The Slice: Calling all marmot experts

‘I could use your help,” began an e-mail from a young woman named Maja DeWolf.

“I am madly in love with a pharmacist from Colorado who is seriously considering moving to Spokane for a year to do a residency at Deaconess (and be with me, duh).”

He came up last week to see the sites and be interviewed at Deaconess. “And I did my best to sell the Lilac City,” said DeWolf, a GU student whose first name is pronounced May-juh.

The two met on Craigslist.com. Their only previous face-to-face encounter was in Portland not long ago. (DeWolf had been there for a tango workshop on the same weekend the young man was there for another interview.)

How did that go? “Incredibly magical,” said DeWolf.

Everything seemed to go well in Spokane last week, too.

Well, almost everything. “There was one thing I promised him and then never got around to: marmots.”

DeWolf said the gentleman in question has a thing about squirrels and the like. He really gets a bang out of them. “Something about that fuzzy tail and their skittishness,” she said, quoting him.

“But by the time he got here, I realized I hadn’t actually seen a marmot for maybe 10 years.”

She sort of panicked. “Maybe they no longer dwelled here in great numbers and/or had moved away from the sites where I remembered watching them as a kid,” she wrote. “I did my best to distract, entertain, and avoid the subject during Mr. Rx’s visit. But as soon as he got home to Colorado, I got an e-mail saying ‘Heyyyy… how come I never saw the marmots?’ “

Thinking fast, DeWolf told him it was her way of luring him back.

But now she needs help.

“I’m almost sure he’s coming back, so I must know: Where are the marmots these days? Are they seasonal, or can we take a marmot safari any old time?”

She pleaded with me to enlist the aid of Slice readers.

“The future of this relationship may depend on it,” she said.

So if you want to help a budding romance bloom and know a lot about marmots, contact me asap.

“Speaking of rodentia: Spokane’s Donna Odean reports that a squirrel she has named Thumper likes to bang on the sliding-glass door leading to her deck. The critter then waits for a snack offering.

Sometimes several other squirrels arrive on the deck at the same time. But they always wait for Thumper to knock on the door. “Does that make her the spokessquirrel for the group?” wrote Odean.

“Today’s Slice question (fill in the blanks): You can’t buy () in () County.