Animal rescuers in San Francisco are trying to figure out where a marmot came from, which is a sentence that sounds normal until you think about it for more than four seconds. Marmots, in case your rodent taxonomy is rusty, are large ground squirrels. They live in mountains, meadows, alpine tundra. They do not live in San Francisco. And yet one turned up in the city after apparently hitching a ride, and then, because the universe has a sense of humor, drinking radiator fluid.

The story, as UPI reports, is that the animal most likely stowed away in a vehicle, rode into the city, emerged, found the nearest puddle of engine coolant and had a drink. Radiator fluid is ethylene glycol, which is sweet-tasting and deeply poisonous, a fact that has killed a lot of pets and, evidently, inconvenienced at least one marmot. Rescuers got to it and treated it, and the animal is recovering. The bigger question is the one nobody can answer: where did it board?

I can't stop chewing on that part. A stowaway rodent is a closed loop of information that runs through exactly one witness, the marmot, who isn't talking. Somebody drove into San Francisco with a marmot under the hood or in the wheel well and never noticed. That person could be from Tahoe, the Sierra, maybe somewhere further. They could be reading about this right now, mildly entertained, with no idea the story is about them.

It's the Toynbee tile problem in miniature. An artifact appears somewhere it shouldn't be, and the explanation almost certainly exists, it just lives inside a stranger's ordinary day. There was a truck. There was a mountain road. There was a marmot making a decision it did not understand, and now a wildlife team in a major city is holding the consequences.

Stowaway animals have a long, weird history here. Snakes in shoe shipments, spiders in banana bunches, the corn snake in the bread aisle I wrote about last week, which is somehow still in my tabs. Rodents are rarer because most of them, sensibly, stay home. A marmot is a homebody by design, it spends half its life in a burrow it considers worth defending. For one to end up two hours and a whole ecosystem away from anywhere marmots live, something went unusually wrong in its commute.

Presumably the rescue organization will check with wildlife agencies, try to match the species and any regional markers to a plausible origin, and release it somewhere appropriate once it's clean of the coolant. If the animal could talk, the whole thing would take eleven seconds to solve. It can't, so we're left doing forensics on a creature whose entire worldview is burrow, grass, rock, sun.

And I keep thinking about the radiator fluid specifically. Of all the welcoming smells of a big city, exhaust and garbage and sea salt, the marmot found the one puddle that was actively trying to kill it and thought, yes, this. You could read that as a parable about cities. Or it was just a thirsty animal, which is somehow worse.

If the rescuers ever trace where it came from, I'll update this. If they don't, the marmot joins my private file of mysteries that were probably boring and refuse to close themselves anyway. That file is enormous. Send coffee.