Ferret chase at midnight

by Patricia
(Texas)

My husband and I live in an apartment and had two ferrets both a little under a year old. We ferret proofed before letting them loose but we made a costly mistake. There was an unused dryer vent that led directly to the outside. When we looked inside it, it was blocked by a piece of plastic. Unknown to us, if you pushed on the plastic hard enough, the plastic swung up (probably to make way for the dryer hose) and was a great tunnel to the outside. We had pushed on it and it seemed to hold. We probably didn’t push hard enough.

It was near ten o’clock at night when we realized that we hadn’t heard Ryo and Fuufo (our ferrets) playing. we started to look for them. An hour later, we still hadn’t found them. That was when I got really panicky and said, we have to look for them outside.

My roommate, opened the front door and screamed “They are outside!” We all went running, four people, and tried to grab our pets. Ryo, was underneath a car, and we were able to get him fairly early. Foofu, however, we could not find. We went back to the apartment and snatched up flashlights and split up, searching. maybe six feet away from the back of our apartment is an extremely busy intersection in addition to the number of stray cats and dogs that roamed the place. We were panicky imagining all kinds of horrors.

We alerted the apartment employees, who reported that some people though they saw a huge rat near the pool. A ferret in the dark can look like a huge rat. We searched the pool, praying not to find a floating ferret on its surface. Fuufo was not there. We keep going well until one in the morning and still no sign of her. We got up at six the next morning, having had little to no sleep from worry, and searched again. We found ferret tracks near another apartment building but no Fuufo. I sent my husband back at the apartment as I looked underneath the building in the weak morning light.

He took a long time. I went back to apartment disheartened and there he was holding a healthy, but dirty Fuufo. I cried, I was so relieved. Turns out she fell asleep inside our front gate, behind the air conditioning unit!

Lesson learned. Check, check, and double check!