Poodle Rats
It’s 4 AM and I’ve barricaded myself in my office. Downstairs everyone is asleep except for the wildlife. Nibbles the gerbil is working the night shift on his wheel, as is his custom. I’m used to that. It’s the new addition that has me spooked. Max the dog. He’s our guest for the week while LaPriel’s brother and sister-in-law sun themselves in Punta Cana.
Max, despite his name, is not a large dog. He’s a lap dog, a poodle, used to sleeping where he wants, which is why at 3 AM my bed was filled with LaPriel, my daughter Breanna⎯who is uptight about getting her tonsils out today⎯Max and me.
I decided to move to the couch in the living room where I lay partially awake and mulled over and over the car negotiations I had concluded last night right before we picked up Max. (I’ll write about the absurd ritual of negotiating a car purchase in another post).
There’s a reason I like large dogs. Small dogs are too much like rats and rats scare me. They are extremely smart, they can climb anywhere and they prefer to do so in the middle of the night. I first learned this when I lived in Mexico. I had just moved into a new rental at the base of the volcano Tacana in southern Chiapas near the Guatemala border. My Spanish was poor, so I was still getting over the shock of having somehow misunderstood my companion and I would not be the sole tenants in the house, but instead we would be sharing the other half with a family, our two rooms separated by a partial wall with a curtain and chest of drawers covering the open doorway. I could hear everything they did and said. They could likewise, including hearing my reaction when I first learned about Mexican rats.
That first night, I strung my hammock between two walls and decided against using my mosquito net, even though as is typical for Chiapan homes, there was a gap between the top of the wall and the roof. At midnight I awoke with a start. I thought I felt something shake my hammock. I looked around but didn’t see anything in the dark. The house was quiet, except for my neighbors’ snores. I didn’t switch on the light to take a closer look because I would wake my housemates. I decided I must have imagined whatever it was so I drifted off.
A few minutes later, my hammock moved again, and I felt something run down my body. This time I sprang up and ran for the lights, shaking the entire house. My neighbors were no longer snoring, but muttering the Spanish equivalent of “What the heck is going on?” There on top of the wall, having just climbed over me and up my hammock strings was a huge grey rat, its beady eyes glistening. I shuddered, kept the lights on, and slept very little from then on.
The next evening I installed my mosquito net so that the rats, which continued to use my hammock as a ladder, would at least not climb on me. I also slept with the lights on, and eventually bought a kitten, who three weeks later got into a two AM fight with a rat and nearly lost.
How is Max the dog like a rat? He has the same cunning, and I learned as I lay on the couch, he likes to wander in silence at night and sneak up on people. I nearly screamed when I caught the movement of something white creeping along the living room floor, right by head. Max jumped too. Apparently, he’s not used to people overreacting to his evening strolls. My heart was still pounding when I was returning to the couch after a bathroom break and the dog freaked me out again, this time jostling his tinkerbell collar by the front door. I exited to my office and locked myself in. I think my nerves have now calmed enough to catch a few more hours of sleep.