Posts Tagged ‘awe’
Pepper the hard-to-believe hamster
Sometimes things happen that you just can’t quite believe.
My sister is in Canada for two weeks, and my mother, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s son, Alex, went to Newcastle tonight for a concert I didn’t fancy. They will be staying over night, so I was given charge of Alex’s hamster, Pepper. She’s very sweet. There isn’t a lot to do: I’m not dexterous enough to handle a hamster, she wasn’t to be fed today, and she’d had her exercise. No problem. I went upstairs and sat back at my amazing desk with its dual monitors that I do intend to blog about eventually. A few hours later, I went downstairs to head out to the park for a quiet read, and noticed Pepper’s cage was open: Alex had left it so before he’d left. Pepper was definitely not in the cage. I let my mother know and began a hunt of all the places she could be. No hamster-level nooks were Pepper-inhabited, so I was about to call off the search, when I saw her dart across the kitchen opposite me. Not thinking clearly enough I went for her with a tea-towel and grabbed her, but she wiggled free. Foolishly, I’d now got her frightened, and she outpaced me back across the kitchen. I had her in a corner and was ready to make another attempt, when she appeared to climb upwards into what looked like solid wood to me. She’d dissapeared into a cupboard where the cupboard door hung over the kickboard. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an ordinary cupboard, it was a door over the washing machine. So there was no way I could get her out of the gap manually.
Removing the kickboard entirely, I assessed the situation: she had access to the back and space underneath the entire left side of the kitchen, including dishwasher (with pipes), oven (with gas pipes) and plenty of electric cabling. The situation was looking grim. There wasn’t a lot more I could do without further dismantling the kitchen, which my mother via the phone wasn’t prepared to let me do. So I left a trail of raisins across the kitchen floor to her cage with the door open in a vain hope, blocked off the kitchen with an old board for doing puzzles on and lots of heavy cookbooks, and went out to the park. On return, there was no sign of any change in the dire situation. So I went about my evening. Then suddenly about half an hour ago I was sitting here tapping away as usual, when I noticed a movement on the small landing outside my attic. It was a true jaw-drop moment: Pepper was moving about out there. How on earth did she manage to get out of a barricaded kitchen, and climb two flights of stairs? I have no explanation. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe she climbed up through the interior of the walls but I know of no exit up here. I tried to get her but was unarmed, and she ran under me into my room. I sealed her in and went to get a colander, all the time wondering if I had hallucinated from having a hot shower… After a twenty minute chase behind the computer, foldable bed and box of computer stuff involving Pepper’s girlish hijinks I had her under the colander. I got her ball and got her in that with raisins, and she’s now safely back in her cage, with a large pile of raisins in case she needs comforting. There is no way I’m getting her out to comfort her myself after this. But I’m not resentful of this: the simple awe of her teleportation was worth it.