I Killed My Smart Mouse

Two days before I left on Christmas holidays this year, I made a discovery. In the bedroom of my rented house, there is a cable cord. Not being one to watch TV in bed, this cord has sat curled round the back of the closet for the past two years. The other end exits the bedroom through a neat little round hole in the wall... I had never questioned where this hole might lead. Until, that is, a few little opportune visitors made their way into the garage, through the hole and into my kitchen. I have never seen the inside of this garage; our entrepreneurial landlord rents it out to a different tenant in a long-standing boat storage agreement. Now I had mice.

First things first - remove the source of the problem. A steel wool plug in the hole took care of that. Next, remove the mice. Being a 'live and let live' kind of person, and not having any luck the first night with my carefully laid snap traps (they ate the peanut butter right out of the trap), I purchased a Tin Cat - a nice little tin box that they can run into but not out of. I caught two large mice. A week later I caught four smaller mice. Was that the end of it? For a while, I was pretty sure we were in the clear. Then, when working late one night, I could have sworn I heard the pitter-patter of little feet.

By this time, I'm pretty paranoid, folks. I can hear a mouse in the bush at forty yards. So I started leaving little bits of teaser bait outside of ol' Tin Cat. The teaser would disappear, but no mouse. Slowly it dawnd on me - either I had a smart mouse, or Adam was messing with my head.

I bought a second Tin Cat and set it up in a different area of the house. Same story, empty traps, three nights in a row. This one, he was clever. He wasn't falling for some silly trap door. Tonight I decided I had to get serious. I wanted my kitchen back. I haven't been able to cook for days, for fear I'd missed dousing some mousey surface in Lysol. I set... the snap trap. This time I didn't use peanut butter - Darlene from the barn advised using raisins. "If you squish it in there really good," she said, "they can't just lick it off. They have to get in there and pull on it. Then it's a nice, quick snap to the back of the head and it's over."

I have to say, I was kind of rooting for the mouse. But, though the little guy was smart, he wasn't infallible. It only took about thirty minutes for the end to come.

I am also reminded that things could have been worse - Mom has been dealing with uninvited skunk guests. And unlike the pigeons, you can't just pull the .22 out of the back of the closet and scare them off...