The Great Hamster Search of 2019: Wyoming Photographer and Blogger

I never dreamed I would be so glad to see a rodent in my house in all my life.

My daughter’s hamster escaped the cage yesterday, sometime between bedtime and the next morning around 8:30 a.m.  I walked past Wyokiddo’s bedroom and noticed the lid to the hamster tower was popped open.

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I prodded the bedding in her tower and cage, lest she was just snuggled in under the fluff.

No hamster.

I’d been the last one to have the lid open.  At night when we put our daughter to bed, I’d taken to opening the cage to give the hamster some love.  Apparently I hadn’t gotten the lid closed correctly and now Star was MIA.

Oh sweet Jesus.

Frantically I called my husband.  He gave me encouragement but was busy digging the bird farm out from under the blizzard that hit that weekend and was unavailable to aid in the search and rescue efforts.

So I scoured the top floor of the house in search of my daughter’s hamster. I looked in her bedroom, our bedroom, the bathroom and living room.  I emptied drawers, checked in the toes of shoes and belly crawled under the beds.  Several dozen dust bunnies but no hamster.  I tore my office apart, even peering up in the cardboard tubes of my photography backgrounds in case she’d mistaken them for some really big toilet paper rolls.  I found $2.86 in change, a memory card and a key to a lock that I’d thrown away two years ago.

Still no hamster.

So I did what any self-respecting mother of my generation does.  I asked for ideas on Facebook and googled “how to trap an escaped hamster.”  Apparently I’m not the only one in contention for mother of the year, as there are more than 221,000 results on the subject.

My friends were really no help.  Some tried.  Others offered sage advice on where to look like “the belly of the cat.”  My niece told me to check behind the refrigerator.  That’s where they’d found her hamster when she was a kid.  (She left out the gory details that they smelled the hamster rather than saw it…poor Fluffy did not have a good ending.)

I even watched a YouTube video by a lovely woman named Erin from Cyprus with a soothing accent.  Erin offered tips on building a humane bucket trap.  Armed with Erin’s loving encouragement and a fresh jar of peanut butter, I commenced building several traps to place around our house.  Except I sliced my knuckle open, then had to fly off in a flurry of paper and products to meet a client.  The entire trip into town, I alternated between praying to St. Francis that the little bugger would be found and vowing to kill it myself if I did find it.

I’m not particularly attached to the hamster.  She’s cute, but she’s not very sociable.  In fact, she reminds me of a mare I had once…nice enough but she merely tolerates humans instead of enjoying them.

No, I dreaded the sadness and drama that telling the 7-year-old I lost her hamster would create.  This was a girl who sobbed for four hours when her Beta fish died.

Just last week, we were watching “The Vet Life” on Animal Planet.  When the doctor told the woman her goat kid had died, my empath of a daughter sagely told me “I know how she feels.  When Rocky died, there was an empty spot in my heart for a long time.  It didn’t feel full again until we got Star.”

Holy Mary and Joseph, where in THE hell was the F’ING hamster???

I let the border collie inside the house and tried to get him to sniff around.  If Ziggy can sniff out two-week old pheasant chicks in foot high weeds, surely he could find a hamster hiding in carpet or linoleum.

“Where’s the hamster, Zig?  Find the hamster. Find the hamster!”

He sniffed in Emily’s room, sniffed in our room, then raced to the living room to pick up his pheasant toy.

“God damn worthless dog,” I scolded.  He just wiggled his butt and dropped the pheasant at my feet.

Outdoor Guy came home about then.  He took one look at the crazed expression on my face and disappeared back out of the house for the mouse bucket trap.

Then I thought of one place on the top floor I hadn’t looked.  The magazine rack in the bathroom.

Nestled between the pages of “Climbing and Hiking in the Wind River Mountains” was the jailbird. She’d chewed herself a cozy little nest of book pages and blinked at my sleepily when the light hit her.  I squawked in triumph, slammed the bathroom door closed again and went for reinforcements.

Armed with a plastic cup and lid and my husband as a second line of defense, I gathered up the hamster and returned her to her cage.  Without so much as a thank you, Star hit the litter-strewn floor and scurried up her tunnel to her food cache.

I had planned on not saying anything to my daughter.  Except I’m Catholic.  Confession is what we are good at.

So over dinner I told Wyokiddo of Star’s adventures.  I told her I learned how to make traps for hamsters on the Internet.  She laughed and giggled at the thought of her hamster on a grand adventure.

At bedtime we gave the hamster lots of coos and a few treats and told her how glad we were she was back.  Then I taped the damn lid shut.

So to those of you who followed along with our hamster hunt online or offered encouraging words via text, thank you.  To those of you who may be missing a hamster and stumbled across this blog by accident…Godspeed.  I feel your pain and wish you well.

And I swear the next pet we get is going to be a horse.  At least if they go missing, they’re easier to spot.  Or maybe another fish.  He never got out of his tank.

Teresa

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