A Mouse in the House

So about a month ago, when I got back from Ecuador, we had a minor mouse infestation. It wasn't too bad - essentially they were hanging out under the kitchen sink, which is where I saw mouse droppings and cleverly discerned their presence. I have lived in places with mice before, and live traps are pretty much the most pointless thing ever, so war was declared. My family is in the habit of making a loud announcement in the vicinity of wherever we're putting the traps down, just in case one of the mice is out of Mrs. Frisby and The Rats of Nimh or something. So I did that: "Get out now and no harm will come to you and yours, I can't be held responsible for what happens otherwise, but you may die happy - this is organic peanut butter, very nice" sort of thing.

My dad brought over the McGuckin death traps and I would check under the sink twice a day and throw a mouse in the trash. Notable variations to the theme include the day I caught two baby mice (so sad) and the time I heard a trap go off and stupidly went to investigate and found that a mouse had half-escaped and was having some sort of brain hemorrhage. I won't go into detail, but it was seriously traumatizing. For me, as well. Just the day before I had been discussing the need for a tiny little shot gun in case I needed to perform any mercy killings. Anyway, eventually I stopped catching anything, and the timing was perfect, because my parents were invaded the same week. They had special scout force mice wandering the entire house in stupid places.

Just to clarify, both my parents and I are very clean about food. Yes, there are crumbs on the floor in the kitchen, and food in the kitchen, but no one does the weird leaving around food thing that other people do. So gross! So, when these mice were parading around the living room at my parent's house, it's not like there was anything good in there. All the good stuff is in the cupboards in the kitchen. The most exciting thing was when they had a mouse up on the headboard of their bed! Yes! It made scritchy noises and then jumped off the headboard and bounced off my father's head. He did not inform my mother of this as she would have immediately booked into a hotel.

Anyway, I came home the other night and no kitties came running to say hi like they normally do. I walked into the living room and Annie was intently staring at Sam intently examining a corner of the room. This corner had a sort of open metalwork globe thing in it, so you could partially see behind it but not really. Anyway, I glance over there, see nothing, and assumed they'd treed a spider or something. But they kept freaking out, boxing with each other over who got to sit closest, meowing and looking very excited, general merriment. So I roll the ball back, and there is a little house mouse with HUGE eyes staring up at me. I rolled the ball back (much to Sam's dismay) and went downstairs to confirm that my roommate Tina's mice were safe and sound. Judith and Matilda were fine, so I came back up and tried to decide whether to commit musicide or catch it in a mason jar or pick it up by the tail or what . . . and THEN, the mouse ran out from behind the metal globe thing, over to the sliding glass door which for some reason was slightly open, Annie tried to catch it, and the mouse escaped her to find itself stuck between the glass door and the screen door. So, at that point I just reached through and opened the screen door enough and it got out onto the deck. Annie was then pissed at me and spent the next hour trying to get me to let her outside. I am hopeful that the mouse somehow conveyed to all its friends and relations that our house has scary, albeit incompetent, cats.

So, the sad part of the story is that Sam never saw the mouse leave the corner, and now he spends a significant portion of his day watching it and scratching around there and meowing at me to make the mouse reappear. It's very tragic and funny to watch. I may have a viewing party.