Bat II

So, bat hides all day in the 1" gap between the bathroom cabinet and the wall. We don't know this. Bat waits until about 1:00 a.m., after the lovely A_______ has finished grading papers and come to bed and turned the lights out, and then scritchy-flutters out of his crack and into the bedroom, where he flies mad loops around the ceiling, one end to the other. Bat is bigger, seems to me, than your standard brown bat. About the size of a pterodactyl, in fact. So the lovely A_______ trots downstairs, more or less to hide; very sensible, given her condition. I watch bat for a minute, hoping he'll land. He does, perching on the top of the window molding where he can keep an eye on me. He looks like a miniature gargoyle up there, all ears and weird, backwards elbows. I go downstairs to get gloves and something to catch him in: a pillowcase.

Back in the bedroom, it's obvious the pillowcase is useless: bat is up too high, the pillowcase opening's too small and floppy. I grab a towel and fling it at bat, hoping to knock him down. He orbits frantically around the room, doing these wobbly figure-eights. I pick up the towel and give it a good locker-room snap as bat flies past. A miracle occurs: I make good contact, bat's furry-leathery self splats against the wall and bounces onto the floor, stunned. Decent wingspan, as I said. I toss the towel over him before he can recover, scoop him up and hustle him outside, where I release him. He flutters out into the night, takes a hard left turn, and presumably flies right back to his nest in our eaves, along with fifty or sixty or so of his cousins. Did I mention the bat guy said they can't do much about a bat colony 'til spring?