Chicken Soup for the Cat & Dog Lover's Soul (19 page)

Bahati
was
lucky that we had found him. Our work that day had given him the opportunity to grow up to become a magnificent creature like that great silverback, and perhaps, I thought with pleasure, he would someday even lead a group of his own in this beautiful mountain setting that was his home.

John E. Cooper, D.T.V.M., F.R.C.V.S.

Hamster on the Lam

Friday. The weekend beckoned. But when I walked through the door, I heard the sniffling of a traumatized child. Amy, our eight-year-old, was sobbing. And for good reason. Hammie the hamster was inside our bathroom wall.

One major complicating factor: Hammie was not ours. He was the class hamster. He had come to our house as part of the great second-grade pet cultural exchange, having survived more than a dozen home visits with the kids in Mrs. Blackwell’s class. A hamster with peer pressure attached.

Now, though he had been in our house only a few hours, Hammie was performing his own version of the Hamster Olympics inside the walls of our home. He was where no paw should tread—on and under pipes, stirring up drywall dust, munching on whatever looked tasty.

As great tragedies often do, this one started with a small act of kindness. Amy had uncaged Hammie in the bathroom for an early-evening romp as she guarded the door. With only one exit, the bathroom had seemed the perfect place for a romp. Unfortunately there was the teeniest hole where the sink cabinet meets the wall. We’d never known it was there, but to Hammie, it must have looked like the Florida Turnpike.

A quick sprint and he was gone: down the linoleum, over the baseboard and into the wall. And now the little squirt’s telltale scratching seemed to move in rhythm to the sobs outside.

Midnight. The family was fast asleep while I maintained the hamster watch. Poking my finger into the hole, I felt a hamster paw. I bent over and, startled, gazed right into Hammie’s eyes. He seemed to be smiling.

At first I thought that by baiting Hammie with some hamster fast food—carrots, apple, a huge piece of lettuce— the little guy would pitter-patter back into the bathroom.

He went for the lettuce. Unfortunately, he took it right back into the hole.

After a restless night, we swore one another to a tell-and-you-die oath. We had forty-eight hours to capture Hammie. Monday would be bad enough without kick-starting the second-grade rumor mill.

Saturday afternoon brought a new plan of attack: Lure Hammie into the Mice Cube, a small plastic rectangle. Bait it. The hungry rodent goes in the trapdoor, but he doesn’t come out. This night brought less sleep—more scratch, scratch, scratch—no Hammie. I guessed he still had plenty of lettuce.

Sunday morning. The pressure was on. We prayed for Hammie. Amy said that under no circumstances would she ever go to school again if we didn’t catch him.

A visit to Dad’s secret weapon, the Pet Store Guy, now seemed crucial. When I told him of our crisis, he barely batted an eye. Clearly he knew a lot about hamster psychology.

In his opinion,Hammie was either
(a)
on the lam and loving it,
(b)
playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can or
(c)
lost in the wall. But he would come out. Hunger would win.

The Pet Store Guy told me to take a two-gallon bucket and place an apple inside. Douse a towel in apple juice. Put the bucket a few hamster steps from the hole and drape the towel over the side—a kind of hamster ramp, if you will. Just enough towel should stick into the bucket to allow the hamster to fall in but not crawl out.

Bedtime Sunday. The trap was in place, but the bathroom wall was eerily quiet. Was Hammie alive in there? I sat in a chair, feeling defeated. I had been beaten by a pint-size rodent. How would I break this news to sixteen second-graders?

Then, in what seemed like one of those slow-motion
Chariots of Fire
moments, my hamster-loving, sweet-hearted girl was motioning to us from the door. Amy had heard the hamster drop in the bucket.

She looked first. Her anxiety as she peered over the edge of the bucket, followed by the sheer euphoria of her realization that he was there, was indescribable.

Hugs and kisses. Hero Dad. Hero Mom. Hamster high-fives.

There are moments in your children’s lives when your heart bounces through your throat—the first step, the first bicycle ride, the first sentence read, the first hamster drop.

I never did win a stuffed animal at the carnival for my sweetheart. But now I know how it feels.

Amy and Jim Grove

© Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The Dog Show

Recently it was my great honor to serve as a judge in the Key West Kritter Patrol Dog Show, which is considered one of the most prestigious dog shows held in the entire Key West area on that particular weekend.

This is not one of those dog shows in which serious, highly competitive dog snobs enter professional dogs that can trace their lineage back 153 generations and basically spend their entire lives sitting around being groomed and fed, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. The Key West show—it benefits the Kritter Patrol, a local group that finds people to adopt stray dogs and cats—reflects the relaxed attitude of Key West, where the term “business attire” means “wearing some kind of clothing.” This is a show for regular civilian dogs, most of whom, if you had to identify them, technically, by breed, would fall under the category of: “probably some kind of dog.”

When I arrived at the show, the last-minute preparations were proceeding with the smooth efficiency of a soccer riot. There were dozens of dogs on hand, ranging in size from what appeared to be cotton swabs with eyeballs, all the way up to Hound of the Baskervilles.

Naturally every single one of these dogs, in accordance with the strict rules of dog etiquette, was dragging its owner around by the leash, trying to get a whiff of every other dog’s personal region. This process was complicated by the fact that many of the dogs were wearing costumes, so they could compete in the Dog and Owner Look-Alike category. (There are a number of categories in this show, and most of the dogs compete in most of them.) Many owners were also wearing costumes, including one man with an extremely old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua; the man had very elaborately dressed both the dog and himself as (Why not?) butterflies. The man wore a sequined pantsuit, antennae and a huge pair of wings.

“Look at that!” I said to the other judges, pointing to the butterfly man.

“Oh, that’s Frank,” several judges answered, as if this explained everything.

Perhaps you are concerned that I, Dave Barry, a humor columnist with no formal training or expertise in the field of dogs, was on the judging panel. You will be relieved to know that there were also two professional cartoonists, both of whom have drawn many expert cartoons involving dogs. Another judge, named Edith, actually did seem to know a few things about dogs, but I believe she was not totally 100 percent objective, inasmuch as her own dog, Peggy, was entered in most of the events. Edith consistently gave Peggy very high ratings despite the fact that Peggy is—and I say this with great affection and respect— the ugliest dog in world history. I think she might actually be some kind of highly experimental sheep. Nevertheless, thanks in part to Edith’s high marks, Peggy did very well in several categories, and actually WON the Trick Dog category, even though her trick consisted of—I swear this was the whole trick—trying to kick off her underpants.

Actually, that was a pretty good trick, considering the competition. The majority of the dogs entered in the Trick Dog event did not actually perform a trick per se. Generally, the owner would bring the dog up onto the stage and wave a dog biscuit at it, or play a harmonica, or gesture, or babble (“C’mon, Ralph! C’mon boy! Sing! C’mon! Woooee! C’mon! Wooooooeeee! C’mon!”) in an increasingly frantic but generally futile effort to get the dog to do whatever trick it was supposed to do, while the dog either looked on with mild interest, or attempted to get off the stage and mate with the next contestant.

As you can imagine, it was not easy serving as a judge with so many strong contestants, both on the stage and hiding under the judges’ table. Nevertheless, when it was all over, approximately forty-three hours after it started, we had to pick one dog as Best in Show. It was a big decision, and although there was a strong and objective push for Peggy, we decided, after agonizing for close to three-tenths of a second, to give the top prize to Sam, the old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua dressed as a butterfly to match his owner, Frank. Frank got quite emotional when he accepted the trophy, and we judges were touched, although we did ask Frank to make Sam move his paw so we could see that he was, in fact, sleeping, and not actually deceased. Because you have to have standards.

Dave Barry

Moving Together

I was on a hillside whipped by wind, soaked in dew, beyond disgusted, all because of that wretched cat. I’d only opened the door for a moment. I’d been groggy with motel sleep, eight hundred miles from our last night’s bed, so I wasn’t thinking clearly.

I had been in the rented box of a room, and I needed something real to look at for a few moments. But when I opened the door there was nothing but sky and highway— gray on gray with scrub bush in-between.

I closed the door just as Lisa was coming turbaned out of the bathroom.

This was the big trip, her return to Winnipeg from Montreal where she had what she repeatedly called “the best year of my life.”

My mail and phone campaign had coaxed her to return. Now, packing hopes, memories and her smoky tortoiseshell cat into my station wagon, we were heading back west together. She had been reluctant to leave, dawdling for sips of café au lait, strolling down the boulevard of St. Denis to sigh
au revoir
and kiss her friends on both cheeks as they eyed me with deepest suspicion.

It was a little later that we discovered the cat was missing from the motel room. “I only opened the door for thirty seconds,” I pleaded.

“That’s all it takes,” she snapped.

That’s all it took to feel like a complete failure. Eternal vigilance, the price of loving a woman with a cat.

Moreover, it was no ordinary cat. Not when it had been raised by Lisa, the social worker. Its every response had been scrutinized. A nap in the pantry was a sulk, a scratch on the hand was a plea for attention, a walk out the window onto the second-story ledge was a suicide attempt and cause for Lisa to cancel our date.

“I should have seen it coming,” she’d said. “Chloe’s been alone too much.”

And how would Lisa analyze this blunder during our very act of moving together? A cat’s jealous rejection? A dark flaw in my character? This could affect our future together. I had to find that cat.

We called out in cat sounds along the bushes. I prodded the underbrush. It opened into a jungly ravine. Where would I go if I were a cat?

“She’s gone!” Lisa cried into the wind. “I just know she’s gone! I loved her so much!”

If only I had a reputation for being reliable—for locking doors and mailing letters, finding my car in a parking lot—but I didn’t.

Ashamed, I stared into bush and vines thinking how Chloe was really just a vulnerable creature, frightened of the car, anxious in the cage. She just wanted some peace. I could empathize. A quiet rabbit hole, soft leaves. She could sleep for days. And so could I.

But we were late. We had to meet the movers. We had family waiting and friends taking time off work to help. We had jobs.

I crashed into the ravine. Never mind the branches and nettles. Scratches were good. Blood could draw sympathy.

Could that cat really want to linger in this wilderness? She was a consumer cat, supermarket-wise in the ways of Kat Chow and Miss Mew. What did she know about hunting mice and sparrows?

Then I stumbled through the tangles and discovered another world. It was a housing development—streets with names like Buttercup Bay and Peony Drive and children on skateboards staring at my muddied clothes.

“Hi, kids.” They looked suspicious. “I lost my cat.” They stayed frozen. “I’ll give you fifty bucks to find her.”

Sudden acceptance. “Wow! Was it black?”

“She’s smoky tortoiseshell grey. She has a hot-pink collar with toy sunglasses attached.”

“I saw her!” hollered one of them. “She was right here. I
knew
I should have grabbed her!” The boy was furious with himself. Never again would he let a cat get away. He’d pack his garage with them for years to come. The kids scrambled into full alert.