Larry, in his big room all his own, browsed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the subject of hamsters. He learned that they were of the order Cricetus frumentarius, belonging to the mouse-tribe Muridae. They made burrows some six feet deep which were vertical and sinuous. This burrow might have three or four chambers, in the deepest of which would be hidden the grain which the hamsters stored for the winter. Males and females and the young had separate rooms for sleeping. And when the young were only three weeks old, they were thrust from the parental burrow to fend for themselves. A female might have a dozen offspring at a time, and from twenty-five to fifty during her fertile eight months of the year. At six weeks, the female was ready for pregnancy. For four months of the year, or during winter, the hamsters hibernated, and fed upon the grain they had stored in their burrow. Among their enemies were owls and men who, at least in times past, had dug up their burrows in order to get at the grain the hamsters had stored.
“A dozen babies at a time!” said Larry to himself, astounded. A thought of selling them to his school chums crossed his mind, and just as quickly vanished. It was more pleasant to dream about a dozen tiny hamsters covering the floor of the three-foot by three-foot warren where his two now were. Probably they could fill all the six warrens before hibernation time.
Hardly six weeks had passed, when Larry looked into the barred front of the warren, and saw ten tiny hamsters suckling or trying to at the nether part of the female, whom Larry had named Gloria. Larry had just come home from school on the yellow bus. He let his book satchel fall to the ground, and he pressed his face close to the bars.
“Golly!—Gosh! Ten—no, eleven!” Larry went running to tell the news. “Hey, Mama!”
Betty was upstairs hemming a counterpane on the sewing machine. She came down to admire the hamster babies to please Larry. “Aren’t they adorable! Like little white mice!”
The following morning, there were only nine in the warren, which Larry had carefully barricaded with newspaper to a height of eight inches behind the bars, so the little ones could not fall out. Where had the other two gone? Then he remembered, with a twinge of horror, that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had said that the mother hamster often ate inferior or sickly babies. Larry supposed that that was what had happened.
Julian came home at 4:30, and Larry dragged him out to show him the little ones.
“That’s awfully quick. Isn’t it?” said Julian. He was not much surprised, as hamsters were related to rabbits after all, but he wanted to say the right thing to his son. Julian’s mind just then was on a swimming pool, and he strolled out with his briefcase still under his arm to take another look at his lawn.
Larry followed him, thinking that the lawn would offer an ample burrowing area for his hamsters and their offspring when winter rolled around—a long time away as yet. It would surely be better for the hamsters to hibernate in the ground than in straw in the brick warrens. They should have the right to store their grain supplies, as it said in the encyclopedia. The basset puppy had loped out to join Larry, and Larry scratched the top of the puppy’s head while trying to pay attention to his father.
“. . . or a nice pale blue pool, Larry my boy? What shape? Kidney shape? Boomerang? Clover?”
“Boomerang!” said Larry, pleased by the word at the moment.
Julian wanted to put in his order at once with his company. Olympian Pool was terribly busy in the spring and summer months, and far from getting priority as an employee, Julian knew he might have to wait a bit. Olympian boasted of being able to create a swimming pool in a week. Julian hoped he could get one while there was still some summer left.
Larry had brought a few of his chums to his house for milk and cookies after school, and to show them his hamsters. The little ones were now a bigger attraction. A couple of the kids wanted to pick the little ones up, which Larry permitted, after separating the mother. Larry picked the mother up by the back of the neck, as his books advised.
“Your mother doesn’t mind the babies,” asked Eddie Carstairs, in a guarded way.
“Why should she?” Larry said. “They’re my pets. I take care of them.”
Eddie glanced over his shoulder, as if to see if Larry’s mother might be coming. “I’ll give you more if you want. My parents want me to get rid of ’em. But my father doesn’t feel like drowning ’em, you see? Well—if you want them—”
It was settled in a trice. The next afternoon, Eddie came on his bicycle around 4 p.m. with a cardboard carton on the handlebars. He had ten baby hamsters for Larry, of two different litters so they were not exactly the same age, plus three adult hamsters, two of which had orange spots, which Larry thought quite beautiful, since they introduced a new color to his hamster warren. Eddie was furtive.
“You don’t have to worry,” Larry said. “My mother won’t mind.”
“You never know. Wait and see,” said Eddie, and he declined politely to come in for milk and apple pie.
Larry released two of the adult hamsters in the garden, and watched with pleasure as they nosed their way about in their new freedom, sniffing irises, nibbling grass, moving on. Mr. Johnson, the basset puppy, loped out just then, and started to chase one of the hamsters who at once disappeared into the lavender bushes, baffling Mr. Johnson. Larry laughed.
A couple of days later, Betty noticed the new babies in two more warrens. “Where’d they come from?”
Larry sensed a faint disapproval. “Oh, one of the kids in school. I said I had room. And—well, you know I’m good at taking care of them.”
“That you are.—All right, Larry, this once. But we don’t want too many, do we? All these are going to produce more, you know.”
Larry nodded politely. His thoughts swam. His status had risen at school because he could take on hamsters and knew a lot about them, and on his own property he had the warrens that hamsters needed, not some old crate or cardboard box. Another thought of Larry’s was that he could release adults or even young hamsters from the age of three weeks onward whenever he wished in the garden. For the time being, he intended to be an outlet for hamsters among his friends. At least four of his schoolmates kept hamsters and had too many.
Three men arrived one afternoon with Larry’s father to look over the lawn in regard to a swimming pool. Larry followed at a distance, keeping an eye on certain hamster burrow exits which he knew, and which he had concealed by discreet heaps of leaves and twigs. Some burrow outlets were obvious, however, and he had heard his father say, “Damned moles!” once to his mother. His father was supposed to jog twice around the lawn every morning, but did not always do it.
Now a workman in blue overalls and with a tape measure sank into a burrow up to his ankle, and laughed. “Moles’ll help us out a little, don’t you think, Julian? Looks like they’ve got it half dug already!”
“Ha-ha!” said Julian, to be friendly. He was talking to another workman about the boomerang shape, telling him at which point he wanted the outer arc of it. “And don’t forget with the excess soil, my wife and I want to create a kind of hill—a rock garden eventually, you know. Over there.” He pointed to a spot between him and a pear tree. “I know it’s on the blueprint, George, but it’s so much clearer when you can see the land in front of your eyes.”
That was in late May. Larry now had a second litter from his original hamsters. The remaining single hamster was a female, and she soon had a litter by the original male, whom Larry had named Pirate, because of the black patch on his head. Larry thought if he held down his warren population to about twenty—three adults and a dozen or more little ones—his parents wouldn’t complain. Since the hamsters were nocturnal, no one ever saw the garden hamsters in daytime, not even Larry. But he knew they were making burrows and doing all right, because he could see the burrow exits in various places in the lawn and garden, and could see that the grass seed, the corn kernels, also the peanuts that he put o
ut in the afternoon were gone by the next day. Larry now had a bicycle, didn’t have to take the school bus, and he spent much of his three dollars a week allowance on hamster food bought after school at the village grocery, which had a pet food section.
All that stored away! Or maybe eaten at once, Larry thought, because surely it was early to start saving for winter. He knew the garden was full of three-week-olds. Larry was tempted to demand twenty-five cents for every hamster he took on from his school chums and ten cents for a baby, to help pay for food, but he resisted. Larry in his fantasy imagined himself the protector of hamsters, the friend who gave them a happier life than the one they had known before, when they lived in cramped boxes.
“Hamster Heaven!” Larry said to himself as July rolled around. It was vacation time. Two litters had just been born in the warren. And maybe more were being born underground? Larry believed so. He imagined the burrows according to the encyclopedia’s description: six feet deep and winding. How fascinating to know that the very ground he stood on was being used by families and their offspring as shelter and storage place, safe bedrooms—home! And no one could tell it from looking at the ground. What a good thing his father had stopped jogging, Larry thought, because even Larry sank in now and then if he stepped on a burrow entrance unawares. His father, being heavier, would sink in more, and might set about getting rid of the hamsters—even if his father still thought they were moles. Larry congratulated himself that his rather furtive feeding of the garden hamsters was paying off.
However, this same fact caused Larry to tell a lie, which weighed a bit on his conscience. It happened thus:
His mother remarked in the kitchen one afternoon, “There aren’t so many as I thought there’d be by this time. To tell you the truth, I’m glad, Larry. So much easier—”
“I’ve given a few away to kids at school,” Larry said, interrupting in his haste, and feeling awful at once.
“Oh, I see. I thought something was a little out of the ordinary about them.” Betty laughed. “I was reading about them, and it seems they fight moles—destroy them. It might be a good idea if we put a couple in the garden. What do you think, Larry? Can you bear to part with a pair or two?”
Larry’s slightly freckled face almost split with his smile. “I think the hamsters would like that.”
After that, in a matter of ten days, things happened with lightning speed, or so it seemed to Larry. For a while, he was lying on his bed in his room, reading books propped on a pillow in lovely sunlight. His hamsters in the warren were plump and happy. Larry’s father was looking forward to the last week in July and the first two weeks in August for his vacation, and Larry had learned that they were going to stay home this summer, because there was a river to fish in not far away, and a little gardening would be good exercise for Julian, his doctor had said. All was bliss, until the swimming pool men arrived in the last week in July.
They came early, around 7 a.m. Larry awakened at the noise of their two big trucks, and watched everything from his window. They were driving a bulldozer on to the lawn! Larry heard his father and mother talking in the hall, then Julian went downstairs and trotted on to the lawn. Larry saw it happen: his father’s left foot sank suddenly, and he fell in a twisted way.
Then Julian gave a moan of pain.
One of the workmen took Julian gently by the shoulders. Julian was seated on the grass. Betty ran out. Julian was not getting up. Betty ran back to the house.
Then a doctor arrived. Julian was lying on the downstairs sofa, grimacing with pain, pale in the face.
“Do you think it’s broken?” Betty asked the doctor.
“I don’t think so, but we’d better take an X-ray. I’ve got some crutches in the car. I’ll get them, and if your husband can just manage to get to my car . . .”
The bulldozer was already humming, groaning, stabbing at the lawn. Larry was more worried about his hamster burrows than about his father.
Julian was back in less than two hours, on crutches, his left foot thickly bandaged and with a metal bar underneath it to walk on when his ankle became better. And he was in a furious temper.
“That lawn is honeycombed!” Julian said to Betty and also Larry, who was in the kitchen having a second breakfast of milk and doughnuts. “The workmen say they’re hamsters, not moles!”
“Well, the digging, darling—the excavation will at least scare some of them off,” Betty said soothingly.
Julian focused his glare on his son. “It’s quite plain, Larry, you’ve been putting your hamsters right in the garden. You didn’t tell us. Therefore you lied. You didn’t—”
“But I didn’t lie,” Larry interrupted in panic, because “lie” was his father’s most awful word. “No one asked me about the—the—” Larry was on his feet, trembling.
“You led your mother to think, which is the same as lying, that the two you released in the garden recently were the only two. This is patently untrue, since the lawn is full of holes and tunnels and God knows what!”
“Darling, don’t get excited,” Betty said, fearing another heart attack. “There are ways—even if there are a lot of holes and things. Exterminators.”
“You’re damned right!” said Julian. “And I’m going to call them up now!” He went off on his crutches in the direction of the telephone.
“Julian, I’ll call them,” Betty said. “Have a rest. You’re probably still in pain.”
Julian wouldn’t be dissuaded. Larry watched, breathing shallowly. He’d never seen his father quite so angry. Exterminators. That meant deadly poison, probably. Maybe men stood out there with clubs and hit the hamsters as they ran from their burrows. Larry wet his lips. Should he try to scare a few out now, and catch them, put them back in the warrens where it was safe? How many burrows with little ones were the pool men killing this very minute?
Larry looked out of the kitchen window. The bulldozer had already made a beginning on one wing of the boomerang shape, and was working now on the second wing, as if marking the land out. But not a hamster was in sight. Larry looked everywhere, even at the edges of the garden. He imagined his hamsters cringing far below in the earth, wondering what was causing all the reverberations. But they’d be only six feet below, and the pool would definitely be twelve feet deep in some places.
“Goddamn the whole batch of ’em!” Julian said in a voice like thunder, and crashed the telephone down.
Larry held his breath and listened.
“Darling, one said he could come possibly tomorrow. Call that one back,” said Betty.
Larry escaped out of the kitchen door, intending to watch the workmen, and to try to save some hamsters if he could. For this reason, he detoured and went to the toolhouse for an empty carton. When Larry reached the excavation, he was just in time to see the big toothed scoop rise with a load of earth, swing and dump it exactly on a spot where Larry knew there was a hamster exit. Larry seethed with helpless fury. He wanted to cry out and stop them. Fortunately the hamsters always had a second exit, Larry reminded himself.
His sense of reassurance was brief. When he looked into the hole the bulldozer was digging, he saw part of a burrow exposed as cleanly as if someone had taken a knife and cut downward, as in the encyclopedia diagram. And there at the bottom were three or four little ones—visible, barely four feet under, wriggling! Where were the hamster parents?
“Stop!” Larry yelled in a shrill voice, waving his arms at the man up in the orange bulldozer. “There’re animals alive there!”
The bulldozer man might not have heard him. The great jaw swung again and struck at a point lower than the baby hamsters’ chamber.
“What’s the matter, sonny?” asked the workman who had walked up beside Larry. “There’re plenty more of those, I can tell you!”
“But these are pets!” Larry said.
The man shook his head. “Your
father’s plenty fed up with ’em, you know. Lawn’s full of ’em! Just look. Now don’t cry, kid! If we kill a few, you’ve got a hundred more around here!” He turned away before Larry could straighten up and assure the man he was not crying.
The rest of the day was a shambles. Julian was again on the telephone during the time the workmen stopped for lunch. Larry went out with his empty cardboard box to try to rescue a few hamsters, adults or babies, and didn’t find a single one. Betty made a simple lunch, and Julian was still too upset to eat more than a bite. He was talking about getting at the hamsters himself, sticking burning brands down their holes, the way the farmers used to do with mole holes in Massachusetts where he’d been brought up.
“But Julian, the exterminators—” Betty glanced at her son. “They’ll probably be able to come in a few days. Friday, they said. You mustn’t get excited over nothing. It’s bad for you.”
“I’m damned well going to have a cigarette!” Julian said, and got up, dropped a crutch, picked it up, and made his way to the telephone table, where there were always cigarettes in a box.
Betty had cut her smoking down to five a day, which she smoked when Julian wasn’t with her. Now she sighed, and glanced at Larry, who looked down at his plate.
His father, Larry thought, was mainly furious because he hadn’t been able to smoke for the last several months, because the doctor had made him work shorter hours—little things like that. How could anyone get so angry just over hamsters? It was absurd. Larry said, “Excuse me,” and left the table.
He went upstairs and wept on his bed. He knew it wouldn’t last long, and it felt good to weep and get it over with. He was feeling a bit sleepy, when the sound of the bulldozer jolted him alert. They were at it again. His hamsters! Larry ran downstairs, with an idea of again trying, with his cardboard box, to save any refugee hamsters. He almost bumped into Julian who was coming in the kitchen door.
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder Page 16
