In addition to the original Habitrail ™ setup, I also built Mickey a more secluded dungeon-like underground "basement," gluing my old, children's building blocks together to make the walls. I kept making the walls higher by adding more and more blocks, and eventually its volume exceeded that of the original plastic cage city on top of it. One of the plastic tubes led directly from the main cage down into the dungeon through a hole I drilled in the wooden roof. Mickey really seemed to appreciate it, spending most of his time there.

Unless I tapped on the roof to let him know I was there, he hardly came up at all.

That summer my Dad thoughtfully surprised me at sleep-away camp by showing up on visiting day with Mickey in the main section of his cage city in the back seat of his Volvo, which I appreciated tremendously. He seemed to enjoy running around on the baseball field, but my Dad was nervous the whole time we had Mickey out of the car. He knew that both of us would be out there all night with the Volvo's headlights on if he happened to get away from me.

When Mickey was about a year and a half-old, he started getting raw, open sores on his back and behind his head. The more he scratched them the worse they got, so my Dad eventually drove us to a local veterinarian. The vet laughed when he read the chart and saw that the patient was a mouse named "Mickey." He started putting on gloves so I told him that Mickey didn't bite,...

He left him in his cage to let me decide what to do with him which I appreciated. I wanted to preserve him in a bottle, like the specimens in the science lab in school. All we had at home was alcohol, so I filled a small bottle and put Mickey in, planning to replace the alcohol with formaldehyde as soon as I could get some from my science teacher. According to him, the alcohol would work just as well, so that's how Mickey stayed, preserved in that little bottle. Occasionally I'd hold the bottle up to look at him. Except for the light refraction by the alcohol, he looked just as he had in life, completely intact, except for the large scab on his back that he couldn't stop scratching.
Surprisingly, Mickey has stayed just like that, perfectly preserved ever since, in that sealed bottle of alcohol, right next his old cages and some other things we have boxed up in the basement. Once in a while I notice him and whenever I do I still think about how blurred the lines can be between the animals that we consider pests and those we consider pets.