Can you imagine waking up at 3:30am hearing a shrew’s piercing squeak!! You switch the table lamp on and peer through bleary eyes at the dark corners of the room trying to get your fuzzy mind into some working order. You spy the shrew under the study table and your thinking process sluggishly pulls into second gear. You rise cautiously to chase it out of the room. You manage to get it half way across the room when it seems to disappear into thin air!! You poke around in vain and finally give up and climb back into bed.
The light is switched off and you are feeling nice and drowsy when you hear several sharp squeaks from the direction of the table. Muttering to yourself you switch on the table lamp again and start to rise when you see a second shrew. You freeze with one leg on the bed and a book in your hand, poised, waiting for the next move. You decide to wait and see what happens, your environmental, photo-journalistic curiousity dominating all other emotions.
You briefly wonder whether the shrew has had babies which is why the commotion under the table or if a shrew invasion is imminent, as in the story The Pied Piper of Hamelin! Your thoughts are arrested by a strong pungent smell, (usually released by a frightened shrew or an aroused one) which permeates the clean night air. Then you see two shrews circle one another, nip each other and ‘wag’ their tails!! With each action the smell gets stronger and stronger. After about five minutes of this, one of the shrews (named Tom for convenience) takes a few steps towards the door, stops, looks back and wags his tail till the other one catches up. (The door has been deliberately left ajar by you). They cover three-fourths of the room when they disappear from sight behind a flowing curtain.
There seems to be a scuffle and sharp startling squeaks are emitted (lover’s tiff?). Then you see Tom dart out of the room (one down, one to go!). But there is no sign of the other one. You grab the nearest defense weapon (which happens to be a newspaper) and proceed cautiously towards the curtain. You shake it, nothing. You lift it, nothing.
‘Drat’, you think, (a night’s sleep gone wondering if the shrew will be invading your bed next) now what? You sit on the bed to ponder and plan your next move when near the door (which is now shut to keep Tom out) you see a long nose twitch inquisitively, the rest of the body is hidden behind the cabinet. You slither out of bed and slink your way to the door and open it a bit. You sigh a breath of relief as you see the shrew race out of the room.
Finally, at 4:15a.m. you sink into bed and your last thought before you drift off to sleep is that if you oversleep and are late for class how on earth do you tell the staid professor that you spent the night watching two shrews ‘make out’ in your room!!
