A Man and A Mouse at War

I saw it scurry over the rug in front of my front door. It sped across the living room floor and darted behind the credenza on which my TV set stood.

Maybe it thought it had violated my space at the best possible time. It was late. Sometimes I fall asleep in the easy chair from which I watched it scoot.

This was new. My apartment isn't in the best condition; I'd had two leaking ceilings worked on only days before. But a mouse?

We've been taught to think that mice are cute. They are depicted as such--friendly but mischievous--in artwork and cartoons.

It keeps one from confronting the damage they can wreak, though. Sooner or later, they have to eat something. They can make one hell of a mess.

Removal awaited, but the trouble to which we must go is a nag. After all, mice can't and don't hurt us. They have no intent to do so. After the moment of eek! usually comes a chuckle. "It's only a mouse," someone will say, if only to oneself.

The angst is about its eventual fate. It must be dealt with. Let things go and the issue becomes the devastation of neglect. Little things unaddressed and tolerated become a shameful, slippery slope. We keep assuring ourselves that everything's okay when it isn't.

I used to have a little country place mid-state that, because I got jobs at the end of my career that were as far away as Texas, I was forced to stay away long enough to invite a rodent invasion. Oh, I got outside help and it worked for a while. We learned it in Vietnam: When the enemy comes from places you know are there but can't see, the only thing you can do is prevent being overrun. You take over during the day, but they own the night.

For the time being, then, it was just a mouse. I saw not a cute little visitor, but an eventual horde.

Albert Schweitzer I'm not. Live-and-let-live with rodents is an assignation to gradual undermining and destruction. This kind of diversity was against my law. So sue me.

Calling for maintenance to deal with it felt inadequate. Besides, what else was there to do but get a trap? Having sold the other place, I'd thrown out my other traps from the previous invasion. I hadn't planned for more. The hardware store was but a block away, though.

There are styles of traps. One can basically behead the critter. Ugh. It would not be a far, far better thing to do than I had ever done. I wasn't Robespierre, either. I didn't want to deal with blood. I passed on that option.

I settled for the good old set-the-trigger kind, the one where you smear the front with something tasty and the end comes fast and relatively unmessy. I had just the bait: some ground almond butter from Whole Foods. Hell, I thought it was pretty good, too.

It seems simple: smear the bait near the catch, make the rodent stick its unfortunate little nose in the wrong place so the trigger's sprung, and the end happens in the best interests of mercy-killings. One shouldn't put the bait at the non-triggered end, though, for a mistake there might cause clamping down on the tail, causing a slow, painful, tortured death.

It's why, after hearing a news-magazine report some time ago, I've decided not to pursue fishing in my retirement. Nobody thinks about this, but fish have feelings. If someone stuck a hook into you--and maybe you've had such an experience in a boat with inexperienced anglers--you wouldn't react well, either. I know salmon and trout are good for you, and someone like me who's had by-pass surgery has been advised to eat a lot of it. I try not to think about that, but it's helped me understand vegans.

So I was careful. I smeared the almond butter well enough and slid the trap just behind the rear corner of the credenza, close to the wall. I wasn't too eager to actually hear the execution, so I set the trap just before I went to bed. After all, it could smell the food, but it could smell me, too. Keeping the lights on, I guessed, kept it from approaching long enough for me to get ready for bed. I figured I was safe from knowing the deadly moment.

Next morning, I winced. I had to make myself look. How nice: No mouse. No food left, either. The trap was still there, trigger still cocked. Crafty little bastard had dodged the ambush. I was being treated to another version of Catch Me If You Can.

You're laughing at me, I thought. My mind raced with possibilities, none of which were pleasant. If it had enjoyed its unexpected meal, it might have had to make a post-meal deposit, too. That was probably back there. But of course, I couldn't afford to slide the credenza away from the wall just yet. The mouse would motor somewhere else, if it hadn't already, and I'd have more problems. Since I figured that it would figure that its new food source would soon return, I let it huddle back there the rest of the day.

I planned again. I had tried my best to be dainty and as antiseptic as possible about ridding myself of this little thing. Now, though, it was murder on my mind, cold-blooded and premeditated.

I looked again at the trap, being careful not to add the actual pain of catching a finger in it as an additional humiliation. Turns out I had set the trigger too well, not allowing it to be freed with anything but a reversal of gravity. The mouse would have had to seek suicide that night. It felt silly to give it that much credit, but I was the dolt that got it wrong.

All kinds of apocalyptic thoughts developed. Whatever granola I'd dropped on floors while shoveling it into my mouth--I eat a lot of it--might be inhaled by the sneaky critter. That might lead it to the back room off the kitchen, where I had a large wicker basket filled with my recyclables. Unquestionably, some of them had bits of food left in them. I could see myself fighting this battle protractively, like in Afghanistan.

I paid better attention this time. I smeared even more almond butter on wood and metal. I set the trigger on a small jutting edge of the apparatus instead of hanging teeth that would be secure for me but possibly fail to get the job done. Get out of this one, I thought, and I'll sign over the lease.

It was not a sanguine moment the next morning. The trap had been flipped. That could only mean one thing: There was a dead mouse on the other side. The ferocity of the trap's killing snap often pulls it and its victim on top of itself. I saw the back end sticking out of the side.

Turning it over, I saw that it had died by a broken neck. It had perished in a quick, painless way, since the trap had not left its original space. Then I noticed that the food had disappeared this time, too. The condemned had had its last meal and, in sating itself, had nearly dodged another execution date. I felt like Robert Mitchum and Kurt Jurgens in the World War II film The Enemy Below, when, near the end of their sea battle, the warriors salute each other from their respective decks out of a grudging but genuine respect.

It deserved a good Christian burial, but I don't own the property. Better, I thought, to dispose of it like the Muslims, within 24 hours of its passing. Into the garbage it went with the other non-recyclables.

It had taken a lot of bother, so I'm considering a cat. At least they enjoy the chase, and torture doesn't bother them.

With some amusement, I read later that Peter Alexander of NBC News tweeted that a mouse fell through the ceiling right above him and into his lap at his desk, at the White House. No report on casualties. No conspiracy theories forwarded.

As the human race seems determined to wipe itself off the face of the earth either by war or unwillingness to attack climate change, I wonder if the mice will have the last laugh. Will the last of us know?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark