By Peyton Bortner
My mom used to call me Ace Ventura growing up because we kept a lot of pets in the house that I would help care for. When I was in kindergarten, we had a gecko, a bearded dragon, two cats, and eleven ferrets. Yes, eleven. My mom, my stepdad Sam, and I lived near a small family owned pet shop. That makes the place sound nice, saying it was “family owned,” but it was actually disgusting. It was always dim and the carpets were black, so there was a mischievous air about it always. They sold ferrets out of a tiny twenty gallon tank— if the owners were generous enough to put them in there instead of hamster cages— so Sam decided we needed to rescue them. Of course, giving a pet store
money for an animal means they’re going to use it to buy a replacement, so really we were just funding their ferret farm. After buying eleven, Sam and Mom realized maybe it was time to stop. So, we ended up with the gang:
- Richard Parker
- Reptar
- Madame Mim
- Madame Hooch
- Spartacus
- Charlie
- Maggie
- Rico
- P-Funk
- Gosling
- Nermal
They stayed in a cage that took up roughly half of one of my bedroom walls in width and stood at maybe five feet tall. To little me, it was a massive beast of wires and tubes. My favorite activity was returning home from school, dropping my bag, and unlatching the cage door. A flood of ferrets would pour out over my feet as they hopped and skipped across the carpet. I had my favorites— Madame Mim, Reptar, and Richard Parker— and the one I stayed away from— P-Funk.
It’s not that P-Funk was an asshole. But, he was an asshole. He had a habit of biting my calves, latching onto them hard enough that they would bleed. My poor mom would have to shove her fingers in his mouth and pry his jaw open to release me as my wailing echoed off of the walls. One day, I thought I beat him. He climbed onto my bed where I was sitting, so I hopped off and stepped back. He watched me from the foot of the bed and I laughed with my hands on my hips, thinking he couldn’t get me from a couple feet away. I forgot how limber ferrets were. He wiggled his slinky body and leapt, clawing onto my shirt and climbing it like Satan himself crawling out of the depths of hell— much like how P-Funk was born, probably.
On the other hand, Madame Mim, Reptar, and Richard Parker were the best ferrets to exist. Richard Parker was the first ferret my family bought. He had a white coat tinged with yellow at the ends and bright red eyes; an albino. He could’ve been called a beautiful— no, a glorious ferret— if he wasn’t also the chunkiest clutz to live. He had a habit of rolling off of the platforms in the cage and just falling. He wouldn’t even try to catch himself. We thought something was wrong with him, but when we took him to the exotic vet they said that was just the way he was. Reptar was our second ferret and instantly his best friend. She was spritely, half his size, and loved to chew on his ears while he slept.
Finally, there was Madame Mim. She was my girl. She was long and white like Richard, but her eyes were plain black. What she lacked in his eccentricity, she made up for in the grace and poise lost on him. She was slender and liked to slither under my blankets while I was laying on the bed. Whenever she would crash into my body, I would feel her trying to nibble me through the blanket and I would screech in laughter. I don’t
think it would be an exaggeration to say she was my first best friend. We played together, occasionally napped together. We were even roommates.
She was also the first one to die in the pack. I was at my dad’s house for the weekend— you know, how split households go— when she slithered somewhere she couldn’t be reached. Maybe she was chilly— after all, my stepdad was a man who yearned for the winter. Maybe she felt the warmth emanating from it and, once nestled in, fell asleep comfortably like someone curled under a heated blanket. That’s how I like to see it anyway. But the truth of the matter is, she slinked her way into the heater. When my mom couldn’t find her anywhere after corralling the others back into the cage, she knew something was wrong.
When I came home from my dad’s and released the ferrets, I looked everywhere for her. I kept thinking maybe she was blending into the mass of browns, whites, and caramels all over the carpet. My mom entered the room and I asked her if she could help me find her.
“Kiddo, I need to talk to you about Madame Mim,” she started. I looked up at her and I remember her lip trembling before she spoke. When I first told her about this conversation, she denied it happened. The second time I told her, she shrugged it off and said “whoops!” But I will always remember what came out of her mouth next.
“Madame Mim is taking a car ride with God and she won’t be back.”
I was so angry at whoever this “God” person was. How dare he take Madame Mim without telling me first. I decided I would give him a piece of my mind if I found him. So, every day for the next two years, I would sit in the backseat and look into the windows of other people’s cars. My hope was that I would see her noodling about in the passenger’s seat, roll my window down, and yell at God to pull over. It was a foolproof plan.
That is, until my teacher told me who God was after I recited this story, and grew bewildered as I started bawling my eyes out in class. I don’t think it was her place to teach me this; it probably would have been better if she just called my mom and told her what I said. I didn’t know much about death except for what Tim Burton described it as in
“The Corpse Bride.” Death was something fun, a natural state full of color and music. I would have loved to imagine her with her nearly boneless looking body whipping around in dance. But my teacher was knowledgeable, she knew more than anyone else— that’s why she was a teacher. If she says that my dead ferret went to a place called Heaven in the sky, then she probably did. It hurt. It hurt so bad to hear that because it went against what I believed. Madame Mim wasn’t dancing. She was farther away from me than I had thought. It felt like someone was standing a few feet away, dangling her in front of me and yanking her up whenever I tried to reach for her. Why couldn’t I have her? It wasn’t fair.
Over time, more of our ferrets passed or we rehomed them, since having ten ferrets was still pretty excessive. Poetically, Richard Parker and Reptar were our last two ferrets to remain/survive. When my mom, Sam, and I moved into my mommom and poppop’s, the ferrets moved into the shed out back. Looking back on that, I realize how awful that is. They were still in the giant cage– I don’t know how it managed to squeeze into that shed but it did– but it wasn’t like there were any accommodations made for them. The shed grew cold along with the weather, so Mom and Sam would give them heated pads throughout the cage. When it was hot in the summer, they got to run around the backyard and lick ice cubes. It was enough to keep them going, but by no means was it a good set up.
As they would gallop through the grass chasing each other, I would follow suit.
They would look back at me following them, twitching and jumping with their mouths open as ferrets do. I think my mommom and poppop’s backyard was a paradise to them. It was large, even for a human. They have a deck my dad built for them many years ago that Richard and Reptar would sometimes sneak under. We’d spend hours trying to coax them back out. Aside from the deck, the yard is wide open with a few trees strewn throughout that have those decals that make it look like they have faces. Mommom and Poppop bought them because they knew I’d find it funny. The yard is outlined in mulch with bushes of various kinds, with my favorite being the hydrangeas.
Richard and Reptar’s favorite part of the yard was the very back corner, behind
the flowers and trees. They would lead me into the shade, to the lumpy mounds of dirt. They would roll around in it and it would look like they were throwing dirt at each other. One day, when they led me back here, my mom followed and looked out on the dirt wistfully.
”This is our pet cemetery,” she said. “All of my pets growing up have been buried
here. Eventually, when our pets go, they’ll be buried here too.”
I watched their merriment. They had no idea what slept below, nor that they
would find rest there too. What looked like throwing dirt turned into an image of them digging their own graves. How long would I have left with them? Why did my ferrets have to keep leaving me? I wanted it to stop.
Stop leaving me behind.
That’s not how this works though, is it? Reptar’s age got to her eventually and her tiny body was frail. She passed peacefully in her sleep, leaving Richard Parker behind too. From there, he started to decline as well.
Every day, he would look for her. Whenever we would open the cage door, he
would look all around the cage before coming to us, slower than before— solemn. In the backyard, he had fun running around with me, but he ran under the deck more and more, sooner and sooner. Eventually, it got to the point where he would just march right to the deck and hide. He got sick. He got lonelier. I did too, watching him get like this. I realized I was going to lose another friend.
I saw him die. My mom and I were together, sitting on top of the deck. Our legs
were criss-crossed as we sat across from one another, and she cradled Richard Parker in her arms. He was swaddled in a bleach-stained towel and, though these were his final moments, he looked like a newborn baby. I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I focused on my mom. She was always so put together around me. I hadn’t learned at that time yet that my mom was a human being too, learning things along the way like me. She was a powerful presence; she knew all of the answers. She consoled me while I cried. No one told me what to do when the roles were reversed.
She wore a white puffy coat with red stripes down the sleeves, a shade matching
her nose and cheeks pinched with the bitter air and sadness. Her dark hair was pulled up in a messy bun, with stray pieces waving out of her hairline and splaying across her forehead. I remember the way her eyes looked. She has the most brilliant blue eyes. The blue was piercing against the reddened whites of her eyes. But then, as Richard Parker exhaled one last time, I watched as her eyes squeezed shut and tears glistened down her cheeks.
I scooted forward on my knees, placed my hands on her shoulders, and rested my head on my knuckles in an odd quarter hug. My tears were warm against the skin and her heaving breath drew the knuckles further into my eyebrows like a slew of miniature punches. It didn’t matter, though. I could take a few punches if it meant my mom would feel less lonely. I was tired of how much loneliness a death could render.
I’m still called Ace Ventura because I still have a plethora of pets. You’d think
after all of that, I would become less of a pet person. But I still have six cats, another bearded dragon, a dog, and a hamster. I will simply never get a ferret again. I am tempted, time and time again, whenever my fiance and I go to Petco. The way they tumble over one another reminds me of Richard Parker and Reptar, Madame Mim and Madame Hooch, Maggie and Rico. But then I remember how much work they are and how limited I am in my free time.
I will always be grateful to my ferrets for being my friends, though. They also
taught me the most complex thing about this life: that we all die. When you’re a kid, everything seems like it will last forever. I thought I would spend the rest of my life, no matter how old I was, taking care of those ferrets and living the way I did. They made me realize that you don’t just die at the end of your life, but every day. I’m not the same person who thought God was some guy that liked to steal ferrets; I don’t even know if I believe in God. I’m not the same person I was before Richard Parker died and I had to comfort my mom; I know my mom is human too and needs my comfort just as much as I need hers. I’m not even the same person I was last week. I’ve died and been reborn again and again. With every rebirth, I can feel Madame Mim tugging on my ankles, leading me to my next phase.