Strange Pets

Sometimes we had some strange pets. We would pick up some creature, keep it for a while and turn it loose. There’s an animal called the California rosy boa or the rubber boa. They’re a little tiny snake. Eighteen inches would be a big one. When they bend their skin wrinkles like rubber. You don’t always see them, but that summer we saw four or five of them. I picked up a rubber boa one day that was long enough, and wrapped it around my neck. This was just fine with the snake because it was warm. I wore the snake for two or three weeks, ‘til the novelty wore off and everybody on the mountain was shocked. Then I turned it loose.

Once Mama wanted to replace the wooden floor of the cabin with a concrete floor because of the fire hazard. When the floor was partly up we found this creature just under the edge of the floor where it was still intact. It was a small thing, bigger than a squirrel but certainly not as big as a skunk. Fritz had on big heavy gloves. He walked over to it and the animal didn’t run off. He picked it up and said, “It’s a God damned skunk!” But it didn’t smell quite like a skunk. It turned out to be a civet cat. It didn’t have stripes on its back, but checks. Fritz took it outside and put it down and it scurried off. We didn’t try to keep that for a pet.

Copyright Joanne Harris May 2009