Safari

2.

The neighborhood had not lost its traditional name, Back-of-the-Yards, even though the stockyards had been gone since before the majority of the current residents had been born. The population was down by more than 30 percent over those years. For generations, the area had been part of Chicago’s Southside ghetto. The stockyards had gone, and most of the businesses around it. Back-of-the-Yards had struggled hard to come back from the depths, with some success. Crime and unemployment were both down, though still above city-wide levels. Many of the most dilapidated buildings had been razed. Some had been replaced. Other lots had been left vacant or turned into small parks.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when Harmon Griffin parked the white university van in front of Mrs. Beloit’s town house, third from the left in a line of identical red-brick houses set back twenty feet from the curb. The half-block across the street had been landscaped. There was playground equipment at one end, trees at the other.

“That’s it.” Harmon pointed out the house to the two graduate students in the van with him. Six weeks had passed since Marietta Beloit had brought the dead mouse to his office.

“Are you sure it’s not a hoax?” Cathy Dixon asked from the front right seat. She kept her head moving, looking around. Her first instinct when Professor Griffin had asked her to help on this had been to refuse. The idea of spending time, maybe even at night, in that area had frightened her—and still did. She had hesitated for as long as she had dared before agreeing to participate. If there was anything new and important to be found in the Back-of-the-Yards, being part of the discovery would be a tremendous boost to her career when she needed it most, at the very beginning.

Griffin’s smile was thin. “As sure as I can be, Cathy. If it is a hoax, it took better technology than what I could muster to try to expose it.” DNA tests had been run on tissue samples taken from several parts of the carcass, proving that it was all one animal—including the detached snout. Comparisons of individual chromosomes had been run against every known species and subspecies of small rodent. As much of the skeleton as could be salvaged had been taken out and reassembled.

“Of course,” Griffin said, “the only way we’ll ever know for sure if it’s real is to catch more of them, preferably alive.”

“But what if it was a sport, one-of-a-kind,” Nick Peragamos, Harmon’s other graduate assistant, asked. He had jumped at the chance to take part, without ever thinking that there might be danger involved. The neighborhood he had grown up in had been almost as dangerous. He was a native Chicagoan. He was used to city conditions. Cathy was from down-state.

Griffin shrugged. “Then we’re pretty much out of luck. We’ve got two snapshots, tissue samples, and the DNA of a curiosity, good for maybe a letter or two in the journals, and certain to catch a lot of skeptical flak.”

Mrs. Beloit opened her front door while Griffin and his assistants were walking up the sidewalk. She pushed the screen door open as they got close. “Come on in,” she invited, moving to the side so they could get by her.

Harmon nodded to her and smiled. “Thanks.” They had spoken on the telephone several times during the past six weeks. At first, those calls had been Griffin phoning to ask if she had caught any more elephant-nosed mice, or seen any of them—and his updates on the laboratory work. Despite his early observation that the organ was more like an anteater’s snout, he still thought of it in terms of an elephant’s trunk. In his mind, at least, the name elephant-nosed mouse had stuck.

Over the past two weeks, Harmon had also taken considerable time to convince Mrs. Beloit to permit him to try to catch the new mice for himself—if there were any more to be caught.

It was dim inside the house. There were no lights on, so the only illumination in the living room came from the front window, filtered through beige sheers and open Venetian blinds.

“Have a seat,” Mrs. Beloit invited after Griffin had introduced his assistants. “Would you like some iced tea? I’ve got a pitcher in the refrigerator.”

“Thank you. That would be nice,” Harmon said. The others nodded.

They sat on the sofa, with the professor in the middle, while Mrs. Beloit went to the kitchen. Harmon opened the folder he had brought along and laid out several pages of DNA traces—those of the animal that Mrs. Beloit had caught and comparison samples from its nearest “known” relatives.

“That’s what shows that the mouse I caught was different?” Mrs. Beloit asked when she returned.

“Yes.” Harmon had to gather up the pages to leave room on the coffee table for the tray she was carrying.

Mrs. Beloit poured four glasses of iced tea, then sat in the rocking chair that was the only other seat in the room. She scooted the rocker closer.

“I’m afraid that goes way past anything I had in school,” she said, pointing at the top sheet.

Griffin took a sip of his tea, complimented Mrs. Beloit on it, then tapped the first paper in his stack. “That is your mouse, Mrs. Beloit,” he said. “It’s a chromosome by chromosome picture of its DNA.”

“Like a computer program,” she suggested.

“Exactly,” Harmon said. “We’ve studied many species of rodents. We have a good understanding of the combinations that are normally present in their DNA, and we know how most of those combinations express themselves in the animal. Most, not all. Even a mouse is an extremely complicated organism. Your mouse appears to be most closely related to the common house mouse, Mus musculus, but there are considerable differences.”

“You mean besides the nose, the snout?” Mrs. Beloit asked.

“Yes. If that were the only difference, the mouse would be in real trouble, probably unable to survive. For instance, the front legs are stronger, the shoulders bulkier. We assume that the muscles must be more highly developed through that section as well, though we couldn’t tell from the one you caught. It was too badly decomposed. The animal would need to be able to balance that snout. In the same vein, the tail is slightly longer and heavier than in the normal mouse—as far as we could tell from the remains we had to work with. And it appears that there are differences to the digestive tract, suggesting that its dietary requirements are different—which is what I was aiming at when I compared the snout to that of the anteater.”

“It’s different,” Mrs. Beloit said.

“Very,” Griffin conceded. “It’s amazing that there could be so many differences between this mouse and all of the others we know about, with no intermediate steps, no gradual development.”

A short laugh, more of a snort, from Mrs. Beloit kept Harmon from continuing immediately.

“Just look at all the trouble I had to get anyone to pay any attention to the mouse I had,” she said. “If I wasn’t so mule-headed, you wouldn’t know about this one. And in this neighborhood, most folks wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t go asking questions, even if they noticed that the mouse was so different.”

“There is that,” Harmon allowed with a grin.

“Tell me again, just what is it you want to do here?” Mrs. Beloit asked. “I want to make sure I know exactly what it is, so’s there’s no confusion.”

“We want to survey your home from top to bottom, look for any possible routes that mice could use to get in and out. We want to set traps to try to capture some of these elephantnosed mice alive. If there are any more of them—and I hope there are. We’ve got some special equipment, cameras and sound gear, to let us probe in the walls, floors, and ceilings without doing any damage. We have fiber-optic lens cables we can hook up to a video camera.”

“Like they use in operations?” Mrs. Beloit asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

“I work as a nurse’s aide at the hospital,” Mrs. Beloit explained. “I know about those.”

“And the sound gear we have is really just an electronic version of a stethoscope,” Nick Peragamos volunteered.

“We also have a couple of video cameras that can see in infrared to take pictures in the dark. They’re triggered by motion detectors, so they can be left on overnight to cover possible routes that the mice might take, without running out of tape or needing someone to change the tapes every two hours.”

“This equipment, it’s expensive?” Mrs. Beloit asked.

“Moderately,” Griffin said.

“And you’ve got it out in that van now?”

The professor nodded.

“This isn’t the worst neighborhood in Chicago, but it sure isn’t the best,” Mrs. Beloit said. “Maybe you should bring your gear in before too many people get a chance to nose around that van.” She was moderately concerned that the equipment would not even be safe inside her house if too many people knew that it was there, but Professor Griffin had signed a waiver absolving her from all responsibility for theft of the equipment.

“I must confess that there’s a strong chance that we’ll be wasting our time and abusing your generous hospitality, Mrs. Beloit,” Harmon said once the last of the equipment had been moved inside. “It’s most likely that the mouse you caught is the only one of its kind, a freak, what we call a sport, and not part of a breeding population.”

She nodded slowly and, after a long pause, said, “I’ve got mixed feelings on that, Professor. On the one hand, I’d like to think that I got rid of the only mouse in my home, but on the other hand, one dead and rotted mouse won’t do you any good.”

“Not as much as living specimens… or even dead ones that were still fresh enough to allay any doubts,” he said. He had mentioned the first dead mouse to several colleagues, and had enlisted the help of a pair of them in running the tests on its remains. They were curious but skeptical.

“More of them would be… extremely important,” Harmon said. “There are still arguments about just how evolution and the start of new species work. Some of my colleagues think that evolution is a constant, cumulative process, a lot of little changes eventually reaching a point where there is a new species. Others argue for what they call ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ that we keep the same species most of the time with only those little, inconsequential changes for ages and ages. But then, occasionally, there is a sudden spate of a lot of major changes, new species, in response to major changes in their environment.”

Marietta Beloit watched Griffin closely through that explanation, nodding several times. “I remember some of that from school,” she conceded. “I guess I never really thought it out before though. If there are more mice like the one I caught, it would argue for this punctuated equilibrium?”

“Very loudly,” Harmon said. “And it would lead to searches for other new species, and professors scurrying to patch the holes in their theories—give a lot of scientists and a lot of graduate students new work to do.”

Harmon Griffin had spent one of his undergraduate summers working for an exterminator. He knew how to conduct the necessary search. Now, Cathy and Nick did most of the work, moving furniture, crawling behind it, emptying cabinets and searching inside, looking for avenues that mice or other pests might use to get in and out. The obvious routes were found quickly, under the kitchen sink and under both bathroom vanities. The plumbers had left gaps around the in let and waste lines, plenty of room for mice—or rats. And behind the kitchen sink there was one larger opening where a section of drywall had been broken out. That hole was seven inches wide and six high.

There was an attic above, but without a ladder to climb up, it had to be left, at least for the moment.

“Is there a basement?” Griffin asked Mrs. Beloit.

“No, just a crawlspace,” she said. “The access panel is out back, next to the kitchen door.”

There was a heavy metal panel over the opening, secured by a padlock. Mrs. Beloit had to go back into the house to get a key, and Nick went with her to get two flashlights from their gear.

“We’re going under there, right?” he asked the professor.

Griffin nodded.

“All three of us?” Cathy asked.

“I think Nick and I can handle it,” Harmon said.

“My children use this to store their bikes and a few other things,” Mrs. Beloit said while she unlocked the panel. “The lawn mower’s in there, too.” Under the kitchen, Harmon spotted a hole by the plumbing. Light showed. He kept crawling, stopping every couple of feet to shine his feet up along the floor joists. There were signs of rodents, droppings and so forth, and there were several holes in the packed earth he was crawling on—clearly tunnel entrances for mice or rats.

“Hey, Professor!” Nick called from the far side of the crawlspace. “Come over here. I found something.”

“What is it?”

“No, come look,” Nick urged.

Harmon sighed and started crawling across. Nick was almost at the front corner of the house, about thirty feet away.

“This better be good,” he warned. “My knees are already aching.”

“It is.” Nick moved, but not enough for Harmon to see what he had found until he was within five feet. Then Nick moved to the side and flashed his light on his discovery.

“A skeleton,” Nick said, “a cat’s skeleton, I think. There’s orange fur scattered around, but not much else.”

Harmon put his light on the bones as well. The animal’s skull had been crushed, pierced and broken into pieces. Few of the other bones were still in their proper place, but the pile of remains was fairly compact.

“It’s a cat, all right,” Harmon said.

“Look at these marks.” Nick pointed at what appeared to be scratches across several of the bones. “It looks like something had cat drumsticks for supper.”

“Take it easy with that kind of talk,” Harmon said. “Mrs. Beloit lost a cat just before the mice showed up.”

“Hell, that mouse she brought you didn’t eat any cat,” Nick said. “Not with that snout.”

“No, but there are probably packs of rats in this neighborhood. Sewer rats. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus. If the cat got hurt or sick and crawled down here from inside the house and rats found him, or the body, they sure wouldn’t have let it go to waste. Let’s finish looking around and get back out where I can stand up.”

“The cat you said was missing, was it orange?” Harmon asked Mrs. Beloit after he emerged from beneath the house.

“An orange tiger, like the one in the funny papers,” she said. “You found Pickles?”

“I’m sorry. We found bones and a little fur, nothing else, but it was a cat.”

“Don’t tell the children,” Mrs. Beloit urged. “Please, don’t say anything about it to them.”

Her three children had arrived home from school while the initial survey was going on. The youngest, a seven-year-old girl, arrived an hour before her two brothers. Samantha was the only one who gave the three intruders more than a passing glance. During most of the survey, she stayed close and watched. But while Harmon and Nick were under the house, she had gone inside. Her brothers had been home and gone in minutes.

Samantha had questions, dozens of them, some asked of all three strangers in turn.

“Are you going to find more funny mouses?” was her favorite question.

“We’re looking for them,” Griffin told her.

“You gonna kill them?”

“I hope not. We want to catch some alive so we can study them,” he said.

“I saw the mouse Mama caught. I saw it first, even before she did.”

“After it was in the trap?” Harmon asked.

The little girl nodded solemnly. “It was already dead.”

Later she asked, “If you catch more, can I keep one as a pet? I used to have a cat, Pickles, but he ran away. I can keep a mouse in a little cage where he can’t run away.”

Harmon smiled. “Whether you can keep one depends on at least two things. One is how many we find. We need some to study. But more important, you’ll have to ask your mother. She might not like to have a pet mouse around.”

That sent Samantha off to her mother. When Samantha returned ten or fifteen minutes later, she didn’t say anything about keeping a mouse as a pet.

“We’ve got everything set up, but there’s not much more we can do today,” Griffin told Mrs. Beloit a few minutes after six o’clock. “If you’ll just switch on the controls for the two video cameras before you go to work, and turn them off in the morning when you get home?”

She nodded. “I can do that, all right, but what about those traps? I’m not real happy with having those little bitty ants you brought in the house.”

“They won’t get out of the traps, Mrs. Beloit. The sides of those glass dishes are coated with a special lubricant. The ants can’t climb it or eat it. They just slide right back off. We had to improvise. If your mouse is specialized to eat small insects—and with that snout, my guess is that it is—it wouldn’t do any good to bait the traps with cheese or peanut butter or the other things that people use to catch regular mice. And even if the ants did get out, say, if someone bumped into one of the traps and knocked one of the dishes over, it still wouldn’t hurt. The ants are all sterile. They can’t breed and give you a long-term problem.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am, about that, at least. Tomorrow morning, if there’s anything in any of the traps, call me right away. I’ll be in my office a few minutes after eight. If there’s nothing, we’ll be back out tomorrow afternoon, about the same time as today, to start using the probes to look and listen between the walls and so forth, to try to find where any mice might be nesting.”