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Authors: Roger MacBride Allen
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buried the box, but there was no smooth mound of peaceful earth there, just a wide, weedy patch of mulch and dirt.
She made her best guess as to where she had buried Fuzzball, and dug twice as deep as she recalled making the grave months before. There was nothing there. She dug another hole a little farther left. Nothing. She tried digging farther to the right, then closer to the fence, then closer to the house. Nothing. Maybe she had missed the grave altogether in the areas of ground between her excavations. She traded in her trowel for a full-size shovel that was far too big for her and merged all her holes into one huge, sloppy pit. Her hands were getting sore, and swelling with huge blisters.
By that time, she had churned up such a huge swath of ground that it was impossible to tell where one hole started or ended, or where the piles of dirt lay atop undisturbed earth. She surrendered to a fierce grumbling in her stomach, and retreated to the house for lunch—after first muddying the bathroom sink with the first layers of dirt off her face and arms. Perhaps recognizing the gleam in her daughter’s eye, her mother allowed Barbara to go back to her searching after eating.
The search for Fuzzball was not a game anymore, but a challenge, a quest. Barbara, faced with the daunting, cratered mess that had been a little strip of ignored waste ground that morning, forced herself to sit down and think . She fought the temptation to pitch back into digging wildly. By now she was sure she must have dug in the right spot. How had the body vanished? What could have happened?
Dirt was a lot messier, a lot damper, a lot dirtier —and a lot more alive—than she had imagined. The body could have simply rotted away altogether, or been gobbled up by the bugs and worms and creepers scuttling to escape the disturbance her excavation had made in their world. Or perhaps a larger animal—a possum or raccoon or a dog—had nosed out Fuzzball the same night she had buried him and dug him up for a quick snack. Maybe her father or mother had jumbled things up with some forgotten gardening chore in the intervening months, spading up the dead rodent in the act of putting some extra topsoil on the tomatoes. The shoe box would have been no protection: one good rain would have collapsed it, and it would have quickly rotted away.
Or maybe, Barbara realized, she herself had dug up Fuzzball hours before without recognizing his few tiny, muddy-brown slivers of bone for what they were. There was not and could not be anything clean and ivory-white in this sea of brown. She could have reburied his bones as she threw her dug-up dirt to one side, trod them down and crushed them to nothing, then dug them up again when she started a new hole. She could be staring right at his invisibly small remains in the churned-up heaps of dirt in front of her.
She looked over the huge mounds of dirt she had thrown up, and realized that she would need not a shovel, not a trowel, but a set of tweezers and a magnifying glass to sift through it all carefully enough to locate whatever bones were left to find. A squirrel scampered past along the back fence, and Barbara suddenly realized that squirrel bones had to go somewhere when they died. In all probability, there were dozens and dozens of small animal bones in this one patch of earth. Even if she did find some bones, she wouldn’t have the slightest idea whether they belonged to Fuzzball, or a squirrel, or a chipmunk, or a bird.
She sighed, threw her shovel back down, and trailed disconsolately back into the house—only to be sent out by her mother to fill the holes back in and put her tools away properly.
She never found the slightest sign of the hamster’s grave.
That failure was a pivotal moment for her, the event that marked her, sparked her interest, told her what she wanted to be.
In some strange way, she felt as if she were still looking for that silly rodent’s body. The small mystery of its disappearance
She made her best guess as to where she had buried Fuzzball, and dug twice as deep as she recalled making the grave months before. There was nothing there. She dug another hole a little farther left. Nothing. She tried digging farther to the right, then closer to the fence, then closer to the house. Nothing. Maybe she had missed the grave altogether in the areas of ground between her excavations. She traded in her trowel for a full-size shovel that was far too big for her and merged all her holes into one huge, sloppy pit. Her hands were getting sore, and swelling with huge blisters.
By that time, she had churned up such a huge swath of ground that it was impossible to tell where one hole started or ended, or where the piles of dirt lay atop undisturbed earth. She surrendered to a fierce grumbling in her stomach, and retreated to the house for lunch—after first muddying the bathroom sink with the first layers of dirt off her face and arms. Perhaps recognizing the gleam in her daughter’s eye, her mother allowed Barbara to go back to her searching after eating.
The search for Fuzzball was not a game anymore, but a challenge, a quest. Barbara, faced with the daunting, cratered mess that had been a little strip of ignored waste ground that morning, forced herself to sit down and think . She fought the temptation to pitch back into digging wildly. By now she was sure she must have dug in the right spot. How had the body vanished? What could have happened?
Dirt was a lot messier, a lot damper, a lot dirtier —and a lot more alive—than she had imagined. The body could have simply rotted away altogether, or been gobbled up by the bugs and worms and creepers scuttling to escape the disturbance her excavation had made in their world. Or perhaps a larger animal—a possum or raccoon or a dog—had nosed out Fuzzball the same night she had buried him and dug him up for a quick snack. Maybe her father or mother had jumbled things up with some forgotten gardening chore in the intervening months, spading up the dead rodent in the act of putting some extra topsoil on the tomatoes. The shoe box would have been no protection: one good rain would have collapsed it, and it would have quickly rotted away.
Or maybe, Barbara realized, she herself had dug up Fuzzball hours before without recognizing his few tiny, muddy-brown slivers of bone for what they were. There was not and could not be anything clean and ivory-white in this sea of brown. She could have reburied his bones as she threw her dug-up dirt to one side, trod them down and crushed them to nothing, then dug them up again when she started a new hole. She could be staring right at his invisibly small remains in the churned-up heaps of dirt in front of her.
She looked over the huge mounds of dirt she had thrown up, and realized that she would need not a shovel, not a trowel, but a set of tweezers and a magnifying glass to sift through it all carefully enough to locate whatever bones were left to find. A squirrel scampered past along the back fence, and Barbara suddenly realized that squirrel bones had to go somewhere when they died. In all probability, there were dozens and dozens of small animal bones in this one patch of earth. Even if she did find some bones, she wouldn’t have the slightest idea whether they belonged to Fuzzball, or a squirrel, or a chipmunk, or a bird.
She sighed, threw her shovel back down, and trailed disconsolately back into the house—only to be sent out by her mother to fill the holes back in and put her tools away properly.
She never found the slightest sign of the hamster’s grave.
That failure was a pivotal moment for her, the event that marked her, sparked her interest, told her what she wanted to be.
In some strange way, she felt as if she were still looking for that silly rodent’s body. The small mystery of its disappearance
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