Trego's Mountain Ear

I’ve been sick – a bit of asthma leaves me more susceptible to lung and sinus infections, and this last one has been rougher than usual.  Anyway, sick or not, I decided it was a good day to replace a burned out front turn indicator light on the Talon.

The Talon is kind of my pet – 30 years old, not yet 60,000 miles, and a bit hotter than a Habanero pepper.  I’ve taken it up to 145 before I ran out of nerve, and the original reviewers claimed 161 was the actual top speed (and they didn’t admit to running out of nerve).  Still, over the years, I’ve learned to approach even the simplest maintenance by reading the manual first. They crowded a lot of things in some tight spaces, and the obvious way to fix things isn’t often the right way to tackle the problem.

So I look at the simple task of replacing a burned out light bulb: “12-12  15 Bulb replacement 2  If you’re replacing the right-side bulb on a 2.0 liter turbo model, remove the air cleaner (see chapter 4).”  Like I said, even the simplest maintenance and repairs get a bit complicated with the Talon. 

So I begin my efforts to replace a bulb by popping the hood and removing the air cleaner.  Once I open it up, I find a huge mouse nest.  That wouldn’t be bad, but I have a rough lung infection, and a couple days earlier I had read that Gene Hackman’s wife had died from hantavirus.  Remember, I spent a few years working as a county agent, and am familiar with hantavirus.  In my neighborhood, it’s spread by deer mice, and when it gets into the lungs it has a fatality rate around 40%.

Both Sam and I have traveled in the Talon before coming down with the crud.  My mind goes into overdrive – if the air cleaner harbors hantavirus, what is the best way to clean things up?  Could we both have hantavirus, or is this some relatively benign plague like Covid or flu?

So I pull on an old mask from the Covid panic days and a pair of blue rubber gloves – and dressed like a TSA guy, I removed the mouse nest from the air cleaner.  As I take it apart, I can feel the body in there – obviously the mouse didn’t make it.

So I inspect the tiny mummy and discover that it’s a dead shrew.  Identifying the shrew immediately takes the worries away – deer mice are associated with hantavirus.  Shrews are not.  As you can see from the nose, the two rodents are easy to tell apart:

So I have a new air filter in a clean housing.  I don’t know what sort of plague and contagion hit me this time – but the dead shrew showed me it wasn’t hantavirus.  I’m glad the shrew died in the air cleaner rather than somewhere where the body wasn’t available to restore my equanimity.