Death of a Rat

Annabel was dead all right.

With hindsight, I think she was probably dead far earlier on in the evening than I realised, and the others were simply shoving her body around inside the bedchamber as I suspected; but since I have to dismantle the entire 'igloo' to get into it, I really didn't want to haul a dying rat out of her last refuge...

I think the others were a bit traumatised, as it was their odd, nervous behaviour that first made me suspicious, and they didn't seem to want to go back into the bedchamber the next day but spent the night in their hammock and then in the box on the ground floor of the cage. But they seem to have forgotten now. And after all, Annabel never really interacted with them — it was always a matter of establishing tolerance rather than building up a relationship.

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I went for a long walk on Monday (well, about two and a half hours, after which it got dark) and got rather muddy. The pain in my knee (which was making it very difficult to cycle) seems to have gone, thank goodness. Perhaps with the coming of spring things will start to clear up a bit.