Safari

6.

It was just past seven-thirty the next morning when the ringing telephone woke Harmon Griffin at home. On the bed next to him, his wife grunted, then poked him in the back. “You get that, honey,” she said.

Mrs. Beloit was on the telephone, and she was even more excited than she had been the day before.

“We hit the jackpot, Professor,” she told him. “There are three mice in the traps this morning. Three of them!” she repeated, her voice climbing in pitch and volume.

“That’s great,” Harmon said. “Three of them?”

“Two in the kitchen and one in the bathroom upstairs, right under the vanity.”

Harmon rubbed at his eyes. “I’ll be over as soon as I can. Maybe an hour and a half. Is that OK?”

“Fine, Professor. No trouble at all.”

“Did you have any trouble last night after we left?”

“Not a glimmer. There was nobody across the street when I went to work.”

There was no difficulty about getting into the labs even on a Saturday. Harmon took his three new captives in and spent an hour getting them situated with the mouse that had been captured the day before.

“I guess I’m going to have to hunt down some food for you critters myself,” he said, hovering over the large glass cage he had appropriated for the mice. “Get enough to tide you over for the next few days, and enough to try to catch a few more members of your clan.” The ants that he had had Cathy and Nick hunt up the afternoon before behind the Beloit house would not go far.

“You four just get chummy and I’ll take care of everything else,” Harmon said. All three of the new captives were female. Things were definitely looking up.

By Monday morning, the mouse count was five, two males and three females. The second male had been trapped Saturday night.

“We don’t really need any more than that, do we?” Cathy asked when she joined Professor Griffin and Nick in the lab at noon Monday. “This should be enough to start a breeding colony.”

“The more the merrier,” Nick said. “The more we have, the better the chance of getting a little genetic variety.”

“He’s right,” Griffin said. “With what may be a very small total population, the dangers of inbreeding are going to be exceptionally high in any case. Besides, we can use a few more days of observation of how they act in their native habitat. Record more tape of them in the nest, get more examples of their behavior when they’re out in view of the other cameras foraging.”

“Can we at least start leaving a little earlier, like well before sunset?” Cathy asked.

“Does it make you that nervous?” Harmon asked.

“Yes! I’ve been having nightmares. I keep seeing people watching me, just staring, until it’s all I can do to not scream because I don’t know what they’re going to do next.”

“It does get kind of spooky,” Nick said. “It’s like we’re asking for trouble.”

“OK, we can leave earlier,” Harmon said. Their moment of privacy was over anyway. There were people coming. News of the unusual mice was beginning to spread around the university.