Uncle Fuzzy's Night on the Town

In my naivety, I never thought it would happen. It certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been - for that I am eternally grateful. And from now on, we will always make sure the twist tie is on the cage door every night.

It began as any other night: Michael fed Uncle Fuzzy and went to bed. Steve and I probably watched a bit of t.v. and went to bed ourselves. But at 1:30am, things took a turn.

In a drowsy stupor, I heard a scratching noise. We have a gravel siding on our house that the birds sometimes attach to, and they make similar sound. The scratching tonight sounded louder though - so loud that it could be inside? As the parade of "scratcher" candidates strolled through my mind, I became quickly alert. Turning on the light, I saw something moving under the curtain against the wall.

It was much to big to be Recko. The thought of anything bigger in our room made me nearly faint. Summoning all the courage I could, I gently pulled back the curtains. There, with a grin from ear to ear (I'm sure of it), was Uncle Fuzzy. I'm not sure if I was more shocked to see him out of his cage, or more relieved that it wasn't a big reptile.

Using a small piece of apple for bait, we got Uncle Fuzzy into his exercise ball - from which we transferred him to his cage. Michael slept soundly through the entire incident, very sorry in the morning to have missed the excitement.

We don't know for sure how he got out - whether he was able to push the cage door open, or if Michael left it open. We don't know exactly when he came under our door into our room, or why he didn't hang a right and go down the stairs. We don't know how long he had been in checking things out in the room. But we can say with all certainty that it could have been much, much worse.

Hamsters are nocturnal: Uncle Fuzzy sleeps all day and doesn't become active until after 9pm. If he had gone anywhere else in the house...how on earth would we have found him? He's very skittish and would have hid until we were all asleep. Not only that, he probably would have chewed on all our wood furniture, the upholstered furniture and who knows what else? And worst of all, what if he died somewhere?

Uncle Fuzzy seems to be in better spirits since that night - I bet he's still dreaming about his Great Escape, and plotting the next one! And as for me? I keep finding hamster turds to vacuum up.