A SHORT HISTORY OF MICE

    by Robert Horvitz

Originally published in BIG DEAL 3, a New York literary magazine
edited by Barbara Baracks, pages 118-120 (spring 1975).

Reprinted in CoEVOLUTION QUARTERLY 10 (summer 1976), pages 100-
102, under the title "Some Mice."

Reprinted again in NEWS THAT STAYED NEWS:  TEN YEARS OF
CoEVOLUTION QUARTERLY, edited by Art Kleiner and Stewart Brand
(ISBN 0-86547-201-7, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1986,
pp. 51-55)

--------------------------------------------------------------

When our lease on the beach house was up, we decided to divide
the mouse colony:  anyone could take some mice with him when he
left, and any left over would be let go in the field next door.
I picked two, the extremes of the litter.  One was the bully, a
handsome and aggressive mouse named Brown.  The other was the
runt.  I named him God.  God was black and white, quite small
and high-strung.  He was always hunched over in fear of being
attacked, as indeed he had been under attack by other mice all
his life, simply because he was the smallest.

In their new cage, Brown immediately made it clear to God that
he would be allowed to live only so long as he obeyed Brown's
wishes.  He cornered God and nipped at his balls and bit him on
the base of his spine until all the hair there was gone.  With
no other mice around, and food appearing effortlessly, Brown
had nothing else to do but manage God's existence.  He laid
down an impossible code of behavior and punished all infractions
severely.  God got very thin because Brown punished him for
eating;  his legs got stiff because Brown wouldn't let him run
on their treadmill.

After a couple of weeks I bought two females at a pet store,
hoping their presence would lessen the tension between the two
males.  One female died mysteriously her first night in the
cage.  Both God and Brown were fascinated with the one who
survived, but Brown became even more oppressive, attacking
God whenever she was nearby.  The Lady was a "waltzing
mouse," a breed with a peculiar waddling walk.  While Brown
was away at the food dish, God would sneak out from his
corner to smell The Lady's vagina, but she would usually
squeal and Brown would come rushing over.  God got so he could
make a quick trip out and back before either of the others
knew what had happened.  Brown's suspicions were aroused by
finding The Lady's scent on God's whiskers and he began
punishing God constantly, just in case he had done something
he wasn't supposed to, or in case he might have been
considering it.

Under this redoubled pressure, God could not get to the food
dish at all.  After a week of harassment and starvation, I
intervened by slipping food directly to him through the wire
mesh wall of the cage.  He was afraid at first to accept
anything because he knew that Brown would smell it on his
breath and punish him.  But after a day or so he gave in to
temptation.

This backfired.  Brown seemed to get the idea that God had
found a way of conjuring up food;  thereafter he never left
God's side, hoping to either catch him in the act of making
food or, better, get the food for himself.

The Lady had not lessened the tension between the males.
The only other thing I could think of was to isolate Brown
for a few days to allow God to recuperate from his life of
routine torture.  I lured Brown into a wire mesh tunnel with
peanut butter and then barricaded the tunnel.

God noticed Brown's absence right away.  He stayed in his
corner the whole first day, afraid it was a trap.  He smelled
the air at intervals, but wouldn't move.  The second day, he
moved around the cage cautiously, stopping to check
everything that smelled of Brown and jumping at unexpected
sounds.  He ate a little at the food dish.  Then he
discovered Brown behind the barricade and ran back to his
corner.  The third day, he went back to the barricade and
gnawed at it at length.  (I could never figure out if he was
trying to liberate Brown or convince himself that he was safe
from him.)  God spent the rest of the night trying to mount
The Lady.  He had never had sex before so he was quite a
comical lover.  On the fourth day, God was noticeably more
relaxed.  His new self-confidence showed in the way he let
his balls hang out under his tail.  The social standing of a
male mouse can be gauged by how prominently he displays his
testicles:  a dominant male wears them proudly, extended;
one who is dominated wears his close in against his belly.
God groomed himself leisurely while sitting at the "control
point" in the center of the tunnel system - which had
previously been reserved for Brown - and gained weight
quickly as he was free to eat for the first time in over a
month.

After four days, I thought their former pattern of supremacy
and submission had been broken and they could begin anew as
equals.  But as soon as I removed the barricade and let
Brown re-enter the main chamber, they began to fight.  They
were a surprisingly even match and they fought until both
were exhausted.  After a pause, the fight resumed and God
was clearly in charge.  He went for the base of Brown's
spine, sometimes biting his tail, and they fought until
exhausted again.  At the end of this round, Brown was either
paralyzed or in such pain that he could not move his hind
legs.  God went back to his corner and the fighting ended.
There was hardly any blood on either of them.  Brown managed
to pull himself back into the tunnel he had been sequestered
in earlier and I replaced the barricade to protect him from
further attacks.

Brown's rear legs were paralyzed, his penis had been bitten
off, and one eye had been punctured.  Two days after the
fight, I saw him struggling to pull himself up to the edge
of the water can.  The fur on his belly, which had always
been brown, was turning dull gray.  He fell over on his side
and could not get up.  As I watched, he went into
convulsions, gasped silently, relaxed, and died.  I buried
him outside.

It was peaceful in the cage until two weeks after Brown's
death, when The Lady gave birth to six rosy, hairless babies.
God had never seen babies and had no idea what they were or
what to do about them.  He went into a state of panic,
hopping around the cage, bumping into walls, and twitching
like a squirrel.  I later saw him cowering at the end of a
dead-end tunnel that was only used for urination.  No mouse
willingly stays in the shit hole for very long, but God
stayed there for three days.  Eventually, I coaxed him out
with food and he went back to The Lady and her brood.

Soon after The Lady's first litter was born, I was given a
year-old albino female who had not had any contact with
other mice since earliest childhood.  Bess's whole world
consisted of herself, her food, and her shoebox full of
nesting material which she sorted through and rearranged
every day.  She was fat and splendidly spoiled by solitude.

God was as bewildered by her arrival in the cage as Bess
was to find herself there.  The Lady left her brood to come
down to the main chamber to meet her.  After a few minutes
of cautious smelling and mutual uncertainty, Bess had had
enough of this new weirdness.  She attacked The Lady.  She
was twice the size of The Lady, but very flabby and
unskilled at fighting.  The Lady fought back and chased her
into a hole.

The fighting between the two females continued sporadically
for weeks, but Bess had time between fights to learn her
way around the main chamber.  As she had no experience with
complicated spaces and was too heavy to climb around the
wire mesh walls, she was unable to find the entrances to
the tunnels where God and The Lady lived.  After learning
where the food was and when it was safe to roam around, she
began to construct an elaborate nest along the lines of her
former one.

God began spending most of his time with Bess.  His own
nest was overrun with infants who kicked and squealed all
day, competing for the best suckling positions, and when The
Lady occasionally went downstairs to eat, he was besieged by
pups who refused to believe he had no teats.  So he moved
out.  The Lady was hurt and jealous:  when God returned to
visit her with Bess's smell on his fur, she would squeak
bitterly and push him away.

Bess was only too happy to have God stay with her.  He had
earned her endless gratitude by introducing her to sex.
Living alone she had never suspected that anything like
sex existed.  She had missed out on the rapes and adolescent
gang-bangs that soured most females on sex, and, of all the
mice I came to know, Bess was the only one who relished it.
The others merely tolerated it.  God and Bess had
intercourse several times a night and even that was not
enough to satisfy her.

It took Bess a month to find the tunnel that went to the
shit hole, as it was almost a foot above the floor of the
main chamber.  A week later she found the tunnel that went
to The Lady's nest.  As she entered the nest tunnel, The
Lady caught her scent.  They confronted each other near the
entrance.  Bess had the extreme stupidity to attack.  I
tried to separate them with a screwdriver but was
unsuccessful.  Bess could not find her way out to safety
and was thus trapped deep within the territory of her rival.
By the time I managed to prod her along the pathway to the
main chamber, she was covered with blood and shaking with
fear and anger.  This same scene occurred a few days later
and, to my knowledge, that was the last time The Lady and
Bess fought.  Thereafter, they left each other alone.  Bess
got pregnant and, shortly after God was killed by one of
The Lady's sons (whose father had been Brown), she gave
birth to seven babies of her own and discovered the joys of
motherhood.

-----------------------------------------------------------