It may or may not be coincidence, but it was right around the time we had to put down our 17 year old cat this summer that the first mouse appeared. I would have liked to type “when the mouse first appeared” but I’ve come to believe he is Legion.
I actually managed to catch the first mouse by hand the very first time we saw him, trapping him in a little toy bucket and releasing him in the field across the street. That was some time this summer and I more or less forgot about mice in the interim.
Many happy mouseless weeks passed. While waiting for the bus one morning not too long after, I heard from a neighbour that she too had seen mice in the house this summer for the first time and she even upped the ante by telling me she’d seen a porcupine (!) in the backyard, and another neighbour stopped me in the driveway to ask if we’d had mice, so apparently they’re in the ‘hood.
Last week, Tristan came up from the basement family room where he’d been building Lego spaceports with a wildly worried look on his face. “There’s a noise like (*insert sound of tiny demon claws scrabbing against the gates of insanity here*) coming from behind the door to the laundry room.”
Now, can we just pause for a minute for a confession? There are times when I am completely unable to suppress my terrified inner 10-year-old who is direly afraid of two things: the dark and basements. Those times are when it’s dark, and when I’m in the basement. I have read entirely enough Stephen King books in my life to know that things that make noises behind closed doors in a dark basement should be LEFT ALONE.
And so I found myself with my hand on the laundry room door, listening to that undeniable sound of chewing, for the love of god, thinking of six hundred and sixty six good reasons NOT to open the door and unable to come up with even ONE good reason to open it. Except the ginormous ocean-blue eyes of Tristan, firmly fixed on me.
If the act of suppressing 40 years of conditioning and ten thousand years of genetically imbedded instinct to open that door in the name of appearing brave in front of my son isn’t a testament to a mother’s love, I don’t know what is.
And so I opened the door and turned on the light and it took about three hours for the light to come on and then another seven hours for me to work up the courage to peer behind the door because the noise was obviously coming from directly behind the door and every hair on my body was actively trying to stand up and walk off my body by the time I swung the door back around and found myself looking at a scritching, scrabbling, wiggling half bag of dog food.
Huh. Demons probably don’t eat dog food. Mice, on the other hand…
So I carefully unrolled the not-very-carefully rolled up top of the bag, and sure as shit the little grey mouse came tumbling out. He was way too quick for me, though, and disappeared somewhere behind the laundry machines.
By the time my heart started beating again, I was okay with the idea of cohabitating with the mouse. We’ve never had mice in the house before, and based on the amount of scat I found around the dog food bag (which also went into the trash) he’s been living down there for a while. Then my nice twitter friends said that mouse poop is toxic and that they will start to get into the real people food, so I thought that maybe I’d get a humane trap.
The idea of actually killing the mouse disturbed me, but the idea of merely maiming the mouse and having him suffering practically undid me. We dithered and debated for a week or so.
On Thursday, I pulled out the rubbermaid bin full of Halloween costumes to get ready for the boys’ school Halloween dance and had Simon and Lucas try on three of the four plush costumes that had been stored in the box. It was only when I went to pull out the fourth costume that I found out that the bottom of the bin was covered in … you guessed it, mouse poop.
By the time everyone had had a scalding hot bath and the halloween costumes went through two wash cycles, war had been declared. It’s ON, mouse. Bring it. If I thought I could flush him out, I would have went after that sucker with a baseball bat. And so help me, if I find he’s been into the Christmas decorations, I’m going to nuke him.
So the very next day I found myself in the mouse trap aisle of Canadian Tire. I seriously thought about getting one of those giant-size rat traps, just to make my point, so annoyed was I. Who knew there was such selection and variety in mouse traps? Glue traps, humane traps, multi-mouse traps… In the end, we got a fancy plastic version of the standard wood-and-wire mousetrap. The label offered a high capture rate and instant kill, which made my karma shrivel only a little bit.
Beloved set the traps on Sunday night, putting one behind the furnace and one near the freezer, both far from human traffic but near where scat postcards had been found. Last night, as I was doing the ubiquitous loads of laundry, I checked on the traps. The one near the freezer had been knocked slightly out of position but was still set. The one near the furnace was… gone. The entire trap had disappeared.
WTF? I can imagine how they’d get displaced, how they might get shifted, how they might even snap shut and bounce up to a foot away depending on how violently they closed. But that sucker is completely and utterly gone, and trust me, we searched everything within a five foot radius.
So the way I see it, either we’ve got a partially disabled but frighteningly strong mouse running around the basement with a discharged mousetrap attached to one of its appendages or… well, let’s just go with option one, shall we?
I’m not sure I can open that door a second time…
