We're on one of those local Freecycle mailing lists, where people post stuff that they want to give away. It warms my little former-finance-major heart to find ways to not spend money on things. Additionally, I've seen the boy play with enough cardboard boxes to know that he doesn't need expensive stuff to be happy. On the list we saw a small box of old "Wild Animal Baby" books, published by the National Wildlife Foundation.

animal book

The boy loves books and loves animals, so this was a no-brainer. We got the books, and quickly put them into our regular rotation.

On the back of each of the books, there is a picture with a letter of the alphabet, along with an animal whose name begins with that letter. Also, there is a child's face on a hand-drawn body, but I find that combination often looks kind of creepy, so I'm not going to talk much about that. Most of the images look something like this:

back cover

So anyway, one day, I'm reading through one of them, when I hear my wife gasp and then stifle laughter. When I asked what was the matter, she pointed to the back of the book I was reading:

back cover

We only got about 8 or 10 of these books, and OF COURSE one of them has to have a vole on the back. After I got over my initial disbelief, I really looked closer at the picture. I know the A is for Armadillo image might be kind of small, but you can see how the armadillo is just walking along going about his business. When I look at the other books, most of the pictures are just like that: they show the animals walking around, going about their business. Then I looked again at the vole image.

vole

You guys thought I was kidding when I wrote about them being evil? Well here's proof that I wasn't, straight from the National Wildlife Foundation. That vole isn't peacefully walking around, it's looking right in your eyes with an "I could kill you at any given moment" look.

I only pray that James F. Gatto made it out of there OK.