Resting, listening to his heart, listening, smiling: the mouse was not the largest fauna in his private world. Doubtless the thing that ran like a man was hills and valleys ahead, a world to hide in. As he trudged back to the shed he was not afraid, his heart was thumping, a-hunting we will go.
He was listening and watching the hills while he strung the electric fence to keep out the mice. He was listening while he cleaned out a room in the old supply shed. He listened in his sleep, even after he had stretched alarm trip wires criss cross beneath the leaves and planted nooses with the sliding catch deer poachers use. Although he did not expect to hold the thing, since it surely would have more intelligence than a deer, he might get a look at it, a flick of time in which he could decide whether to shoot.
The snares worked as he was sometimes to think afterward too well. The afternoon he charged into a world of shrieks and crashing leaves and saw a bronzed, hair-whirling fury, her leaf-clotted mane glinted blue in the sunlight, straining from the humming wire with the self-destroying terror of a filly trapped in a cattle guard, he stared, then ran for the wire snips. When he cautiously approached he saw the wire had bitten deep into her ankle. As she squawled, she was beating the leaves with blood. It would be many afternoons before she would run again, if ever. If he loosed this lone thing now, she would die.
Once, on Mars, he shot a sand lizard that wriggled into a crevasse and would take a long time to die. To him, although it must be waiting in the darkness with yawning jaws, there was nothing for him to do but inch down and finish the mess he had begun.
So he went back to his room for a blanket. Holding it open before him, he edged toward the snarling, drooling animal that backed away along the circle of its tether, leaving blood and liquid on the leaves. It stunk, it made him gag from excitement and the rank odor of its sweat and hate. He wanted to run and never come back, for he could not finish it like a sand lizard, it was going to be snarling and watching until the Doric rescued him, took it away, and that would be six months!
Its hard bones thrashing beneath the blanket frightened him. He yelled as its teeth found his knee. He swung his fist to dislodge it, for it was no more female to him than is a bitch fox in a trap. It was a fearful thing, outside his experience, and he moaned as he lay across it, plucking at the snare, staring at the blue, dirt-grained foot with broad yellow nails, until the noose widened and it tried to crawl beneath him like a tortoise. Then he bundled it up, it was no heavier than a whining bundle of sticks, and ran into his room, where, after carefully wrapping the snapping head, he bound the hands and feet and tied it by a sheet about its middle to the bed. After opening the window to clear the stench, he sat on its legs and, wincing each time it squawled, washed and disinfected its ankle.
Whipping off the head rag so it could breathe more softly, he fled outside and watched it through the window. It was a bird cage and knife blades tightly wrapped in brown, scroflous skin, with little pools of sweat in the hollows and sticks for legs and arms. There was a purple, imperfectly healed tear above its navel. It was past puberty. Its present condition might be excused by fright, but he had a sickening suspicion it was not housebroken.
Its huge deep eyes seemed to swallow him. When it shrieked, he jumped and retreated into the sunlight where he nursed his flask, muttering, "Six months, six months. Harry, what did I ever do to deserve this? Six months, just me and it."
After he had pulled himself together, he marched inside, blanketed the head so it couldn't watch him, took a detergent, a rag and a bucket of water and began to scrub away layers of grease and filth. "Shut up," he yelled, "I don't like this either. One job I never asked for was attendant in a lunatic asylum." But he was wise enough to consider that until he trapped her from her own environment she was probably no more insane than a fox is insane. How she would adjust herself to her new life he did not know. Was it possible that with certain skills, if you didn't learn them young, you could never learn them?