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SOUP'S ON: AN APLODONTIA'S TAIL

So, what would you think if you had walked into a hospital cafeteria for the first time, and some bozo behind the counter is animatedly telling one of the doctors about some "large, primitive rodent" he has in his freezer? You might just grab a bottle of pop and a cookie, and clear out - just to be safe. (Whose freezer is it in, anyway?)

It had started like this:

I wanted to hit a local beach for a good minus tide, so I grabbed a city bus to get as close as I could (about a mile away, uphill) and then cast about for the quickest route downhill. Spotted a dead-end sign with a ravine beyond it - I always check out something like this; there's almost always some sort of a footpath in this situation, worn by generations of kids looking for a shortcut to the beach. The dirt path was sneaker-wide, and for about fifty yards it skirted fences and backyards. It connected, as I'd hoped, with a larger trail heading down to the beach. Right where the trail passed under a bridge, a brown, furry thing was stretched, unmoving, smack in the middle of the trail, with a mountain bike tire-print bisecting its spinal axis. Dead-on, right-down-the-middle--probably intentionally done.

An Aplodontia!

Right about now, you're asking yourself, as almost everyone else has, Œand just what the hell is an apolo... apo...apple-dont. ..whatever he said?"

[Editor's note: This is definitely not the first question I asked MYself.]

The Aplodontia is a Pacific Northwest native rodent, and is considered to be the most primitive rodent in existence - a true living fossil. Commonly called a Mountain beaver, though it is not related to the beaver, it looks like a big dark brown guinea pig with tiny, squinty eyes. They are not rare, occurring from northern California to southern British Columbia, and from the Cascade Crest all the way down to sea level, although a couple populations - possible subspecies - in California have become geographically isolated by human development and are currently listed as threatened.

But hardly anyone knows of aplodontias primarily because of their lifestyle: they are burrowers in native-growth areas, and they are nocturnal. I mean, cougar sightings are supposedly quite rare, and I've seen four or five of those, but I'd never before seen one of these.

I once identified one from a photo pinned to a bulletin board in an Olympic National Park ranger station. The photo, turned in by a hiker, had a caption penned in by one of the rangers, asking for assistance: Does anybody know what this is?

So I walk up, take one glance, and proclaim, "It's an Aplodontia!"

And the park ranger behind the counter answers with, "Oh. And who the hell are you? And how do you happen to know of this apo. .apolo...whatever?"

I'm the guy who reads the mammal field guide cover-to-cover, counting off, "seen this... and this... haven't seen this... or this... seen those...."

Like, I haven't seen a live bushy-tailed woodrat in fourteen years, when a band of them were about this close to making off with my peanut butter, .but I did find the pelt of one, freshly-scraped clean, a couple years ago along a trail - probably rasped clean by a tongue of a bobcat (which I've still never seen - neither bobcat nor tongue), and with a perfectly tidy and still steaming pile of cat poop a few inches away... but that's another tale.

So, I knew what this furry roadkill above the beach was at a glance. It was a recent kill, obviously that morning, and a clean one (no bloody ruptures) so I paused to inspect it. I grabbed a couple quick pictures, and then picked it up by its feet and set it over in the bushes for later.

I headed on down to the beach, and ate my lunch while sitting on a log and watching the tide go out. And contemplating that I was eating lunch with hands that had just recently handled a dead rodent. But I'd only handled it by its ankles!

The beach didn't seem all that exciting, and I realized that I'd already found the prize of the day. So I mooched a couple plastic bags from a guy walking his dog and headed back uphill before some other dog found my prize.

Oh, be careful whom you sit next to on the bus!

I called Marcia, the wildlife biologist whose backyard I have used as a charnel house on several other occasions (See: Boniface, Plastic Joseph, & a Big Dead Dog: A Love Story (Part I), and Undertaking an Undertaking: A Love Story (Part II). She suggested that if what I was after was the skeleton, I COULD make stock. I had already considered that option, horribly enough, but I currently cannot afford to sacrifice yet another soup pot to the category of "no longer usable for actual food preparation." Besides, I don't have a fan in my kitchen, and I have neighbors. So, dead rodent stew was not an option.

The deal was made: I can... board... Appie-dude. ..in Marcia's backyard - if I also help... install... "Musty," a frozen Water spaniel (ice spaniel?)...at the same time (as usual, proper names and a few verbs have been altered to protect reputations and legal status).

So, until the scheduled "play date" in "Tacoma" arrives, Appie-dude sits, taking up half my freezer and looking like a hairy loaf of dark rye, with feet. And nobody comes by for dinner anymore.

(FYI: Only one person at the hospital where I work had any inkling of what an aplodontia was, and almost all of them want to see it once I have it all prettied up. Only one of the doctors ran in terror and/or disgust out of said cafeteria with her fingers jammed into her ears and "nananananananana"-ing loudly. I won't even tell her when I take it for show and tell.)