Great, just great.
I survey the mess on the floor: the droppings, the pellets, the ripped paper, the giant splat of puke.
And it had to happen on a Saturday.
Actually, it had all started back on Monday, when Benny, my seven-year-old brother, lost one of his dwarf hamsters. I didn’t care at first; it was the male, and we’d probably finally get rid the litters.
I’m not making much sense, am I? Well it never made much sense to me either, but I’ll start at the beginning for you.
Roughly nine weeks ago, Benny got the hamsters as a sort of early-birthday gift. It was late March, and his birthday wasn’t until mid-May, so I was a little skeptical as to how the connection was made, but it didn’t bother much more beyond that. Three weeks later, out pops a litter. Literally, they just popped out overnight. We told the pet store man about it, and he asked us if we kept the male and female together at all times. We told we’d done exactly that, and he gave us a weird look.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, they’ll be giving birth every three weeks.”
Every three weeks! On average, a hamster births a litter of eight. That would be almost one hundred forty-four baby hamsters in a year! Not only that, but the hamsters have no moral values: the father will impregnate his own children if they’re left all together.
At this point, the compound multiplication left me dazed with the thought that we’d be overrun by rodents before long. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.
The first litter (8 pink rats) died because ants got into the litter and bit the babies. Call me cruel, but it was quite a relief to me. Benny was rather sad, true, but he was too young to understand: he could never multiply eight hamsters by the eighteen sets of three weeks in a year.
Anyways, it wasn’t long before the next litter came along. I’d tried to get our parents to buy another cage, tried to explain to them it was necessary to keep them apart, tried to show them my pages and pages of math. But to no avail: those hamsters stuck together like gum on a shoe, and to make it worse, they were bopping like bunnies.
April 8: the second batch comes along. The hamsters make their first escape attempt.
I must have broken a mirror on the 7th, or walked under a ladder. First off, the mother popped out another bunch: 5 this time. Just as I feared, Benny was allowed to keep the entire family all together, even though every rule book in the world warns against multiple hamster captivity: they’ll fight and breed like…rats. Inwardly, I groaned and imagined what would happen if the two females of the litter got pregnant. If they did, that would mean a total of seventeen hamsters in a tiny cage (and that’s not even including the next litter Momma would have in another three weeks).
Being so crowded must have really frazzled the father, I mean, when making babies is as natural a thing as breathing to you, you gotta go a little nuts. I don’t know how he broke out, but he did, and it wasn’t until late at night that I found him on the kitchen floor. Darned thing looked like a rat; I almost stepped on him. Even though the thought of touching his dingy yellow fur (It was white when we first bought them) was revolting, the job had to be done. Back to Benny’s room went the hamster, but Daddio certainly looked miffed to be back in the cage.
As I brushed my teeth and boiled my hands that night, I thought over what I’d done. Eliminating the father certainly wouldn’t have stemmed the tide, since any one of his three sons could take the job over easily. But still, if I had opened the door and flushed him out with a broom, it would have made the whole deal a bunch easier. Why hadn’t I?
I went to bed that night believing I was going hamster-crazy. But that was only the beginning.
The next morning, I had a tiff with a younger brother (Joe, 13) which made my parents believe that he was no longer fit to be roomed with me (we have a bunk bed). Certainly, as time goes on, all males start to grasp and fight for territorial rights (something I was waiting to see amongst Daddio and his sons). The only solution here was to move us out of the cage.
Unfortunately, in a big family, there’s always a shortage of rooms (we even share one bathroom) so the key was pairing. Across and down the hall from our (mine and Joe’s) room was our younger brothers’ (Benny and Paul*) room. It was decided that Joe would move in with Paul, and Benny would come over to live with me.
And he’d bring his hamsters.
No matter how hard I tried to explain things, nobody would listen to me, and the deal was soon cut, pressed, stamped and dried: hamsters were going to take over my world.
It took about a week to move clothing, personal artifacts and whatnot, and by that time the pink little worms had grown hair and started eating solid food. They looked exactly like their parents, only a little whiter on the undersides (they all had a black-and-brown speckled back, the youngsters’ merging into a cream color, Daddio’s a dirty, dark brown). No sooner did the little guys grow up Momma got pregnant again.
We separated the hamsters (Momma in the cage, Daddio and Co. into a plastic bucket) for a while, but it didn’t work very well: there was only one water spout. It would be simple to buy another one, but simpler still would it have been to throw out the old hamsters and just keep the new ones‡. Naturally, I didn’t say any of this aloud: since nobody had listened to my opinions so far, why should they start now?
Those were strange days: the hamsters stunk up the whole room within minutes of their arrival**. They pushed food pellets and sawdust out the sides of the cage and onto the floor. Their water had to be changed every few days, the food once a week. Benny was forever cutting up cardboard tissue rolls to make tunnels for them, but they were more interested in chewing up the paper to line their nests. During the day, they lazed around and slept unless someone was changing their food or water. At night, they ran about, squeaked, fought, ran on their squeaky wheel, and pushed more crap out of their burrows†.
I admit, at that point I was very ready to crack. At night I couldn’t go to sleep for all the noise (counting sheep was worse, they turned into hamsters just as they jumped over the fence) and even if I could manage an hour of shut eye, all I could dream about was me frantically scribbled on hamster-chewed paper, trying to figure out how many hamsters there’d be in just a month. Sometimes I woke up gasping in the night, sweaty, sheets askew…but it was just to return to the nightmare: they’d be there, gnawing their cage bars or drinking noisily from their water spout.
I didn’t get used to this until a week later, about the time the third batch came. This time, it was seven little bas– ahem, babies. It wasn’t too much of a problem, only twice as much noise and more work: somebody had to move the water bottle back and forth between the plastic bucket and the cage (it was imperative that they be kept separate now, since the father might have eaten the pinkies) so that each would get water access for about half a day. And whose job was it to do that? Yours truly.
Why, you ask? Because I spent all my time in the room, while Benny was downstairs learning to read or write or color in the lines: we couldn’t have stopped his schooling just for some hamsters now, could we? But of course, good ol’ Josh sitting two feet away from them could get up from his books twice a day to move the spout around.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted more badly to just stick my nose in my Algebra book.
And would you believe it, every time anybody went to town I would remind them to buy another water bottle. And yet, every time, they’d come back empty-handed: it had simply slipped their mind. Why didn’t I buy them one? Well, it would have to come from my wallet, something that I would have no problem with, but only half a month earlier I had to have a cracked cellphone screen☼ fixed, and the resulting price had cost me my allowance. In short, I was broke.
I might have been able to claim the hamsters as dependants to raise my allowance (or to at least make it come sooner) but before I could try, something big happened.
Daddio got out. Again.
Sure, no biggy, catch the darn thing: it’s happened before. I even caught one as it crawled into the bathroom while I was on the john (Do you know how hard it is to wipe your butt and pull your pants up while holding a hamster and preventing its wiggly mass from escaping?) and one as it fell into a sink full of dishwater. But now it seemed impossible to find him.
We searched high (top of the TV, upper bunk, desktops, inside the computer tower) and low (under tables, beds, desks, bookcases and stacks of CDs). But he simply wasn’t to be found. Benny put out food at night, in hopes of catching him, but he couldn’t have stayed up longer than ten-o’ clock, and we ended up just tripping on the pellets every time we passed by the ‘trap’ (I eventually swept them up and carried Benny to bed). Hamster traps are just a joke (food trails leading into plastic buckets) and he certainly wasn’t coming on back by himself.
By the fourth day of his disappearance, it was starting to look as if he’d never come back. Strangely, I didn’t feel right about it. A few weeks ago, I would have been rejoicing at one less pair of gnawing teeth. But now…
It was hard to explain, but even though the noise at night seemed to have never changed a bit (by this point I was used to the nocturnal hamster-opera), I found it hard to sleep.
Why, why, why, why? And how? How had I gone from a hamster-hater (who dreamed of controlled methods to keep the population of rodents down) to a…a…I don’t know, someone who was disturbed by the thought that one hamster wasn’t safely snug in his bed of sawdust shavings and ripped tissue paper.
Maybe I was going hamster-crazy after all.
The next day, Benny came up with the brilliant idea of releasing Momma to find Daddio. If she searched out a hiding place, it would probably be the one Daddio had chosen. So he pulled her out of the cage (her litter could be left alone for longer periods of time now) and set her on the floor.
Instantly, she ran behind my computer desk and squeezed into a half-inch crack between desk and wall. We hadn’t searched behind this desk, believing that there was no way he could have gotten there: with hamsters, always guess again.
I pulled the desk from the wall, and found both Daddio and Momma, sitting together into a makeshift nest of paper and string (there was even a store of food he had taken from somewhere or other). Back into the cage they went, and off to our mom to tell her the good news.
But before we could go, Benny did the unexpected.
He puked on the floor in front of my desk.
Don’t ask me what happened there. Nobody touched him, he isn’t allergic to hamsters, and the emotional stress couldn’t have possibly done anything to him, but that’s an unpredictable seven-year-old for you.
Now there were droppings, ripped paper and a puke puddle on the floor.
And it had to happen on a Saturday.
Long story short, the mess got cleaned up (the room really didn’t smell any different afterward: Hamster and Puke smell remarkably similar) and the hamsters returned to their rightful cages. That night, I wondered over the excitement of the day.
Maybe Benny really had been influenced by the emotion of finding Daddio again. But how could he be? The rats weren’t like a normal pet. A dog could love you, a cat will shun you in a way that some find pleasant (I don’t), a horse can be a steadfast servant, and even a turtle can have a personality. But hamsters are everything those pets are not: in fact, hamsters are just dumb animals, driven with the pure instinct of, “Gotta have a baby, gotta have a baby, gotta…”
How could Benny have loved the little things so much?
I looked at them closely before going to bed. There was so much more than noise and smell about them that I hadn’t noticed before. They cleaned their whiskers vigorously; their beady black eyes reflected even the slightest light sharply; they had four tiny feet that stuck out like the corners of a fat pillow. They were cute, yes, but how can you love something that just seeks to eat, sleep, crap and reproduce?
Suddenly, Daddio got up and clambered into the wheel. Almost instantly, two of the youngsters jumped on top of him and all three began running. They got about half a turn before they were tumbled out into the sawdust. But it hardly fazed them: back into the wheel they went. Over and over and over and never once did they stop to rest.
Up on the second floor, I watched the two females grooming each other, nibbling each other’s fur with their sharp teeth. They move delicately, nipping at stray pieces of fur and cleaning out the gunk from beneath the toes.
Kind like a makeover, I thought. [i]While dad and the bros have some rough-and-tumble horseplay.
I looked over at the mother’s bucket and saw that she was curled up into a ball around the pink-turning grey bodies. They squeaked and fidgeted, and their eyes were barely open: how could she love and care for such ugly things?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Love? I thought to myself, retreating to the safety of my bed. You’re getting in deep, Josh. Hamsters are animals. Dumb animals. They can’t love.
Maybe to someone as hamster-crazy as me can sympathize with the confusion I experienced at that point. But to those who have never lived with, cleaned up after and watched a family of hamsters living together can’t fully take in what I felt there.
Why do we love our pets? I thought, setting myself in for a long debate with myself. What is there to love if it isn’t cute, fluffy, loyal, useful or non-smelly?
I’d like to tell you that I’ve got it all figured out, that I understand it now. But I can’t: understanding an animal…or even your own emotions about the animal…well…it’s impossible.
Given the choice between a human’s life and an animal’s, most people would never hesitate: there’s just a strong bond between humans there. But what about loving an animal? Can that bond ever be as strong? Can you love something on the level of a human, even though logic says it isn’t even near? Can you love a pet so much your belly upheaves when you find it again after a long and worrisome disappearance?
Sometimes at night, when I’m not dreaming of calculating the hamster population, I think about this.
The End
(Okay, so it turned out to be more eco-ish-friendly-sappy-tree-hugger-type story than I intended it to be. But I was grasping for straws toward the end.)
Footnotes:
*My name is Joshua, Joe is Joseph, Benny is Benjamin and Paul is Paul: biblical names, all of us.
‡Apologies to animal lovers anywhere, please remember that this is an exaggerated narrative.
**I went through two bottles of Super-De-Lux Lemon Air Freshener pretty quickly. That’s not even exaggerated.
†Hamsters are nocturnal, which means they sleep during the day and do everything else at night.
☼So I was driving along on my motorcycle, a’ight? And I’m holding my cellphone in one hand, steering with the other, a’ight? Along comes a speed bump, a’ight? What do you think happened?
I never knew you wrote stories! *is excited*
But, yeah, you could work on it.