As a young child, my experiences with pet rodents were very shocking. When I was about eight years old, pet rodents were the things to have. Everything they did was great, except the messes. Over the period of about one year, my brother, sister and I lost around five or six rodents to a bigger species or the great outdoors. The story I'm going to tell you about now includes two of my favorite gerbils, Blackie and Smoky.
It all started in the summer of ninety-two. My brother, sister and I had saved up around fifty-five dollars for our life long dream, pet gerbils. The most difficult part in the process of possessing the rodents was convincing our parents into letting us buy a couple. Of course, we used the original method of saying, "we'll feed them everyday and be very responsible". They finally gave in to our plans ans we were off to the pet store.
At the pet store there were animals everywhere going crazy trying to get out of their cages. When we got over to the rodent section of the store, we looked for rodents with our favorite characteristic, which would be the ones that were the most active.
That was when we first saw the best gerbils to buy, Blackie and Smoky. They were tumbling about in the glass cage very playfully. We bought everything you need to make your gerbils happy at the pet store that day. The final bill came to fifty dollars, but boy did we think it was worth it at the time.
There's one very important character I haven't introduced you to yet. It's our black lab, Shirley. She's dark as night, but as jolly as Santa. She always has to be the center of attention. But upstairs near the gerbils was off limits to her for now.
About two weeks passed. We went to see them everyday after school as promised. Well, Shirley wanted to see what all the fuss was about up in our room. So one day after we had finished playing maze with the gerbils, she slipped upstairs as we were watching television. Shirley saw the two rodents having so much fun inside the cage that she wanted to join them. This however, was impossible because obviously she couldn't fit in the cage. Shirley is a smart dog and it didn't take her long to figure out that if she couldn't play in the cage, they could play out of it. So she pushed off the metal top and put her paws in the cage. Smoky climbed up one paw and Blackie went up the other. Shirley was so excited because she was the first pet in the neighborhood to have her own pets. Smoky and Blackie kept running around the room and every time they got far out of her range, she would swooop them up in her mouth and plop them down right back in the center of the room, sometimes injuring their tiny necks (not funny guys). Soon the gerbils had had enough abuse and they finally croaked and lay flat as boards. Shirley soon got bored with the dead gerbils and pranced right back down the stairs.
That's when it hit us, Shirley had been near the gerbils. We stood in thought for a second on what could have happened to our small circus! Then in no time at all we bolted up the stairs. We entered the room and ran over to the cage but they were nowhere to be seen. We were in such a hurrry to find them then that we didn't look down on the floor. Soon we gave up looking, but right as I stepped out the door I looked down and there they were - slobber glimmering circus pets.
