This incident is more of a "how did they do that?" -type thing. I still don't know how Tigger and Noodles managed to do it and trust me, I've seriously tried to work it out. In our previous apartment, when we were not at home or when we were sleeping we would bar the top of the staircase (the front door was on the second floor and the back door on the bottom floor) with a big board so that Tigger and Noodles couldn't get upstairs. We also put some books against the board to keep it from being knocked over. The bottom floor was easier to keep ferret safe. The board was too high to jump or climb over and it was between a wall and the bannister. The bannister had another board tied to it so the ferrets couldn't take the express lift downstairs. So they couldn't get around the board either. Well, one day we came home from work an hour or so earlier than usual. I opened the door and their were our little furballs in the corridor. I'm certain that we made sure they were downstairs in the morning and the board was in place. So there we were, all four of us. Jaakko and I staring at the ferrets and Tigger and Noodles staring at us. I could almost hear them whistling as they slowly backed up, turned around and trotted off as if nothing had happened, looking as innocent as possible. We checked the board, nothing unusual about it. I tried offering them water. If they had been upstairs the whole time, they'd be pretty thirsty. But they both just dunked their faces into the water and started playing around with it. So I was left with 3 theories.    1. Ferrets can grow wings at will.    2. Noodles gave Tigger a lift up over the board and she helped him scramble over it.    3. Tigger and Noodles are quantum physics geniuses and have built a teleporter, one gateway being in a cupboard downstairs and the other being under the bed. I'll never know how they did it, but I'm all for theory number 3. I like to think that ferrets are much smarter than they look.