Joey was a boy of around 11, who would eventually grow up to become a mad scientist. His childhood was filled will all sorts of experiments and adventures, and I'd like to tell you some of them.
Joey quickly captured the bird, which didn't resist very much, being stunned. Joey found out that one of its wings had been bruised, so it was unable to fly. Joey took it inside, and put it into a makeshift birdcage in his room, and got some bread to feed the bird, and made a little water dish out of an old tuna can.
It was winter, and Joey knew the bird was on its way south where the climate would be warmer, and it would be able to survive the winter. Joey thought of an interesting experiment.
First Joey put aluminum foil over his windows, and held it on with some double sided scotch tape. He fixed it so no light could leak in from the outside. Then he wired in another switch to the light in the hallway outside his door, so that from inside his room he could turn the hall light on and off. Then he drilled a small hole in his bedroom door so he could look out into the hallway and see if the light was turned on or not.
Next, Joey brought some of his parents' photographic lighting equipment into his room, and wired it all into a timer so it would be turned on 14 hours every day, and off for the other 10.
Over the next few weeks Joey nursed the bird back to health. In his room he always had the lights running off the timer. If the lights in his room were off, and he was inside, and he wanted to leave, he would always make sure the hall light was off before opening the door. And always before entering his room he would make sure the hall light was off. He didn't want to confuse the bird. Later he realized he could have simplified things by making an isolated box for the bird, but he didn't bother to do it because the bird had pretty much healed.
Each day Joey had readjusted the timer so that it would have 5 minutes more of light per day, and 5 minutes less of darkness. Joey wanted to reset the bird's internal timer so it would think it was approaching summer instead of winter.
Finally the bird was completely well again, and Joey brought it outside and set it free. Just as Joey had expected, the bird headed north, and quite speedily too.
Joey never saw the bird again. Later, off and on, he would think about the bird, and wonder if it had perished in the cold, as he had hoped it would. He wished there had been some way to find out what had become of his little bird friend.
After a while the female gave birth, and Joey was happy. There were 8 little baby mice. Over the next few weeks they grew up and reached full size. By this time Joey had figured out how to tell the males from females, and he separated them into separate cages. The thought of mice incest made him sick, so he was very careful not to let it happen.
Now, the idea of mice incest made Joey sick, but at the same time it was strangely...compelling. Frequently he would wonder what would be the product. What type of weird, mutated offspring would be the result? What if you kept doing it, generation after generation? What would happen? Joey would often wonder about these things, but he never actually allowed it to happen.
Instead, Joey was sort of frantic keeping the males and females separated, and yet since he wanted to have more and more mice under his control, he had to have more mating going on. So he would continue buying new male mice from his friend, which he would then mate with the females. As long as he kept the males separated, and only allowed new male mice from his friend's collection to mate with his females, he could be sure there wasn't any incest going on.
Over time he had many dozens of mice, and he was spending a larger and larger portion of his allowance on new cages and food for them. Cleaning up after them was getting to be tiresome also, and he had run out of experiments to perform. The experiments had all been trying to see what the mice could learn, if they could learn to travel down a tube and come out a certain hole, or if they could learn to look for food in a certain place. After a while he didn't want to know anything more about mice, and so he decided to set them free.
He had built a special frame on his floor that served as a pen, keeping the mice inside. It was a square made from 1 inch by 6 inch pieces of wood, and the square was 6 feet on a side. He had very carefully sanded the wood so the mice couldn't get a grip and climb over it. Once inside, the mice were unable to get away.
He then decided how he was going to set the mice free. It would require some special training, and he would have to make a gadget to assist. First, he took an old boot, and cut the sole away. Then inside the boot he glued some strips of wood sideways, and put little containers on the strips that would hold the mouse food. The strips were about 1 and 1/2 inches up from the bottom of the leather sides of the boot. Where a person's leg would go into the boot he put a cardboard tube that had once held some large posters. It was about 3 inches in diameter and 4 feet long. He glued the tube into the boot, and laced the boot up. He had cut some holes into the tongue of the boot so he could put in a tube to fill the food containers. Finally he took a pair of old jeans, cut off one of the legs, and fixed it so the leg came down around the boot. From the side it looked like a person's leg, wearing a boot.
Joey put several of his mice into the pen, put some food in the containers, and then held the boot down so the mice could climb up from underneath and get at the food. He began only feeding them this way, and after a short time the mice became accustomed to eating. They could climb up onto one of the slats inside the boot, and from there nibble at the grains in one of the containers.
Joey began feeding them more and more infrequently, so they were in general more hungry than they were accustomed to. And he would have larger groups of mice in the pen at the same time. And he would move the boot around in walking motions, slowly at first, then faster as the mice got used to it. They would race and climb over each other to get to where the boot would be coming down, so they could be underneath to climb up inside the boot and get the food. Joey was impressed at how good they got at it. Eventually all the mice were trained to run underneath the boot when it was coming down, even when they weren't hungry. But they'd move especially fast when they were hungry.
Joey fasted the mice for a day, and for a mouse this is a long time to go without food, so they were pretty frantic. Then he loaded them all up into grocery bag, males and females alike, put it into the basket on his bicycle, and rode over to the train station. Just before rush hour, when a train would be coming and dumping off a huge load of passengers, Joey arrived at the station. As the train was slowing to a stop, and the doors were opening, Joey put the bag on its side on the ground, and then upended it, pouring the mice out. Then he ran out as quickly as possible, got on his bike, and rode home. He had glanced back once, and had seen his mice all running frantically towards the group of people disembarking at the station.
Joey never found out what had happened to the mice, but he suspected they didn't suffer long. He figured the people getting off the train would be worse off.