Our hamster's name is Baby. She has a spacious cage in the bedroom we use as an office. It has a nice place to nest on top with a latching door we can use to abduct her for our entertainment. You have to be quiet and a little quick because there's a tube running to the main cage, and there's just no way to get her out of that tube.
Sometimes we leave the lid unlatched. It's quieter that way, and she shows no interest in running. Well, not until recently.
I went to have a look at her, and she was not in her cage. I looked and looked (because it's easy for her to be there but not in line of sight), but the cage was empty. No corpse, no door hanging open, just a prison with no prisoner.
I went to get a flashlight. My wife was not optimistic. If I find Baby at all, she said, she'll be dead when I do.
There might be something she could eat laying around in there (her bag of food is right next to the cage, for instance), but there's nothing to drink outside the cage. I'd just seen her a night or two before, however, so I thought there was still a chance of finding her live and hiding, not yet dehydrated or starved.
Flashlight in hand, I started looking in places I used to see mice. I was surprised to find her in only a few minutes, sitting in the closet making a new nest. She hadn't gotten very far.
When I went to pick her up, she ran under something, but I was so happy to have found her at all that I didn't mind. I got some food, left it where she and I could both see it, and she came out for it shortly. I scooped her up, and now she's back to being a pet rather than a fugitive.
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