Otherwise, he would just sit comfortably in my hand, holding whatever he was eating between his front paws, periodically rotating it for the best biting angle.

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...
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