Over the years, we've had our share of critters sharing the house with us - mice, rats, red squirrels, all in the walls.  Yesterday was a first when we finally saw what had been sharing our home with us for months - a least weasel. 

Since January there have been no mice in the house, before that at least one every night was found in the kitchen drawer, in the peanut butter filled trap.  Then no mice.  No mice droppings in our utensils, or on the counters.  We wondered why, and last month found out when we heard scratching noises in the living room wall.  The noise was loud, too loud for a mouse, and then last week Sabra and I were having Happy Hour in the living room, when we heard strange, almost human voices, trilling, fast and high, like Alvin and the Chipmunks.  The dog jumped off the chair he was sharing with Sabra, went to the wall.  "What the hell was that?" we asked each other.  Then Timmy saw what he thought was a ferret on the deck.  Then yesterday all hell broke out.

The noises in the wall were terrible, screeches and that weird sound, so bad I decided to go outside and weed the driveway (yes, the driveway.)  I was weeding when this small, dark sleek and almost beautiful creature ran by me and into the shed.  "Timmy," I screamed,"I saw it, I saw what is living in our walls." And then he saw it too, with a baby in the mother's mouth, she dropped it into a chipmunk hole near the shed.  That was it.  It was moving time and all that noise was the mother taking the babies, one at a time, out of the dark walls, and into the daylight.  So we looked up least weasel on the internet, and there it was, just like the picture.  A beautiful creature, the smallest of the weasel family. I searched through the articles, looking for "weasels living in the house" but the closest I could find was weasels in the barn, near a large supple of mice - their favorite food.  So two mysteries solved - the no mice, and the talking creatures.