Part 13: In which Billy is not daunted

Late one afternoon I settled down in my office after an errand, facing a fast-closing project deadline. After a while, I paused for a break and, as usual, checked to see whether Billy was up to something. It seemed to me that the run had been too quiet for too long. Even when Billy napped, I was used to hearing occasional drowsy munching sounds coming from his hut. I checked the blue hut and then the log hut and even under the big hut.

Billy had vanished entirely. He wasn't anywhere in his run. I crawled around the floor, checking all of his hiding places on my side of the wall. He wasn't in any of them, either. Incredibly, it seemed he must have somehow made it over the second, much higher cardboard wall that spanned my office doorway, separating it from the rest of the house. But how? By scaling it with tiny grappling hooks made from paper clips? By pole vaulting over it with a pencil? It was unthinkable--but it was undeniable that he was missing.

Ted and I spent the next hour or so searching the entire house, upstairs and down, looking in every closet and on every low shelf and under and behind all the furniture. It was astounding how many small hiding places we found; whole gangs of desperado hamsters could have holed up in our house for years. Our indifferent housekeeping didn't make our task any easier--we captured dozens of dust bunnies but no Billy.

Finally, as evening approached, I decided to put out hamster traps all over the house. (A hamster trap consists of a stepped pile of books leading up to a tilted bucket with peanut butter bait at the bottom. We added towels--for a soft landing--and small plastic cups of water to ours.) This chore kept us busy for nearly another hour, arranging scrub buckets and building towers of encyclopedia volumes. Worried that Billy might dehydrate before he fell into one of the traps, I also set out water in shallow jar lids in most of the rooms.

Distracted as I was, I had to get back to work, so I returned to my office after a quick dinner. As the computer was warming up, I heard a faint scrabbling sound somewhere nearby. I called Ted and we both got down on our hands and knees and made hamster-attracting noises. Finally, we located the sound, coming from underneath a filing cabinet. Billy had somehow flattened himself enough to crawl in under the bottom drawer when it had been left open earlier in the day and had been trapped inside when the drawer was closed (and probably narrowly missed becoming hamster paté).

To get the heavy drawer out of the cabinet, we had to remove and stack more than half of its files. Finally, we got the drawer out, scooped up a chastened (but only temporarily) Billy, transported him back to his home. Then, before I could work, we had to put the files back into the drawer, move the furniture back into place, and disassemble the peanut butter traps. Unfortunately, I overlooked some of the jar lids of water which Ted came across later--unexpectedly--and was, I thought, unnecessarily cranky about.

However, Billy was back where he belonged, and I could hear an occasional contented munching sound coming from his hut as I worked on past midnight.