Scarface

This is a picture that I took of a deer mouse that was living in my house last winter around this time of year. I manipulated the photo with Gimp.


He started coming inside to get out of the cold sporadically during the day. Because we were in the middle of renovating the place at the time we decided to let him stay since there were holes leading to the outside all over the place and we weren’t going to seal them up anytime soon. We started calling him Scarface because it looked like his left eye had been gouged out or injured in some manner.

Scarface eventually moved in full time and made a nest underneath our washing machine. We would hear him during the night scratching and climbing on the metal underneath the washer, that sound always made us smile. Eventually he became very friendly. He would come up to us and eat bread out of our hand and stare at us for hours. When staring at us he would always stand on the same brick by the fireplace. When our human conversations got really loud or boisterous he would actually stand on his hind legs and start to rub his tiny mouse hands together like he was keeping them warm or something. Suffice it to say he was really growing on us and was starting to become part of the family.

Months passed by as winter became spring and one day little Scarface went missing. We looked everywhere for him and eventually spotted him outside by the pit. He was climbing the juniper trees, breaking off branches and making a nest outside! Obviously we were sad to see him go, but hey that’s the way of the beast, one day they’re standing up laughing at your jokes, the next they’re dancing on the rim of a pit. Until…

A day later Scarface popped his head in through the front door. Full of joy, I ran over to him, but as I got closer I could see clearly there was something wrong. There were three huge tumors coming out of Scarface’s butt.:frowning:
I leaned in more to get a closer look and to my astonishment the tumors weren’t tumors at all, they were three baby mice coming out of his butt!.. Then it came to me, Scarface was a SHE not a HE! Scareface was a mother!!! And those babies were breastfeeding while being dragged across the floor by the proud new mother.:smiley:

Scareface had come back to the house to bring her children to the nest underneath the washer and trusted me enough to walk right in front of me with the most valuable things in her life… her children.:smiley:

Unfortunately for Scarface the house was almost fully renovated, meaning all the holes had been sealed up and 4 mice living in one house was not going to be possible, or appropriate… plus the mouse droppings underneath the washer were beginning to stink really really bad. So the next day when Scarface was out getting another branch from outside for the nest, we moved the old washer with the babies still inside of it to the driveway hoping that Scarface would retrieve them and start a new nest somewhere outside. Instead what happened was Scarface could not find them because she was a stupid mouse and eventually a neighbor dog ate one of the babies and the other two died from exposure…

Anyway, the lesson is… I unintentionally killed a family who trusted me, and even though it’s a mouse family it still really sucks.

Merry Christmas!

http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/rodents/


Other side of her…


Here’s a nice one…


That is a sad story.

One of the type life likes to write.

I can tell a similar one.
Two years ago, our dog Sayuri, who usually hunts mice, “saved” a baby mouse, from a freshly plowed field. She just took the baby in her mouth, without biting, and released it into my hand. I took it back home then, and, after a quick recherche, tried to keep it alive and feed it. Which went well, to my complete amazement (hope it’s okay to post the image here in your thread, just drop me a note if not):

After about 3 weeks, the mouse baby had become a cute, nosy little guy who liked to challenge my fingertips for a fight, and go for strolls to explore my studio, but always came back after a while.
One day, he slipped out of the door unnoticed … and obviously came across Sayuri (my dog) again … who finished what she had begun before.
I didn’t realize what had happened for hours, until my wife found the little corpse.

Believe me or not … I cried my eyes out that day.

It had all been my fault. I had even heard her hunting our “guest”. It just did not make it to me, that he wasn’t inside the studio anymore, so I did not care …

No, I don’t have a problem with you posting that picture here at all. Thank you very much for the complementary story. I remember my dog “saved” some of my pet baby rabbits that way too. He did not get to finish the job, but it didn’t really matter anyway since the mother rejected the babies and let them starve to death since the dog’s smell was on them.

It’s funny, a lot of people would laugh at these kind of stories because they think that rodents are all disgusting, disease ridden, tunnel dwelling spawns of Satan that will eat your babies eyes out as you sleep in the next room… and are therefore not deserving of such care and should be killed immediately. Of course all those things are true, but mice are also really cute… Plus they are really close to humans biologically, so why not care for them when they are in need? They have emotions just like anybody else, they feel pain and pleasure. And I’m sure when you cared for the little guy you alleviated some of his fear. Poor mouse.

http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/rodents/

I don’t understand why the mouses in your country look cute, while my country’s mouses look really dirty and scary (Why God, why?). I once saw a really huge mouse like the size of fat man’ arm around the garden of my house. It looks really scary.