe twelve feet.” People around her on the bus had clearly smelled the dead mouse. Several had given her strange looks. Anger had kept Marietta Beloit from feeling embarrassed.

Griffin looked more closely at the remains in the plastic bag. The animal had been dead too long to have much left—a crumpled wad of skin and hair, some indication of bones. The shape, what little could be made of that now, appeared somewhat unusual. The tail was visible, and a similar appendage (though rather thicker) at the other end. But that had apparently broken off, if it had ever actually been attached.

“Please, have a seat, Mrs. Beloit,” Harmon said, belatedly remembering his manners.

She sat, rather primly, back straight, and occupying only the first eight inches of the seat.

“Tell me about it,” Harmon invited, gesturing at the bag.

She gave the dead mouse only a brief sidelong glance before she started.

“I live in the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood with my three children. I’m a widow. My husband died seven years ago. That’s why we’re in public housing. He was a good man, but he didn’t have any life insurance. We’ve got one of those townhouses the Housing Authority put up ten, twelve years back. Pretty new. Nice.” She shrugged. “Not as nice as we had before my husband died, but that’s life. The Good Lord provides what we need, long as we’re careful with what He gives us.”

Harmon leaned back in his chair and watched his visitor closely while she talked, giving her his undivided attention. Even if there was nothing to her claim, she was due that much from simple hospitality.

“I keep my home clean, not like some of my neighbors.” She paused and shook her head. “Those row houses. They’re nice, but we get all kinds of pests in, roaches and silverfish, mice, sometimes even a rat. I can’t keep them out, maybe, but I can get rid of them almost as fast as they come in. And I do. I get bug sprays. I get traps. I had a cat, a good mouser, but she must have wandered off. We haven’t seen her in almost three weeks now.” Her forehead knotted up in a moment of concentration. “Maybe four weeks now,” she amended.

“I guess I’m going to have to find a new cat. It was after Pickles got lost that the mice moved back in.”

When the cat’s away… Harmon thought, concentrating to keep from smiling at the inescapable cliche.

“I’m not some ignorant third-generation welfare mother, Professor Griffin,” Mrs. Beloit said. “I had almost three years of college. If it wasn’t for my husband dying, I wouldn’t be in that neighborhood, wouldn’t need any assistance. Another few months and I hope to be off public aid altogether. I work hard, and I’ve got good kids. They don’t get into trouble.” She blinked a couple of times, and seemed to pull back into herself. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you with my problems.”

“There’s no need to be defensive, Mrs. Beloit, I assure you,” he replied. “Go on, please.”

“I had two biology courses in college,” she said. “I know about evolution and mutations, and I know what mice are supposed to look like. When I saw that thing in the mousetrap, I knew that it was something I had never seen or heard about before. I thought that someone else should know. I called the Housing Authority. I wrote letters. Then I wrote to all of the colleges and universities around here, trying to get someone to pay attention and tell me what it was I had caught.” She hesitated. “Nobody paid any attention to me. I guess they all thought I was just some dumb old nigger lady too hysterical to know what she’s talking about.” There was anger in her voice, and defiance in her face as she met the professor’s stare.

“I understand why you might feel that way, Mrs. Beloit, but I’m sure it’s not that. It’s just...” Harmon stopped while he turned his chair and picked up the plastic bag. He held the bag up close to his eyes, studied the animal for a moment, then set the bag back on the desk.

“You said that you’ve had college-level courses in biology. Then you must know that major mutations in mammals are rare. Most mutations don’t survive, or don’t reproduce. Those that do are usually minor changes, small adaptations, cumulative over enormous lengths of time. There has to be a change in the animal’s environment. Those individual members of the species with the mutation have to have a better survival rate, a better reproductive rate than those that don’t.”

She nodded several times during his explanation. “Yes, I know all of that,” she said after he finished. “That’s why, when I saw that thing, I decided I had to tell somebody about it who might be able to… do something.”

A new species of mouse, significantly different from any of the hundreds of varieties we know about, Harmon thought. It would be nice to have a coup like that under my belt.

“I do wish that you had come to me sooner, Mrs. Beloit,” he said. “We can run some DNA tests, see if we can spot the differences in its genes, but I would have dearly loved to see it before it was so badly decomposed.”

“Like I said, I couldn’t get anybody to pay any attention to me before. And I sure wasn’t going to put it in my freezer with food. But I can show you what it looked like. I took pictures the morning I found it.” She opened the small black purse she had been clutching on her lap, pulled out the snapshots, and handed them to the professor.

The two prints appeared almost identical, the photographs taken from only slightly different angles. Harmon looked at each, then opened the center drawer of his desk to pull out a large magnifying glass. Then he looked at the photos again, scanning each image slowly. A dead mouse in an old-fashioned wooden backbreaker mousetrap. The cheese was still on the trigger. The mouse had been caught by its tail and rump. In the snapshots, the creature’s snout was clearly visible.

“Not so much like an elephant’s trunk, Mrs. Beloit,” Harmon said after he had examined both photographs closely. “It looks more like an anteater’s snout.” If this is legitimate and not some bizarre hoax, he reminded himself. “That is its mouth, not its nose. I think. I can’t see nostrils. The resolution isn’t good enough.”

“Anteater?”

Harmon nodded. “Anteater.”

“I thought mice ate grain and cheese and things like that,” Mrs. Beloit said.

“Normally, yes. At least most of them, most of the time.” He continued to look at the two snapshots, going back and forth from one to the other. I hope this is for real, he thought.

“I’ll keep this animal, if you don’t mind,” Harmon said, finally setting the magnifying glass aside. “And the snapshots too, if I can. We’ll run tests in the lab. I will personally let you know what the results of those tests show. And if you should happen to catch another one of these, please—please—bring it to me immediately. Or just phone me and I’ll come over to pick it up.”