Safari

3.

The telephone was ringing when Harmon reached his office the next morning. Mrs. Beloit was on the line.

“Did we catch anything?” Harmon asked. His heart had started beating faster as soon as he heard the ringing.

“No. I thought you told me those ants couldn’t get out of those dishes,” Mrs. Beloit said.

“Not unless they were tipped over,” Griffin replied.

“Oh, yeah? Those dishes are all empty, and none of the traps were touched.”

“Have you actually seen any of the ants?”

“Not yet.”

Harmon hesitated. The lubricant was supposed to be proof against the ants. It always had been. He had used it before.

“Maybe the ants didn’t escape,” he said finally.

“They sure didn’t turn invisible,” Mrs. Beloit countered.

“It might mean that the mice can reach farther with those snouts than we allowed for.” It had been a rough measurement, as much guess as anything else. There hadn’t been time to construct new traps. Griffin had taken a model that was available, that he could quickly convert for live bait. If those anteater-like snouts could reach the bait from the sides, it might explain how the ants could be missing with the traps empty. “I’ll have to look to see if either of the cameras spotted anything.”

It was Marietta’s turn to hesitate. “You think that maybe I do have more of those mice?” The tone of her voice suggested that she hadn’t given much credence to that possibility before.

“We’ll know better after I run the tapes. I’ve got two classes this morning, but we’ll be out first thing this afternoon. You’ll be home?”

“I’ll be here. I’m going to bed now. I just got home from work. But I’ll be up before you get here.”

“We can make it a little later, if you like,” Harmon offered. “Give you a chance to get more sleep.”

“No, one o’clock, like yesterday, is fine. I’m off tonight anyway, so I want to be able to sleep then.”

Nick Peragamos thought that the glass dish in one trap had been moved, ever so slightly, closer to one side. “I was careful,” he told the professor. “I put each one precisely in the middle. I’ve got a good eye for things like that.”

Mrs. Beloit assured them that the traps had not been touched by her or her children. “I told them to stay away from the traps and your equipment, that I didn’t want them bumping those traps and maybe letting the ants get loose.”

She watched while Griffin carefully examined the traps and the now-empty dishes. She lifted an eyebrow, and bit at her lip to keep from talking, when the professor replaced the ants in the dishes.

“This way, we give them a chance to get away—if they can—while we’re here,” Harmon said when he noticed her look. “I don’t think that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out. Maybe we’ll know better after we check the videotapes.”

While Griffin had been working with the traps, Cathy and Nick had replaced the tapes in the two video cameras. Both cassettes showed that the tape in them had run for a short time. They would, at a minimum, have recorded five minutes after being switched on, as Mrs. Beloit left, and again in the morning when she approached, until she turned each one off.

“What we’re looking for is anything between those two times,” Griffin said after explaining to Mrs. Beloit that she would have triggered the cameras herself.

The tapes were standard VHS cassettes. There was a VCR in the living room. Nick handled the controls. The first camera had been set up in the kitchen, near the doorway so that it could cover most of the kitchen floor.

Mrs. Beloit walked away from the camera, visible for only an instant as the tape began to play. I’d best make sure I’m dressed when I do that, she thought as she watched herself. There was no movement at all on screen after that until the camera had shut off after five minutes.

At first, when the camera came back on, there was still no obvious movement. All four spectators watched closely.

“There, left of the stove,” Cathy Dixon said, pointing.

The others had picked up the movement almost as soon as she had, a hot spot between the stove and the kitchen cabinets. Imagination more than vision pictured a tiny creature looking out, surveying the room. Only after the animal moved out of the narrow lane was the camera able to provide a clear view of it. There was something of a collective gasp from the spectators when they saw that it was indeed another elephant-nosed mouse.

“Gotcha!” Harmon whispered, leaning closer to the television. If there are two, there must be more, maybe a lot more, he thought.

No one else said anything. They all watched the mouse move away from the stove, taking several steps then stopping to look around, showing fairly typical behavior—tentative motion, nervous alertness. At first, the mouse’s ranging appeared to be random, but after stopping twice to sniff the air—lifting its snout well above its head—the mouse zeroed in on the waiting trap and moved directly toward it.

The trap gave the mouse several minutes of difficulty. It went around it three times, stopping frequently, probing through the wire mesh with its snout, reaching toward the dish in the center. The mouse spent more than a minute near the spring-loaded gate that was meant to capture the mouse after it went inside. Twice, the creature put one foot forward as if to go in, but both times retreated instead.

Go on, go in, Harmon thought, unconsciously urging the mouse forward, forgetting that he was only watching a tape, and that the mouse would not go in because the trap had been empty.

The mouse made another circuit of the trap, reaching in through the mesh with its snout several times.

“There, I think he moved the dish,” Nick said. “Pushed it.”

Cathy shushed him.

The mouse continued around the trap. When it got to the far side this time, it made a more determined effort to reach the glass dish with its snout. And succeeded. The viewers could not see exactly what happened—the resolution was not good enough to actually let them see the tiny ants that had been used for bait—but it appeared that the mouse simply sucked them up.

“The smoking gun!” Nick crowed.

The mouse went around the trap once more. Then it made tentative starts in several directions away from it. Finally, though, it simply returned to the space between stove and cabinets where it had first appeared. The camera continued to run through the end of five minutes without motion.

The next view was in daylight, as Mrs. Beloit came in to shut off the camera. There was just one quick image of her.

The second tape showed two excursions other than Mrs. Beloit’s appearances. The first trek showed an elephant-nosed mouse investigating the other trap but giving up and going back under the bathroom vanity. Then there was a second expedition. This time, after nearly ten minutes of effort, the mouse managed to get to the ants in the second trap.

“Is there any way to tell if that’s the same mouse both times?” Nick asked. “Or if either is the one from the kitchen?”

“If you want to get stills made from the tape and spend some time doing detailed measurements, you might be able to tell about the ones in the bathroom,” Griffin suggested. “If they show significant differences in size you might be able to tell that they’re different specimens. Comparing that to the kitchen one would be more difficult—different distance and angle from the camera to the mouse. Of course, it could be three different mice and you still wouldn’t be able to tell if they’re all the same size.”

“I think I’ll hold off then,” Nick said, retreating quickly. “That sounds too much like counting the holes in acoustic tiles.”

“You still going to leave ants in those traps?” Mrs. Beloit asked. “Seeing as how those mice can get at them without going in anyway.”

Griffin considered that for a moment. “I think that if we put a smaller mesh around the sides of the traps, something like screening, it should do the trick. That closes off the easy access to the ants. The only way the mice will be able to get them out then is to go inside.”

“Looked like they knew better than that,” Marietta observed. “Wouldn’t none of them go in. Like they knew it was a trap.”

“If they’re hungry enough, they’ll go in even if they are suspicious,” Nick said. “Hunger’s a powerful force.”

“We should have some screening in the van, in one of those brown cases in the back. Nick, you want to run out and see what you can find?” Harmon handed Nick the keys. “And something to attach it to the trap.”

He turned to Mrs. Beloit. “He’s right about hunger being a strong inducement. It depends how hungry the mice are.”

After the traps had been modified, Griffin and Peragamos started using the fiber-optic equipment to probe inside the walls. They started in the upstairs bathroom because it was easier to get to the holes leading under the floor and behind the wall there than in the kitchen. While they worked the fiber-optic cable, Cathy started probing the walls of the house with the sound equipment, room by room. Her work went more quickly. Moving the fiberoptic cable around, reaching for the small gaps in the insulation and the holes through studs where wires and pipes ran, was a slow job for the two men. It was perhaps inevitable that Cathy was the first to report success.

“Sounds like a lot of heartbeats,” she said when her companions came to the kitchen in response to her call. “It must be a nest. Right here.” The location was halfway up the wall, behind and just above the counter left of the sink.

First Professor Griffin and then Nick Peragamos took the sound gear. The sound was a soft chirping, a nearly constant noise. With a mouse’s heart rate over 700 beats per minute, there could be no more definition than that. To get anything more, they would have to take the audio recording being made and slow it down considerably and use other equipment—back in the lab—to try to get a count.

Harmon listened for more than a minute, then said, “I think you’re right, Cathy,” as he passed the earphones to Nick. “It’s going to be rough getting the camera probe up there, though.”

“I’m a whole lot more concerned about getting the mice out of there,” Marietta said from behind the others. “I don’t want mice nesting in my kitchen.”

“We want them out of there also, Mrs. Beloit,” Griffin said, turning toward her and turning on a smile. “Especially if they’re your elephant-nosed mice and not the common sort.”

“I don’t care what kind they are, I just want to get rid of them as fast as I can,” she replied.

“I understand. We’ll do what we can.” Harmon turned to Cathy. “Have you finished your survey of the kitchen?”

She shook her head. “I just started at the corner by the stove and got this far. When I heard the mice there, I called you right away.”

“Well, finish in here with the sound equipment. If there’s one nest, there might be others. Nick and I won’t start working with the cables in here until you’re done. We’d make too much noise for you to pick up anything.”

“We going back upstairs to finish in the bathroom there?” Nick asked.

Harmon’s hesitation was too fleeting for anyone to pick up on it. “No. We’ll wait for Cathy to finish in here, then try to get a glass eye into that nest. She can finish the other rooms while we do that.”

After three hours of work, Harmon and Nick had still not managed to thread the flexible fiber-optic cable into position to see the nest of mice. Frustration was mounting for both of them, and for the two women. Cathy had finished her survey of the rest of the house. She had found a second nest in the kitchen, and one possible nest in the upstairs bathroom. Mrs. Beloit did not stay with the academics all of the time. Once her children got home from school, she was in and out of the kitchen several times. Though she tried to stay away, she could not.

It was past seven o’clock when Professor Griffin pulled back out of the cabinet under the kitchen sink and shook his head. “I think it’s time to call it a day. We’re not getting anywhere. I’ll leave the cable where it is. We’ll put everything back in the cabinet around it, and try again tomorrow.” He stood up and brushed the legs of his trousers.

“Have you figured out how to get those mice out of here yet?” Mrs. Beloit asked. She and her children had eaten in the living room. Before cooking supper, Mrs. Beloit had rewashed everything that she used to prepare and serve the meal.

“Not yet,” Harmon said. “We’re still trying to get in to see them.”

“Three nests you found.” Marietta Beloit considered that a scandalous affront to her abilities as a homemaker.

Harmon closed his eyes for an instant and took a deep breath. A headache had started to develop over his left eye. “We’ll do our best,” he promised. “It’s not easy to get rid of all of the mice in a building when you’ve got everything going for you, and with these mice being so different, there’s not much chance that any of the usual remedies would work. If they only eat bugs—and I’m guessing that they’re that specialized—regular poison or traps wouldn’t help. Poisoned baits aren’t all that effective anyway. Regular mice can often tell without taking a lethal dose. That leaves gasses. Ether poison bait or gas leaves dead mice in the walls to rot. You don’t want that.”

“There must be some way,” she insisted.

“You can’t possibly want those mice out more than we do, Mrs. Beloit. It’s important for us to get as many of them as possible, and—if we can—alive.”

“I wish Pickles was still here,” Mrs. Beloit said, looking around to make sure that none of her children were close enough to hear. “Pickles was always a good mouser. She even caught a couple of rats over in the park last fall.”

“But a cat can’t get up inside the walls to where those nests are,” Griffin said, also speaking softly. “Like I said, we’ll do everything we can.” He glanced at the wall, near the location of the first nest, then looked at Mrs. Beloit again, hesitating, unsure whether he should plant ideas in her head. But he was tired, and his head hurt. ‘There is one thing, if all else fails,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“If you took a metal pie pan and beat on the bottom with a heavy metal spoon, right about here,”—he indicated a spot just in front of where Cathy had found the first concentration of mice—“some of them might drop dead of heart attacks.”

“You’re kidding me now,” Marietta charged.

Harmon smiled and shook his head. “Mice really are very delicate, timid creatures. It’s not hard to literally scare them to death. A sharp noise where they don’t expect it can kill them. They produce too much adrenaline and the bodies’ systems overload. Seriously,” he added when he saw the skeptical look on her face. “But that would be as bad as poison, leave dead mice rotting inside the walls, smelling the place up.”

“I hope I’m not going to have to tear holes in the walls to get rid of them,” Mrs. Beloit said.

It was near sunset when Harmon and his assistants finally left. There had been a little rain earlier and everything was damp. The slight breeze carried a heavy, musty smell.

Harmon let Cathy and Nick into the van, then walked around to the driver’s side. In front of the vehicle, he stopped for an instant and raised a hand to his head, pressing back against a sudden increase in the pain over his left eye.

“That’s all I need,” he muttered, closing his eyes briefly. It would take all night to get rid of the ache, even using larger-than-recommended doses of aspirin.

Preoccupied, he almost didn’t notice the wavy line of black paint that had been sprayed along the side of the van. He had opened his door and started to climb in before he did. Harmon stopped his motion and cursed under his breath for a moment.

“What is it?” Cathy asked.

“Some bright soul with a spray can left his mark,” Harmon said. He looked at the line. “Must have been just before it started raining. Some of the paint ran.”

“I hope there was a good coat of wax on the van,” Nick said.

“You must be kidding,” Harmon said. “The university waste money to wax a vehicle?”

They were almost back to the university before talk moved away from the vandalism.

“How are we going to get the mice out?” Cathy asked. “Even if we find some way to lure out all of the adults, any nursing babies will be left in the nests.”

“We’re not exterminators, anyway,” Nick said. “Sure, we want to study the mice, but we don’t need all of them. If we can study them in place, that’s best, but failing that, as long as we get enough to establish a viable breeding colony in the lab we’ve succeeded, haven’t we?”

“I suppose,” Griffin said. His headache was rapidly getting worse. “I’d take all of them if we could get them, have a few to trade to other labs, maybe. Those elephant-nosed mice are going to be worth a relative fortune for some time to come. If we had the money available, we’d offer to relocate the Beloits, at least temporarily, go in and do whatever we had to do to get the mice, then repair the damage afterward.”

“Isn’t this important enough to get more research money?” Cathy asked. “We have good evidence of the mice now.”

“If we were willing to wait a year, maybe two years, while the requests were processed and subjected to peer review and all the rest of the red tape, we might get enough interest and a few dollars. But in that time…” He shook his head. They would have to publish what they had already, the photographs, DNA investigation, and so forth. Other researchers would start looking right away. Money would probably be found somewhere for the job, but there was no guarantee that Harmon Griffin would be the first to get it. There were other biologists with better connections, and more secure scientific reputations, than his. “We’ll do what we can, and whatever Mrs. Beloit will permit. Remember, we’re in her home strictly on her sufferance.”