Chipmunk

From jj

11 Jun 92

I grew up in the country. There weren't too many other kids around to play with, and so at times it was a somewhat lonely existence. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, one day in the summer, I was walking through the woods and saw a chipmunk sitting in the path in front of me. Unlike other chipmunks, this one didn't seem to be all that afraid of my approach; it didn't run away as I came near, but rather just sort of looked at me with a blase sort of attitude. I thought it would run but it didn't, even when I came to within a few feet of it; it merely turned its head and looked up at me with what I took to be a friendly expression. I was elated--here was a new friend! I quickly ran back to our house and found a cardboard box. I ran back to the chipmunk, and though I don't remember exactly how I did it, I somehow got him into the box.

My mother was a bit dubious at first, but finally relented, and so I had a new pet. I found an old aquarium and lined it with bedding. I bought a wheel and hacked a way to make it suspended in the cage. I bought a water bottle, and with some chicken coop wire spent many hours creating a sort of second- and third-story superstructure that fit on top of the aquarium in lieu of a lid. The chipmunk could climb up there, through different levels, and it would be just like he was climbing a tree. I intended to do right by my new friend.

Trouble was, he didn't seem to want to make use of these accommodations. He pretty much stayed in one corner and slept a lot, no matter how much I banged on the side of the aquarium. He didn't want to eat anything either, though I tried to entice him with juicy raisins, peanuts and peanut butter. Very curious, and somewhat disappointing. I wanted him to get out and sit on my shoulder, just like in all the Bobbsey-twins genre books I had read. I would take him to school and he would hide in my pocket, transforming the burdensome day into joyful fun.

I found I could pick him up without him making any attempt to bite me. A couple days later, as I was holding him, I happened to turn him over and something caught my eye. Something odd. I looked more carefully. It was a male chipmunk, complete with a full complement of standard sexual organs. Only, there seemed to be something wrong here, specifically with his scrotum. There seemed to be some kind of wound on the chipmunk's scrotum. I looked more closely, turning the chipmunk this way and that--he lay in my hand very placidly--and turned on an overhead light. Yes, it definitely was some kind of bloodless wound--in fact more like a hole--in the chipmunk's scrotum. Having a scrotum myself, I could well empathize and felt a bit queasy. No wonder he wasn't very active! I could relate, and felt much anxiety and a send of urgency. I considered what I should do for him. I vaguely thought that I should disinfect the wound and wondered what I should use. This was all very disconcerting and troubling. This was my friend and he needed help!

As I sat there thinking, chipmunk in hand, some movement caught my eye. I looked closer. Something was moving in the hole in the scrotum! Peering into the hole, looking very carefully, I was finally able to discern the vague outlines of several maggots. They were resting complacently at the bottom of the hole, though the light seemed to annoy them slightly. The chipmunk was again asleep.

Well, something like this never occurred in Encyclopedia Brown or the Bobbsey Twins. I felt a bit nauseated and I wasn't so sure I liked my little pet anymore. I wondered how many maggots filled his body, what percentage was chipmunk and what percentage was wriggling worm. Still, I felt a sense of responsibility toward my pet and was determined to help him get better. I kinda wished that he had had some other sort of infirmity of which I could cure him, something a bit more cleaner and less repulsive, something like a broken leg that I could heroically splint, but there was no use at this point crying over spilled milk. I had to work with what was available.

I hunted through my mother's sewing kit until I found a safety pin. Returning to the chipmunk, I opened the pin and turned him over. I dug down with the point of the pin into his scrotum, digging for the worms. This of course infuriated them and immediately they took off for parts unknown. I was left looking at an empty hole.

The next few hours were spend in a coy game of hide and seek. I would let the chipmunk lie still sleeping for a while, and eventually the worms would return to rest in the cavity in the scrotum. They seemed to like the contact with the air, and had probably eaten their way through the testicles for the very purpose of finding air and/or contact with the outside world. As soon as the little nasties reappeared, I would dig down into the scrotum with the pin, attempting to hook into one of the little bastards. Unlike my pet, they were very energetic; they moved too fast and I failed to hook them, in which case the pin sometimes entered the raw flesh of the insides of the scrotum, at which point the chipmunk would wake up briefly and look at me with beseeching eyes. Then I would sit and wait for fifteen or twenty minutes until the worms returned, the chipmunk would again fall asleep, and the cycle would repeat.

Finally after what seemed forever, I actually succeeded in hooking one of the bastards! I withdrew him from the scrotum impaled on the pin, pulling him like spaghetti into the light. He was about an inch long, very chubby and doughty-looking, and was not at all happy to be suddenly outside the protection of his home. He was moist and glistening, sorta mucousy, and was wriggling about on the pin like some exposed tendon or nerve. Well, step one was complete, and I felt relieved. If I had hooked one I could hook the others.

It occurred to me that my pet might want to get a glimpse of the enemy that had been torturing him. Thus, I held the impaled maggot close to the chipmunk's face and jiggled my hand a bit to wake the chipmunk up. He opened his eyes; I held the maggot close to his nose. Suddenly the chipmunk became a little dynamo. His eyes lit up as if on fire and he leapt up in my hand. He grabbed the maggot from the pin with his front paws and proceeded to chew the shit out of it. This was all very curious to me. It repulsed me not a little, but I was learning the ways of the wild and anyway the chipmunk was certainly reaping his just revenge.

I spent the next few hours repeating the pin-in-scrotum procedure. Each time I succeeded in extracting one of the little beasts, I would hold it to the chipmunk's face, at which time he would eat it. Out one end, in another. Finally there came a point at which no matter how long I waited, no new heads of maggots appeared in the scrotum hole. I considered the mission a success--I had extirpated the evil aliens that had so morbidly infected my buddy. I set the chipmunk back into his home and went off to bed to have some interesting dreams.

The next day my pet showed a dramatic improvement. He still would not eat, but he walked about the cage very animatedly and seemed to be much more aware (and concerned) of my presence. At one point a couple of days later I lifted him out of the cage and looked at the scrotum hole. To my joyful surprise, I saw that it wasn't really a hole any longer but had started to heal and was now a scab. This was indeed good news. It had been a traumatizing experience, but a lot of good had come of it. During the next 24 to 48 hours, my pet's condition continued to improve. He became very spry and even began climbing into his chicken-wire penthouse. He acted much more chipmunk-like in his movements and I was very glad. I allowed him to pose for a bit on my shoulder, to which he assented with only a few attempts to escape, and it seemed as if the Bobbsey-twins pet-thing might be in reach after all.

Then a day or so later, as I was coming down for breakfast, I paused at the cage to greet my friend. To my surprise, he was again resting languidly in a corner, his eyes glazed over and half-closed. My heart skipped a beat. With trembling hands, I reached into the cage and picked him up. I could well guess what the recurrence of the symptoms meant, and I was afraid to look. With a pit in my stomach I turned him over and looked at his scrotum. The maggots had returned in force. They had not only chewed their way through the newly formed scab, but had eaten out a much greater area. In fact, the damage now went will-nigh clear of the scrotum, extending into the flesh between the scrotum and anus and in fact one maggot was extending from the anus itself, though it seemed not to like the original hole and so had excavated a more satisfactory one adjacent to the original. In short, the entire back end of my pet was one mass of fat phlegmatic twisting and gyrating worms.

This was too much for me. Suppressing an urge to upchoke, I simply walked out of the house with the chipmunk and set him on the lawn some distance from the house. I felt really bad about the whole thing but I just couldn't cope with the notion that I really had not just one pet but perhaps several thousand. I wasn't sure how Encyclopedia Brown would have handled the situation, and to tell you the truth, I didn't really care. All I knew is that I wanted to get rid of this damn chipmunk that was being eaten from the inside out. I mournfully wished for a cat or a dog, just a normal pet like any other kid.

The rest of the story is rather anticlimatic. A couple of days later I worked up the courage to visit the spot where I had left the chipmunk. It was gone. I didn't think it had had the energy to walk away, certainly not across the great expanse of the lawn, and I wondered if some animal had gotten a hold of it. Searching further, I came across a dried pool of vomit a short distance away. I looked carefully for signs of chipmunk in the vomit but didn't see any. To this day I don't know if the vomit pool was related or not.

jj