The two prints appeared almost identical, the photographs taken from only slightly different angles. Harmon looked at each, then opened the center drawer of his desk to pull out a large magnifying glass. Then he looked at the photos again, scanning each image slowly. A dead mouse in an old-fashioned wooden backbreaker mousetrap. The cheese was still on the trigger. The mouse had been caught by its tail and rump. In the snapshots, the creature’s snout was clearly visible.
“Not so much like an elephant’s trunk, Mrs. Beloit,” Harmon said after he had examined both photographs closely. “It looks more like an anteater’s snout.” If this is legitimate and not some bizarre hoax, he reminded himself. “That is its mouth, not its nose. I think. I can’t see nostrils. The resolution isn’t good enough.”
“Anteater?”
Harmon nodded. “Anteater.”
“I thought mice ate grain and cheese and things like that,” Mrs. Beloit said.
“Normally, yes. At least most of them, most of the time.” He continued to look at the two snapshots, going back and forth from one to the other. I hope this is for real, he thought.
“I’ll keep this animal, if you don’t mind,” Harmon said, finally setting the magnifying glass aside. “And the snapshots too, if I can. We’ll run tests in the lab. I will personally let you know what the results of those tests show. And if you should happen to catch another one of these, please—please—bring it to me immediately. Or just phone me and I’ll come over to pick it up.”
2.
The neighborhood had not lost its traditional name, Back-of-the-Yards, even though the stockyards had been gone since before the majority of the current residents had been born. The population was down by more than 30 percent over those years. For generations, the area had been part of Chicago’s Southside ghetto. The stockyards had gone, and most of the businesses around it. Back-of-the-Yards had struggled hard to come back from the depths, with some success. Crime and unemployment were both down, though still above city-wide levels. Many of the most dilapidated buildings had been razed. Some had been replaced. Other lots had been left vacant or turned into small parks.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon when Harmon Griffin parked the white university van in front of Mrs. Beloit’s town house, third from the left in a line of identical red-brick houses set back twenty feet from the curb. The half-block across the street had been landscaped. There was playground equipment at one end, trees at the other.
“That’s it.” Harmon pointed out the house to the two graduate students in the van with him. Six weeks had passed since Marietta Beloit had brought the dead mouse to his office.
“Are you sure it’s not a hoax?” Cathy Dixon asked from the front right seat. She kept her head moving, looking around. Her first instinct when Professor Griffin had asked her to help on this had been to refuse. The idea of spending time, maybe even at night, in that area had frightened her—and still did. She had hesitated for as long as she had dared before agreeing to participate. If there was anything new and important to be found in the Back-of-the-Yards, being part of the discovery would be a tremendous boost to her career when she needed it most, at the very beginning.
Griffin’s smile was thin. “As sure as I can be, Cathy. If it is a hoax, it took better technology than what I could muster to try to expose it.” DNA tests had been run on tissue samples taken from several parts of the carcass, proving that it was all one animal—including the detached snout. Comparisons of individual chromosomes had been run against every known species and subspecies of small rodent. As much of the skeleton as could be salvaged had been taken out and reassembled.
“Of course,” Griffin said, “the only way we’ll ever know for sure if it’s real is to catch more of them, preferably alive.”
“But what if it was a sport, one-of-a-kind,” Nick Peragamos, Harmon’s other graduate assistant, asked. He had jumped at the chance to take part, without ever thinking that there might be danger involved. The neighborhood he had grown up in had been almost as dangerous. He was a native Chicagoan. He was used to city conditions. Cathy was from down-state.
Griffin shrugged. “Then we’re pretty much out of luck. We’ve got two snapshots, tissue samples, and the DNA of a curiosity, good for maybe a letter or two in the journals, and certain to catch a lot of skeptical flak.”
Mrs. Beloit opened her front door while Griffin and his assistants were walking up the sidewalk. She pushed the screen door open as they got close. “Come on in,” she invited, moving to the side so they could get by her.
Harmon nodded to her and smiled. “Thanks.” They had spoken on the telephone several times during the past six weeks. At first, those calls had been Griffin phoning to ask if she had caught any more elephant-nosed mice, or seen any of them—and his updates on the laboratory work. Despite his early observation that the organ was more like an anteater’s snout, he still thought of it in terms of an elephant’s trunk. In his mind, at least, the name elephant-nosed mouse had stuck.
Over the past two weeks, Harmon had also taken considerable time to convince Mrs. Beloit to permit him to try to catch the new mice for himself—if there were any more to be caught.
It was dim inside the house. There were no lights on, so the only illumination in the living room came from the front window, filtered through beige sheers and open Venetian blinds.
“Have a seat,” Mrs. Beloit invited after Griffin had introduced his assistants. “Would you like some iced tea? I’ve got a pitcher in the refrigerator.”
“Thank you. That would be nice,” Harmon said. The others nodded.
They sat on the sofa, with the professor in the middle, while Mrs. Beloit went to the kitchen. Harmon opened the folder he had brought along and laid out several pages of DNA traces—those of the animal that Mrs. Beloit had caught and comparison samples from its nearest “known” relatives.
“That’s what shows that the mouse I caught was different?” Mrs. Beloit asked when she returned.
“Yes.” Harmon had to gather up the pages to leave room on the coffee table for the tray she was carrying.
Mrs. Beloit poured four glasses of iced tea, then sat in the rocking chair that was the only other seat in the room. She scooted the rocker closer.
“I’m afraid that goes way past anything I had in school,” she said, pointing at the top sheet.
Griffin took a sip of his tea, complimented Mrs. Beloit on it, then tapped the first paper in his stack. “That is your mouse, Mrs. Beloit,” he said. “It’s a chromosome by chromosome picture of its DNA.”
“Like a computer program,” she suggested.
“Exactly,” Harmon said. “We’ve studied many species of rodents. We have a good understanding of the combinations that are normally present in their DNA, and we know how most of those combinations express themselves in the animal. Most, not all. Even a mouse is an extremely complicated organism. Your mouse appears to be most closely related to the common house mouse, Mus musculus, but there are considerable differences.”
“You mean besides the nose, the snout?” Mrs. Beloit asked.
“Yes. If that were the only difference, the mouse would be in real trouble, probably unable to survive. For instance, the front legs are stronger, the shoulders bulkier. We assume that the muscles must be more highly developed through that section as well, though we couldn’t tell from the one you caught. It was too badly decomposed. The animal would need to be able to balance that snout. In the same vein, the tail is slightly longer and heavier than in the normal mouse—as far as we could tell from the remains we had to work with. And it appears that there are differences to the digestive tract, suggesting that its dietary requirements are different—which is what I was aiming at when I compared the snout to that of the anteater.”