FOLIO
One long-ago summer morning, a little red-haired girl awoke to a commotion outside. The sun was just peeking through the trees over the mountaintop when, pajama-clad, she padded barefoot into the yard to see what caused their felonious felines to disturb her slumber.
Upon her approach, the cats dropped the small fleshy ball they’d been fighting over and retreated several yards away to glower and lick. At first the girl thought it was a fetal mouse or a rabbit, so it came as a surprise when her small searching hands found wings in the dewy grass.
It was a bat, a baby little brown bat, mostly hairless, eyes closed, like a teacup pterodactyl taking a nap. It was alive, warm to the touch, and moving. She cupped it gently to her chest, chiding the cats watching with vague disappointment at having lost their breakfast treat.
The girl’s excitement was palpable as she examined the rescuee; her parents would never let them keep a wild animal that could survive on its own, but her new best friend had been roughed up pretty good by the cats — would a slightly torn wing sufficiently handicap a bat so that she could keep it? She hoped more than anything that it would be so.
Then the creature scampered up her pajama shirt and latched onto the hollow of her neck where it hung like some sort of creepy Appalachian adornment.
Just like that, the friendship between girl and bat was over.
It was technically too early to wake her parents on a Saturday, when cartoons and cereal kept her and her sister occupied until round about noon. But a bat hanging by its teeth from a little girl’s neck seemed a fitting exception to that rule, so, bravely trying not to cry, she roused the grownups.
Groggy irritation quickly became slightly bemused concern as the adults mulled over how to address the myotis lucifugus dangling from their daughter’s slim white throat.
Her stepfather determined that it wasn’t trying to hurt her or suck her blood; it was hanging onto her as it would its own mother. Her mother worriedly spoke of rabies. The little girl listened raptly, concerned that a trip to the hospital was in the cards.
Her stepfather issued their verdict: He would yank the bat off her neck.
“Nooo,” the girl wailed, “don’t hurt it!”
Sympathy that had been lost when the small hairless beast climbed her forefront and bit down was regained when her parents said it was treating her as it would its own mother.
“It won’t get hurt, I promise,” her stepfather lied. How could he know what hurts baby bats?
The little girl was doubtful, but what could she do? She held her breath and the screen door as her stepfather gave the small creature one sure tug with a thick brown fist and off it came.
Miracle of miracles, the bat was still alive and her young neck bore just the faintest abrasion where the creature had hung.
The little girl was elated. “Can we keep it?”
Her parents exchanged a look and her stepfather explained that the bat would have to be tested for rabies.
“If it doesn’t have rabies, can we keep it?”
This time the look they exchanged was grave. She hadn’t cried, not once, not through any of it, but when they told her that in order to be tested for rabies, the bat would have to be decapitated, tears ran a bitter river down her cheeks. Not even their explanation that rabies could end her young life was any comfort.
She cursed herself for picking up the sweet little creature and holding it close. If only she had held it out, far and away where it could not climb nor hang by its teeth!
Then she hit upon a plan. “If it doesn’t have rabies and the cats get another one” — the adults had previously said that this probably was the first of many mornings that would begin with separating cat from bat — “can we keep it?” They hesitated, and she rushed on, “But only if it can’t survive in the wild.”
She had them there. She knew it. They knew it, too. It was a deal.
I named him Count. You should’ve seen the look on my mother’s face when, mere days after the rabies test came back negative, she woke to find me triumphantly holding my new best friend: a baby bat, hairier and slightly bigger than the one who had been lost to youthful indiscretion and a laboratory, with a hopelessly tattered wing that meant he would never, ever fly. For two solid days, no one would go in the laundry room where they made me stow him, no one but me. I tended to my patient with the tenderness of a Florence Nightingale, tenderly using an eyedropper to feed him powdered milk I carefully mixed with water and warmed, noon and night, like he was a puppy.
My mother was the first he won over. By the time he was big enough that he could have flown if his wing hadn’t been tattered, Count was a favored family pet.
He lived on one of the counters in the kitchen of our country home, where he slept upside down inside his paper towel roll boudoir during the day. The paper towels also, incidentally, served as his toilet; bats don’t seem to mind shitting where they sleep.
Once evening fell, Count would emerge from his toilet/house and regale us with furry brown antics. A favorite was jumping off the counter and swooping – as best he could with that broken wing – down onto whoever happened to walk by, then scaling them like the baby bat before him had climbed my small chest. Oh, the way guests would scream!
Sometimes he’d hang in my sister’s thick, dark hair. She was getting to the age when cartoons and pets were starting to play second fiddle to Teen Magazine and gabbing on the phone with her friends, but Count could bring out that childish wonder once in a while. Other times, he’d ride around on my shoulder while I whispered all my girlhood secrets into his fuzzy little ears.
Bats are supposed to eat mostly insects and Count certainly ingested his fair share in that creaky old farmhouse. But he also loved cheese doodles. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a little brown bat happily crunching on a puffed cheese curl a quarter his size. Cherry tomatoes were another favored snack. He’d sink his teeth in, wrap his wings around the tomato and roll all over the counter like a tiny, winged wrestler.
I loved him as fervently as a little girl can love a small furry creature.
Count was not long for this world and I don’t even quite recall when he died, but a piece of my heart will always belong to the fuzzy little fanged thing that captured the imagination of a lonely little girl with whom he shared a passion for cheese doodles and cherry tomatoes.
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