I had a cat that would sit on the balcony every morning and watch the sunrise. A mate of mine’s dog barks angrily every time The Parlotones plays on the radio. And our Russian dwarf hamster Joost (pronounced by Lucy: Juice-st) has twice now escaped from his cage and disappeared for a day or two.
The first time he pushed the cage door open. We figured he must have had a right nose around because we found little hamster poos in every room. After a thorough search he was discovered under, of course the heaviest, couch in the front room.
Lucy started leaning objects too heavy for a hamster to move against the cage door. I suggested buying a padlock; that thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Now even though we take him out of the cage often and let him bimble around you must understand that a hamster’s life is quite mundane. There’s only so far a running wheel can take you, and the conversation has to be pretty dry:
“So how was your day?”
“Eh.”
…
“I hear the Stormers are doing well this season…”
So it’s no surprise the little bugger found a way to break out again.
Lucy called me Wednesday night and said, “Nath, Joost ain’t in the cage. The door hasn’t been opened so I don’t know how he got out.”
“Oh well,” I sighed wisdomologically, “I’m sure we’ll find him somewhere.”
But we didn’t! He wasn’t under the bed, couches, I moved the frikken fridge and stove and he was nowhere to be found!
As an aside: Things in our house are prone to vanishing. It started with a packet of Chipniks that disappeared into thin air. Then the dvd remote in our bedroom mysteriously evaporated. We thought ghosts, or possibly alien investigating scientists, or even time travelling historians! The last straw was when my Sweetie Pie was gone from the fridge – there can’t be any other explanation.
I figured Joost must have squeezed through the bars (he’s not as much a fatsack as his cagemate, Julius), slipped under the front door (some rodents can flatten their bodies, dontcha know), and headed out into the big world to seek his fortune (which would probably amount to short stint as a Teazers’ bartender and then modest success as a continuity announcer on SABC).
Well, this is the scenario I posited to Lucy. What I really imagined was he’d run out the door to be devoured by the neighbour’s surly cat, Mogul. Or that the aliens had got him and were probing his small intestine.
Two days later Lucy and I get home from a bit of a bender after work. Lucy is sitting on the couch in the hallway while I’m making the tea and she hears a scratching coming from inside the couch. I lift it up and tear the bottom open to find Joost twitching his little, pink nose at me. He’s pale, traumatised, and when we put him back in the cage with Julius the fat bastard attacks him, piling up the trauma like pancakes on an American’s breakfast plate. They’re rolling around like furriness in a pinball machine. Trying to separate the two gets me a bleeding finger from Julius’ kung-fu death teeth, and I have to grab a tablespoon to separate them.
My theory is this: hamsters have got really tiny, Malema-sized brains (his name is Julius, coincidentally). Forty-eight hours without his buddy and he’s forgotten all about him. Maybe that’s the target market DStv’s going for, what with all the re-runs.
So now we’ve gone and had to buy another cage so we can sleep easy without worrying about waking up to a decapitated, half-eaten, very-much-dead hamster with the other one bathing in his blood. And we’re renaming Joost Indiana Jones and Julius possibly something like maybe Hannibal Lecter.
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