On February 4, 2003, the unexpected happened. Dixie lay on her back dead after what appeared to have been a vicious brawl with her sister, Pixie. Her face was all torn up from apparently having been partially eaten by her sister. Four days later, on February 8, I bought a new hamster; one of a different color, at that. I named this hamster Dixie, Jr., in memory of Dixie. For short, we called her DJ. DJ only stayed with us for a little over two months, but during that short time, she instantly became a special part of the family. Though shy and somewhat timid, all DJ seemed to want was to be everybody's friend, and with her help, I was able to recover from losing Dixie much quicker. On the night of April 16, 2003, I took one last look at her all snug in her cage before going to bed. Little did I know that it would be the last time I would ever see her alive. The next morning, April 17, exactly one week before my seventeenth birthday, my mom found DJ's dead body on the foyer near the front door. When we found her cage, we discovered that she had managed to knock the lid off and escape, and our cat, Mittens, slept indoors that night, so we figured that he killed her. I burried her in my backyard that afternoon on the opposite end of the shed from where I had burried Dixie. On April 26, two days after my birthday, my sister bought me a new hamster, who I named Bijou after the French hamster from Hamtaro. Bijou has the same color scheme as DJ and I sometimes call her DJ by accident. However, Bijou has a very different personality, and will never replace DJ, and DJ was never able to replace Dixie. No hamster will ever be able to replace those I've lost, but they can instead be themselves and they'll earn just as much love as their predecessors. Despite what Mittens did, it was his nature as a cat to kill any rodents running through the house, so I forgive him. He didn't know that this rodent was my friend.