Safari

5.

The next morning, the telephone was again ringing when Harmon Griffin entered his office. Mrs. Beloit was almost incoherent in her excitement.

“We got one! We got one!” she shouted into the telephone. “One of those mice. In the kitchen. We got one!”

Harmon felt his heart flutter. It sounded almost too good to be true, even after seeing the mice on camera. At first, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t reply. He glanced at his watch, then sucked in a deep breath. “I’ve got a class at nine o’clock,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. During rush hour, it might not be possible to make the round-trip in time for the class. “That lets out at 9:50. I’ll leave here then.” His second class was at eleven, but after traffic eased off, he should be able to make it there and back in seventy minutes. And he desperately wanted to get that mouse just as quickly as he could.

Professor Griffin ended up dismissing his first class nearly ten minutes early. He was too excited to concentrate on his lecture, or to stand still. He kept losing his place, repeating sentences, or trailing off into near incoherency. His distraction was obviously affecting his students. This was his large class, the freshman introductory course, seventy-five students. He came close to setting speed records on the drive to Mrs. Beloit’s house, but he did manage the trip without attracting the attention of any police.

“In the kitchen,” Marietta Beloit said as soon as she opened the door. “It’s still alive.”

The mouse was cowering next to an empty glass dish in the trap. It had, at least, eaten. When Griffin and Mrs. Beloit entered the kitchen, the mouse appeared to tense up. It turned its head toward the door, sensing if not actually seeing their approach. Harmon slowed down, moving as silently as he could to the trap. Cautiously, he knelt next to it. He leaned forward, wanting to get as close as he could. The mouse’s unusual snout was curled to the left, along the side of its head and up onto its shoulder. The animal looked up, then back down, and backed into a corner.

“You’re beautiful, mouse,” Harmon whispered. Emotion more than thought was pulsing through him. Irrefutable proof of the animal’s existence. There would be the academic papers, most likely a book. Status. A career made. But there was something else that pulled even more strongly at him.

A new kind of life, something no one else has ever seen alive—just me, Mrs. Beloit, and maybe her children.

“I never thought I’d say this about a mouse, but it is kind of cute,” Marietta said from behind Harmon.

“Right now,” he whispered, pulling back from the trap, “I’d say that it’s the most beautiful creature on four legs on the lace of this Earth.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Harmon got to his feet and chuckled softly. “No, I can see where you might not.” He turned to her. “But that mouse is an unrelieved miracle. It shouldn’t be, but it obviously is.”

“That nose, or snout, or whatever it is, it couldn’t eat anything very big through that,” Marietta said, pointing.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “Those ants seemed to do the trick though.”

“I mean, it couldn’t eat cockroaches or water bugs or anything like that. They wouldn’t fit up that snout, would they?”

“Maybe when they were very young,” he said. “But ants, fleas, lice, ticks, mites, and small spiders. There’s obviously enough for them to eat, even in a clean, well-kept house.”

Mrs. Beloit could not suppress a shudder. “Bugs!”

“The thing is, regular mice and rats carry fleas, lice, ticks, and so forth all the time. It’s the small bugs that infest rodents that cause most of the diseases that mice and rats get blamed for.”

Marietta blinked once. “If it eats all those things, then it shouldn’t have all of them on it, right?”

“A very logical hypothesis,” Harmon said. “One that we’ll have to test when we get this creature to the lab.”

“You going to kill it?”

“No, we’re not going to kill it.” He shook his head, first vigorously, then more slowly. “Probably not,” he amended. “We want more of these mice. With any luck we’ll manage to capture enough to breed enough stock to do all of the necessary testing. Then we can let this one live out its natural span to maybe enjoy its fame as the first of its kind in captivity.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get right back to school. Have you got a couple of paper towels—something I can use to cover the trap to keep the mouse out of the sun?”

“Sure. Take all you want.” She pointed to the dispenser on the wall next to the kitchen sink. “Don’t they like sunlight?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes of direct sunlight can sometimes kill regular mice. Their systems can’t handle it. I’ve got to assume that this kind is just as delicate.”

Two minutes later, at the front door, Harmon paused. “Now that we’ve got a live specimen, it’s time to give the species a proper name. You discovered it. We could name it after you—Myrmecophagus beloiti. How does that sound?”

“Name a mouse after me?”

“Give you a footnote in all of the taxonomy texts,” he said.

“Let me think on that.”

By the time that Griffin got back to campus, he could no longer contain himself. He went along the corridor leading to his office knocking on the office doors of several of his colleagues, looking for someone to share his discovery—his triumph—with. But no one was in. He took the trap with his elephant-nosed mouse to his eleven o’clock class after getting a better cover for it and a supply of ants for the mouse to eat, as well as a small dish of water.

He set the covered trap on the desk in the classroom. None of the students coming in gave it any attention. Exhibits were not uncommon in this upper-division course.

“I have something special for you today,” Harmon said precisely at eleven o’clock, while the last students were making their way toward seats. “Something that no more than five other people in the world have ever seen—so far as I can tell.”

That did provoke an undercurrent of murmuring in the room. Several pairs of eyes focused on the covered object on the desk.

“It’s not time to tell the entire story of how this came about. For now, I’ll just say that it’s part of a research project I am involved in, within a half-hour drive of this campus. There is a building that has a unique species of mouse, considerably different from any other known. As you are about to see, it is, ah, remarkably different from any other species or subspecies, apparently a massive mutation from the common house mouse, Mus musculus, that seems to breed true—although that has yet to be confirmed under laboratory conditions.”

Harmon leaned forward. “Before I lift this, I want to caution you all to restrain yourselves. I don’t want any noise, any loud reactions. We don’t want to scare the poor creature to death. And, in case any of you have forgotten, it is unfortunately all too easy to do that.”

By now, he had the rapt attention of all seventeen students in the room. Very slowly, Harmon lifted the cover from the trap, peeking underneath before he had it all of the way off to make certain that the mouse was still alive.

“The elephant-nosed mouse,” he announced once it had been exposed. He kept his voice soft now. “The only living specimen in captivity, though I have the badly decomposed remains of one other in a freezer here at the university.”

Students moved around in their seats or stood in place to get the best view they could of the creature.

“Now, very calmly and quietly, I want you all to file past to take a better look at it,” Griffin said. “Don’t get too close, but I want each of you to have a good look.” He almost said, “This will be something you can tell your grandchildren about someday,” but he bit off the cliche.

Harmon hovered over the specimen like a nervous mother during the procession, but the mouse seemed to take no notice of the parade of spectators that filed past his new home. He was still eating.

Harmon and his assistants were late getting to the Beloit home that afternoon. Nick and Cathy had insisted on spending time with the captured mouse first. For that matter, Harmon had not yet had his fill of observation—or showing off his prize.

The mouse seemed to adjust quickly to captivity. Griffin had moved it—him—to a regular laboratory cage after showing the mouse to his eleven o’clock class. The mouse made himself at home, building a nest from wood shavings in one corner, exploring the rest of his new world, and eating contentedly from the stock of ants that had been placed inside with him.

Griffin and the two graduate students carried additional traps with them when they left campus. “We’ve got to try to catch more of them,” Harmon had said, several times. “We’ll put traps along the runways we’ve spotted in the tapes.” The problem, before long, would be finding bait for the traps—and a steady supply of food for the mouse they already had. Harmon had the last of the available ants with him. The next time the traps had to be baited, or the mouse in the lab had to be fed, he would need a new source. He had phoned in an order for a supply of live ants from one of the firms that serviced the biology department, but it would be Tuesday before that shipment would arrive—not nearly soon enough.

“We’ll have to go ant hunting this afternoon,” Harmon warned his assistants.

“How’s that mouse doing?” Mrs. Beloit asked while she held her front door open for the academics.

“Thriving,” Griffin said. “Now we need to find him a few companions.”

“Too bad you can’t stick the hose from a vacuum cleaner in the wall like you did that camera thing and suck them all out.”

Harmon started to laugh, then stopped and shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t work. We had more than enough trouble just getting that quarter-inch fiber-optic cable up there. A regular vacuum hose would never make it. Besides, if it did, it would almost certainly kill the mice, one way or the other. Even a narrow vacuum hose might kill them. We don’t want that, at least not until we’ve caught a few more of them alive.”

“Do you think I’ve got the only mice like that in the whole world?” Mrs. Beloit asked after she had closed the front door and followed the others through into the kitchen.

“As exceptional as it is to find anything like this, I’d say that the chances must be astronomical that they don’t extend far,” Harmon said. “They might be around the neighborhood, in the rest of this block of row houses, at least. Maybe outside, too, underground, in the area. But that’s probably it.”

The traps were set and baited. The videos from the night before were watched—the kitchen camera had run most of the night, following the activities of the mouse that had been captured. The cameras were loaded again. Cathy used the sound equipment to check on the other nests that she had located before. Harmon and Nick threaded the other fiber-optic cable toward the nest behind the upstairs bathroom wall.

Marietta had to work that evening, so she retired to her bedroom to sleep for a couple of hours—until her daughter got home from school. The researchers had no interruptions until the girl came in just before three-thirty.

It was nearly seven o’clock before the second cable was all the way to the bathroom nest. There were a dozen adult mice huddled together in it, but there appeared to be only one litter of pups, and they seemed to be nearly old enough to be weaned.

“If we could just cut through the wall quickly, we might be able to nab several of them,” Nick suggested.

“Don’t even think about it,” Professor Griffin said. “The odds aren’t that good. We’d be lucky to nab even one pup, and we couldn’t abuse Mrs. Beloit’s hospitality even if the odds were better than even that we could grab the whole lot of them.”

“I know. I was just saying.”

Griffin smiled. “I’ve toyed with the same thoughts. We’ll just have to try to get as many as possible in the traps.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Nick reminded the professor. “You want us to come out here on the weekend?”

“I think I can handle it alone. You and Cathy just take care of your work at the lab. I’ll give Mrs. Beloit my home phone number so she can let me know if we get anything in the traps. Check in with me first thing Monday morning, though.”

They left just before sunset Friday. But once more, as they approached the white van, several young men came out of the park to stand near the far curb and watch.

“This is beginning to scare me,” Cathy said after they had driven away from the block. “Those guys, watching us, like they’re just waiting for the right time to strike. They marked the van and now they’re just watching.”

In the middle seat, Nick was looking out the back window. He wouldn’t say anything, not yet, but it was beginning to wear on his nerves as well.

“We don’t know that it’s the same ones who painted the side of the van,” Harmon said. Most of that had come off after a brisk scrubbing. “They haven’t done anything, haven’t said anything.” He glanced in the outside rearview mirror. “They’re probably just curious, wondering what three white people are doing spending so much time in their neighborhood.”

“What about Mrs. Beloit. Could she be in danger because of us?” Cathy asked.

“I’ll mention the kids to her. She hasn’t said anything. After all, it’s her neighborhood. She must know if there’s anything to worry about.”

“Call her tonight, as soon as we get back to school,” Cathy urged. “She’s got to go out to work tonight.”

“No, I don’t know who they might be,” Marietta Beloit said when Harmon told her about the young men in the park. “My boys were already in. If you had said something then, Teddy—he’s the oldest—could have gone out with you to look. All my neighbors know what you folks have been doing here. I made sure of that the first day. Some folks might have wondered if I hadn’t. Then there might have been trouble. People might have thought you were the law. But I don’t know about any kids watching from in the park. I’ll keep my eyes open and ask around.”

“Please, be careful,” Harmon said. “You’ve been so good to us all week. I don’t want to cause you any trouble with your neighbors, or put you in any danger.”

She laughed harshly. “Don’t you worry ’bout me, Professor. I’ve lived a long time in this city. I can take care of myself.”