First, a warning. This story starts innocently, sweetly even, but ends with some of the most gruesome imagery ever to have entered my visual cortex. Those prone to queasiness should consider leaving this story unread, and skipping to a lighter, cheerier read.
Prelude
The story is set in and around my parents house, at a time when my sister was about ten years old, and I was a couple of years older. A young friend and neighbour had given my sister a few pet mice as a gift. My sister kept the mice hidden from our parents in an aquarium-style cage under a shelf at the bottom of her wardrobe.
For a short period after she was given the mice, my sister was very enthusiastic about keeping them. She would rush home from school, then disappear into her bedroom, where she would take the mice out of their cage and teach them to perform tricks. Her training method involved offering small pieces of cheese as a reward for acrobatic feats or cleverness. Sometimes, when she thought she had a new trick perfected, my sister would invite me and her other siblings into her bedroom to serve as an audience for her amazing mouse circus.
The mice and the circus kept my sister amused for a couple of weeks. Soon after however, the pain of chores associated with ownership of the mice began to outweigh the pleasure she derived from keeping them. She became neglectful of cleaning their cage, and then the smell of the mouse droppings provided another reason to resent the impact the cute little creatures had had on her otherwise carefree life.
My sister faced a dilemma. She wanted to get rid of the mice, but could not bring herself to release them into the backyard, knowing that if she did, the mice would likely be caught and killed by the family cat. Also, there were plenty of other ways the mice could be accidentally killed if they were set free - they were so small and fragile that they had almost been trod on and killed a few times already when they had been allowed to run free around her bedroom.
The solution my sister settled on was to continue to keep the mice in their cage, but to store the cage in a old disused tin shed in our backyard. She very loosely figured that she would tend to the mice from time to time, and that she might grow to like them again if only she did not have to live with them constantly. To allow the mice to survive for extended periods between her visits to the shed, my sister devised an ingenious slow feeding mechanism consisting of a Milo tin with a small hole in the bottom. She filled the Milo tin with birdseed I think.
My sister was not a very dedicated carer, and so predictably, a short while later her carefree life of dress-ups and pool parties resumed, and she forgot all about the mice. I forgot about them too.
Shock
A month or perhaps two months later, after searching the house for an old toy or bike part or piece of sporting equipment maybe I expanded my search to the backyard. I beat back the ferns that surrounded the entrance to the old tin shed, then slid back the bolt that held the door in place. The thin door wobbled outwards on its own due to the shed's age and shoddy construction. The makeshift wooden chipboard floor was bloated and damp due to the leaking roof. Only when I spotted the aquarium-style cage in a dark corner of the shed did I remember about the mice. I hesitated, having no clear idea of what might have happened to them after the long period of neglect, but nonetheless being filled with vague premonitions of unpleasantness. The shed was too dark for me see anything looking through the glass, so I picked up the cage and carried it out into the light.
Strangely I don't remember anything about the smell of the cage, but I remember the sight. As the bright summer sun shone through the glass walls of the aquarium, distinct red smears became apparent. The smears were about two centimetres wide and rose from the bottom of the glass walls to about a third of the way up. There were about ten smears in total, spread haphazardly over all four walls of the cage.
Inside the cage was more red. Red was everywhere. The spinning wheel and other mouse toys looked like heavily used and never cleaned instruments of torture. The white fur of whole and partial mice was littered about the cage floor. I remember a mouse near the centre of the cage, largely intact but with its innards having been eaten out and the red of its body cavity contrasting with its exposed thin white bones and the clean white fur of its exterior.
Before I had come up with a satisfactory explanation for the apparent massacre of my sister's pet mice, another sight inside the cage confused me. I saw a row of little pink piglets - plastic toy farm animals about a centimetre long from a play set that was kept inside the house. That those plastic toys had at some point been given to the mice seemed the most likely explanation initially, but I soon realised that what I was looking at were not plastic toys, but hairless, newborn, baby mice. A glance around the rest of the cage confirmed that the newborns were not the only additions to the mouse population. Adolescent mice about three centimetres long were among the mutilated.
The horrifying reality of what had happened dawned on me. The mice had bred to the point where the bird-seed food supply was no longer sufficient, and had turned to cannibalism. The red smears had been created by a mortally wounded mouse, trying vainly as it bled to death to escape the hell of its surroundings by throwing itself against the cold and unyielding glass walls. I shuddered at the thought of that poor mouse's agonising last moments.
While in shock I looked over the cage for any signs of life. I found a single live, fully grown mouse, quivering in a corner of the cage, partially hidden under a small plastic shelter and peering out with frightened eyes. There may have been others not so obviously alive, but those frightened eyes are all that has stuck in my memory. The quivering mouse was surrounded by the aftermath of a life and death cannibalistic struggle that no creature should ever have to experience. I wonder how the mouse felt about its victory.
What I did with the mice and the cage I have blotted from my memory. Most likely I tipped the contents of the cage into the compost heap at the back of the garden, hosed out the cage, then returned it to its place in the old tin shed.
Reflection
The thing that struck me most about this gruesome episode was the appalling amount of suffering that was caused by such a minor lapse of judgement. In most circumstances, the upper limit of suffering that can be caused by an action is the loss of life of all who were present when the action took place. Future Hitlers of the world should take note that there is no limit to the amount of suffering that can be inflicted if breeding is allowed.
