The following anecdote was told to me in early 1999 by Ruth Johnson, Anchorage, Alaska.
"One late evening last Fall, my young male, Trig, would not come in for bed when I called him. I was getting pretty exasperated because it was late at night and I was tired. I went and finished getting ready for bed and then called him again to come into the house for the night. He reluctantly came in, which was not at all his usual exuberant puppy obedience.
As soon as he came in he immediately tried to turn around and go back out but I caught him and scolded him tor trying to dodge past me to get back outside. I began tyo notice he looked kind of sick. Perhaps there was something wrong with him? As a new Bernese owner I began to jump to a hundred different things that could be wrong.
I helped him into my room near the foot of my bed where he sleeps, to get a better assessment. He began to look seriously ill. He did have a new leather collar on and so I knelt down and carefuilly removed it, checking his neck and head for sores or problems. His eyes began to bulge and his mouth to frown. He looked like he was about to throw up. My concern for him was growing by leaps and bounds. I was questioning him and baby talking him, looking for answers when all of a sudden he lowered his head and out dropped a very wet live mouse!
Holy cow! I jumped up and screamed and landed on the middle of my bed in fright. Now what to do? I had a live mouse which had darted off into my closet and a Berner that looked all too relieved to be rid of his soggy dilemma. He had held that live mouse in his mouth for at least 15 minutes while I had examined him and worried over him! I immediately went to my brave-hearted teenage daughter's room and woke her to come to my rescue. She came into my room amused with the story I told her and quite sure that her mother was a nut case. She calmly got down on all fours and emptied my shoes out of my closet slowly one by one but no mouse.
All of a sudden she got a crazed look on her face, her eyes bulged out of her head, she jumped to her feet and started doing the hokey-pokey....in cut time! The soggy mouse had somehow come out from under my bed and crawled up her pajama bottoms and had tickled her thigh! Now we're both on my bed screaming! So much for a brave-hearted daughter. Trig sat in the corner with a very bemused grin on his face this whole time
I finally pushed my reluctant daughter off the bed and with a promise of great riches in her future, bribed her into getting a coffee can to catch the mouse. We finally caught the poor little wretch and deposited him safely back outdoors, much to our great relief. I know that I'll never look at a Berner in distress in quite the same way again!"