Haku, Lost and Found

Sometimes the blank spaces between our posts mean that nothing noteworthy has happened. Sometimes they mean that something major has happened. At the end of last week I made the horrible discovery that Haku was not in his cage.

I didn't know it at the time, but the story actually began a few days prior, when I had noticed Cringer taking an alarming interest in the snake. I was worried that he would somehow knock the lid off and get into the cage.

Aside: When I was 14 or so, my pet iguana was mauled by a cat who had figured out how to open the hook and eye lock on the cage while I was away. When I got home and found Tyrone severely injured, I first tried to put him out of his misery as humanely as possibly by gassing him with the exhaust from an old Ford Econoline Van. That didn't work, so in the end I had to euthanize Tyrone with my .22 rifle out in the yard.

So, I was sensitive to the dangers of having a cat and a reptile in the same house. I charged Mason and Tyson with always keeping their door closed and, as an extra precaution, placed the Sensitive Plant on top of the cage to keep the lid weighted down. Later, as I surveyed the scene of the disappearance, I realized that placing the heavy plant on the lid had caused one of the corners to lift up slightly and Haku had slipped out of that hole sometime in the previous two or three days.

I looked all over the boys' room but couldn't find any sign of him. I was certain that Haku had gone down the heating vent but before we left to visit our cousins, I put a pinky mouse in Haku's dish on the floor. Nearby, I placed his favorite spider plant and a nest that I made from his heating pad and one of Mason's slippers. I turned the furnace off so that the cold might drive him to the warm nest, and poured a trail of flour across the threshold of the room so I would be able to tell from the tracks if Haku had either entered or exited. I then locked Cringer in the basement and stuffed a towel under the door so that if Haku was wandering around the house, he at least wouldn't wander into Cringer's claws.

I worried about Haku the whole time we were down South - fabulous time by the way; here's some pictures:





I call this one, "The Russian and The Rootbeer Float"


When we got home, I went in first and snuck upstairs, thinking that the weekend had provided our best chance of finding the snake... cold house, toasty slipper, no one around for two days so he would be more comfortable coming out of hiding...
The flour trail was undisturbed and when I eased the door open I saw that the mouse was still where I'd left it. A quick check verified that Haku was still missing.

Ella was a little scared to sleep at night because she was worried that Haku would come into her bed - I didn't tell her this, but it's probably fairly reasonable to expect that a snake might decide to cuddle up to a warm body at night. We all wanted to get Mason's snake back, but the fact that we are moving in only a couple of weeks, added a real sense of urgency.

Aside: Searching through drawers and closets for the snake gave me a deja-vu feeling that reminded me of an experience I had when I was working at a lumber mill before my mission. One of my coworkers, in a momentary lapse of judgement, brushed across a spinning tablesaw and amputated the end of his index finger. While he was being driven to the hospital I was tasked with finding the missing digit so it could follow him and perhaps be reattached. As I sifted through the piles of sawdust I had this excited/apprehensive feeling; I was trying to find the finger but at the same time I hoped that I wouldn't find it.

At work on Monday I shared the story with one of my coworkers (the missing snake story, not the finger story), and she told me about how her mother had been sued by the people who'd bought her house over a plumbing problem a full year after the sale. This made me even more worried!

I reasoned that I couldn't tell the people moving into the house, "here's the keys, and by the way, there's a snake loose somewhere in here". But on the other hand, I also couldn't not tell them because if it suddenly turned up a couple of months later, they would probably be even more mad that I hadn't said anything. I resolved myself to the fact that we would have to pay for an exterminator and/or furnace cleaning and even then, short of finding a body, I would still be faced with the prospect of 'fessing up to the new owners.

We had been praying every meal and every night that we would find Haku before we moved, but when I got home from work that day, I took the cat upstairs and set him in the middle of Mason's room. I felt like we had tried one way but that desperate times called for desperate measures. If this was a movie, it would definitely be the time to say something like,

"Cringer, you're off your chain and cleared to engage"

Cringer immediately started sniffing around the floor. I gave him a parting look that said "do what you reptile-hunting machines do best" and then went downstairs to apologize to Mason and promise I would make it up to him. After dinner we went for a long, Family Home Evening walk to the library. It was dark out and getting late enough that one of our primary teachers and one of our school teachers that we met on the way, both commented on how the kids should be in bed.

When we got home at 9:30, Mason and Ella went upstairs to get ready for bed but soon gave a shout from Mason's room. I ran up and found Mason holding a wriggling Haku which he had found on his windowsill just as Cringer was boosting himself up from the bookshelf. Four days of stress washed away and we secured Haku in his cage and gave him a welcome-back mouse.

The next day was the day of our Snake Party. We had balloons and streamers and ate a serpent-shaped calzone while we listened to a kid-generated music playlist. The pizza was good and everyone loves Miley's Party in The USA, but my favorite part of the story was this: Finding Haku was absolutely an answer to the kids' prayers.

If we had gone to bed even a few minutes earlier, Cringer would have not have flushed Haku out of hiding (Mason and Tyson always lock the cat out at night because that's when he turns into Battlecat and bothers them). Or, if we had come in just a few minutes later, Cringer would have caught Haku who likely would have ended up at the receiving end of a Honda tail pipe. This really was the perfect resolution to our crisis.

And now... the lid is secured to the cage with a double wrap of packing tape.



- C