rodent sighting

This is an antidote to Wordless Wednesday--Wordy Wednesday? Thesaurus Thursday?--because there was no time to reach for the camera, even UNsafely.

I was driving to work, and I was almost thirty miles from home, stopped at a traffic light, when something brown moving across the windshield drew my eye down from the red light. Leaves don't move like that, I thought, a split second before recognizing it as something very like a field mouse. It scrambled across the windshield from one side to the other, and climbed around on the windshield wipers, just as the light turned green before I could grab the iPod out of my purse on the seat beside me. As soon as the car moved, it darted back into the engine compartment.

Where, I have no doubt, it had been engaged in storing acorns inside the hollow spaces in the hood, and elsewhere, when I left the house. (I hear them rattling and rolling when I turn corners sharply.) I hope it left the car in the parking lot at work. I hope it didn't chew on anything during its terrifying journey. Two years ago something larger than a mouse chewed a hole in the air-intake hose in this very engine. That, at least, was not dangerous.