Creek Running North

Photo courtesy Four Corners Veterinary Hospital, Harley’s primary care physicians

I put Harley outside today. I stayed home with an earache and decided to get a few things done, chief among them cleaning the animal cages. Harley goes outside on the lawn when his cage gets cleaned, the top of his cage over him for food, water, and shelter, while the tray that holds his litter gets washed and aired out. He loves to eat the grass, to snooze under his little shelf, to sniff the air. He asks so little from us.

And we give him so little, really. A few skritches now and then, cuddling on a toweled lap from time to time. He is self-sufficient. He’s been the middle kid since Thistle showed up, and we’ve had to remind ourselves to give him the love he needs. Guinea pigs vocalize, and he does so when he really needs something, and we always respond. Still, I shudder to think of the number of times I’ve walked past his cage to pet the rabbit. One doesn’t get a treat without the other getting one, so there’s no neglect involved. Except the emotional kind. You’d think, by now, I would know better about the emotional kind.

Two weeks ago he stopped eating, again. His teeth have been a problem for the last four years. He’s been to the vet certainly a dozen times to get his teeth filed down. The back ones would grow at odd angles, keeping him from closing his mouth; this prevented him from using his front teeth properly, and they’d grow long and useless. Two hours of surgery and three or four hundred dollars later, he would be back, groggily, on his feet, greedily sucking Critical Care rodent formula out of a syringe.

Two weeks ago the vet and I rolled our eyes at each other. Six years old! Geriatric for a guinea pig. And one surgery after another, with only a few weeks of good eating between them. Becky and I muttered darkly that Harley would outlive Zeke, and Thistle, and probably me. He would recover from the surgery and spend his days eating: it’s all he’s ever wanted to do. If that eating took place in a lap, a syringe of good food stuck in his face, and then a nap flopped over in the crease between my thighs, so much the better.

He loves being put on the lawn. This morning when I took his cage out there, he fair leapt onto the grass and started eating. The summer has not been kind to the lawn, and there are dead patches of it all over. In the shade of the Granny Smith apple tree, he went to work on the dead grass. I hosed his cage out, filled it with an inch of water to soak.

Inside, I tackled the closet in the office. Harley’s cage usually blocks the closet door, so I took the opportunity to clean in there. Bags of computer cables, telephone wires, old phone handsets, documentation for software that last ran on Apple’s System 6.5, SCSI cables and the power cord to my old Syquest Drive: all went away. Thousands of dollars spent on things now dead, and what can you do? Shrug it off, I guess. I sorted out the items I might conceivably use with current equipment and set the rest out for donations and discard. The closet mostly empty, I mopped the floor, and then had an idea. There is a bale of pet-food-related items in the middle of the room, and I’d cleared enough room in the closet to hold it with room to spare, and if I found another place for Harley’s cage to live it would work fine. He could stay across the room at the base of the bookshelves, I supposed.

An hour or so later I found a cloud of fruitflies on the compost bowl. I took it out and dumped it. On the way back in, I noticed the sun had moved and Harley’s cage was no longer in the shade. He does have the shelf in there to hide under, but I checked on him anyway.

Asleep.

Or not. there was something odd about his pose. I nudged him. He didn’t respond. And then he did, a feeble squeaking noise like when he dreams. That was reassuring. Still, I decided to pick him up. It was pretty warm, 90-95 degrees probably, and though he’d enjoyed days in similar weather it just seemed somehow…

He was limp when I picked him up. No muscle control at all. Breathing, rapid and shallow but breathing, and there was some hint of consciousness in his eyes. Fuck, I said to everyone and no one, and hurried him in to the kitchen. I put him in the stainless steel sink, pulled the hose attachment out, felt the water to make sure it was somewhere between tepid and cold, and showered him down.

He woke up a little more at that. “Come on, Harley,” I said. “We were joking. We don’t want you to go yet.” He started squeaking, that series of little whimpers that means happy guinea pig, but the rhythm wrong: one per breath, trying to talk to me. More water, and I dribbled a drop or two onto his lips. He swallowed.

It seemed like I’d bought some time: he was more responsive. A quick web search on “guinea pigs” and “heatstroke” confirmed my hunch. I set up a little fan in the office, laid him on a towel in front of it, lay there talking to him. He started to come around, getting some movement back in his front legs, kicking a little with his back legs. The vet page linked just above says that once cooled, heatstroked guinea pigs start to act as if nothing had happened. I watched for recovery. Once he stabilized, I could make the half-hour run to the vet to get him looked at and rehydrated.

Another run to the sink, and he really seemed on the mend. I held him in front of the fan, his butt in one hand and shoulders on the other, wet belly exposed to the fan. He started pumping his front feet like a pup at his mother’s teat, kneading the air. His rear toes flexed, relaxed, flexed again. His eyes moved around, followed my face when I moved him. And then, suddenly, he held his head up without my help, looked right at me. Thank god, Harley, thank god! And I set him down on the towel, went and got something to eat real quick before taking him to the emergency vet. I brought the food back into the office so that I could watch him while I ate. He was on his side, breathing more regularly, flexing his hind legs.

I took my empty bowl back into the kitchen, a trip of ten seconds. He was dead when I came back.

We buried him beneath his favorite spot on the lawn just now, a hole barely larger than the width of my spade. I held him, apologized, laid him on his side and covered him with the earth he fed these last years. Becky thinks I’m being too hard on myself. He’s spent whole days outdoors in summer heat and protested being brought in at night, she reminds me. It’s as likely he had a regular stroke as heatstroke, she says. If not for my noticing within hours when he was off his feed, he would have died in agony on probably ten separate occasions. And this is an end far better than the wasting starvation we had feared he faced: he died fat and full of food, and was healthy until the morning he died. After months and months of being left alone all day, he died when I was there to croon to him, to kiss him as he departed and to make his last hour more comfortable. He knew I was there at the end. He knew I was with him.

She may have a point.

Still. I hate myself right now. I took him on six years ago, accepted the responsibility of caring for him, and on his last day I failed to meet it. I am so sorry, little pig. Rest well.