Mouse in the house

We've got a mouse in the house. Or rather, mice. The drought has really scorched the farmland surrounding our subdivision, and a new school going up right next door has taken a significant amount of field mouse habitat out of play. So now we hear them scurrying in the ceilings, and our neighbors report the same. A week or so back, we actually saw one, tiny cute and charcoal-gray scurrying across the entryway late at night while we were watching some Netflix or other. The next day we found where he'd gnawed a hole through the drywall in the downstairs bathroom, and shortly thereafter caught him in a glue trap. Then we gathered the kids, and amid much fanfare, took the mouse to an empty lot bordering farmland down the street and released him (after a goodly application of vegetable oil to dissolve the glue) into his natural habitat. And we thought our mouse problem solved.

But that was not to be. We heard more scurrying in the ceiling and walls. And the other night, as I worked in my office in the wee hours, one scampered into my office, gave me an appraising look, then disappeared behind my desk. Right. A trip to the store netted me a box trap, with a nifty see-saw doorway that lets mice in but keeps them trapped once inside. I baited it with peanut butter, tucked it away behind my desk, and this morning was rewarded with a very surprised mouse. I released this one in that same field.

Notice these are all catch-and-release trappings. I have no deep aversion to more deadly types of rodent traps, but we don't view them as necessary in this case. Individually, the mice are more or less harmless and it only takes a couple of minutes to release them. Also, we are trying to teach our children empathy and that killing--even mice--should not be done without just cause. Spring traps are just begging for little fingers to get snapped upon, and poison bait is out because of the dogs and cats (both ours and our neighbors) who might come upon a stricken mouse and view it as a light snack. So we release them back into the wild, where they can serve as dinner for some owl or snake.

This is not, I must point out, the way I was brought up to deal with rodents. When I was a wee lad, no older than Monkey Girl is now, certainly, an old vacuum cleaner brought into the house from outside introduced an infestation of kangaroo or pocket mice to our house. We didn't live in the semi-arid regions of the state where kangaroo rats are native, but these certainly had elongated hind legs and a pronounced jumping ability. A kind of homemade box trap consisting of a King Edward cigar box with an entry hold cut into it proved futile in corraling the little jumpers. Regular spring traps produced unsatisfactory results as well. The idea of letting the beagles into the house to run down the mice probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight probably wasn't the best thought-out of plans. It was at this point my father decided to break out the big guns--literally.

You see, he was an avid hunter. Did all his own reloading of bullets and shotgun shells. Now to give him credit, he did not simply pull out a gun and start blasting away like Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam. Instead, he took several bullets, removed the bullet from the casing and replaced it with a wax slug. The idea being that the wax would be enough to kill or at least stun the mouse while not causing any damage to the house. Fair enough.

There was one mouse that'd taken up residence under the refrigerator in the kitchen. As we would watch TV in the living room, it'd come out and scurry around the kitchen in plain view, only disappearing if someone approached. So we--as a family--settled in to watch some movie or other in the living room, with my father on the couch with his gun close at hand. Sure enough, before the first commercial break, the mouse pops out from under the fridge. Dad picks up his gun, aims, fires. I know it had to have been loud, the report of the gun, but I can't remember that--only the build up and the aftermath.

"I missed," he said. The mouse was gone.

Things are a little fuzzy here. I don't recall who went to the kitchen first, whether it was some of us or all of us. For the sake of a good story, let's say it was just me, looking to see if I could find that wax slug.

Did I mention the gun he used was a Remington .30-06? No?

I did not find the wax slug. Instead, I found a spectacular array of mouse parts distributed around the kitchen in spectacular fashion. You would not normally believe a creature so tiny could be so profoundly subdivided and redistributed over so broad an area in such a striking manner, but disbelief does not change the fact that the kitchen was downright festooned with mouse.

Mother was not happy, particularly since she had to clean it up. But Dad had learned his lesson. From then on out, he only used a single action .45 revolver for his wax-slug mouse-hunting.

So yeah. I think I'll stick with my little hing-door box traps.

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