Three Visually Adept Mice

Not long before making my way back to my Waco apartment, I recieved a text message from my roommate reading, "Can I get a hamster?"  This was of course puzzling because we already have a mouse.  Our Jasper is endearing, but it didn't seem important to have another rodent.

Still, mice are social creatures and thrive when they have company.  As it turns out, we had mistakenly decided the gender and Jasper is a girl, therefore Jasper can have mouse companions without the fear of mice babies.  Therefore, Christina bought two more mice rather than a hamster.  The initial integration did not work well and one of the mice escaped on the first day.  So when I got home there was black-and-white Jasper in one cage and brown-and-white Emma in the other and the rumor of Dodger.

I was beginning to believe that Dodger had made it to a world beyond our apartment when Christina found some chewed up bits of foil that we have wrapped around our burners.  We proceeded to find an increasing trail of evidence around the kitchen.  I began to mark the trail with crime scene numbers and fortunately, only one bag of chocolate chips were compromised.  For about a week, this is all I knew of Dodger:

Then, the trail went cold for two whole days.  When I finally believed that the poor creature had crawled into the trash and I had thrown her in the dumpster, I recieved a text message from Christina saying, "I'm going to be as artful as possible when I say I've managed to dodge any future theft of my chocolate."  She had found the prodgical mouse under the vaccum cleaner (which I had just put away only a few hours before) which is stored in the bathroom, a good distance from the kitchen in mouse terms.  There was much rejoicing in the retrieval of our pet and the loss of an unattended rodent.

About a week later, we decided to try to integrate Jasper with the rest of the mice again.  Christina had read that we needed to put some vanilla on them so that they would all smell the same -- a neutral smell.  We put it on a little thicker than we meant to, so they seemed to be more preoccupied with getting the vanilla off than fighting each other, but it worked.  The three are now the best of friends and safely contained.  The end.

Photos: Top, Emma - our spastic blonde bombshell.  Bottom, Dodger - our independent brown-coat.