Another Mouse Tale, Part I

Neither Robert Burns, Tony Banks, nor Ian Anderson have adequately prepared me for my continuing adventures with our small and distant mammal relatives, though perhaps they have helped to bolster my esteem for such creatures. Though often thought of as mere vermin, I have a hard time looking at the mouse as such. Of course, my recent forays into Kafka and his first-person experience as a "monstrous vermin" have also helped to moderate my opinion of the fidgety little devils who seem to have truly been given the short end of the stick. Nearly everything that is predatory eats mice, and civilization even caters to this, selling them as a fodder-commodity in pet stores for everything from snakes to piranha to tarantulas. Once upon a time, in San Diego, I even saw a minute falcon drop out of the sky to catch one. I had been running Mission Bay's scenic bay loop and was routinely witness to male, American kestrels that would float, motionless, on the air streams that wafted off the ocean and into the coastal community. Typically, the raptors merely "sat" there, for certainly they seemed not to be at any more trouble for balance than they were when on a branch. One day, however, I watched as a kestrel quite literally dropped out of the sky, like a rock, falling directly to the earth. I thought for certain he'd had a heart attack because he hit the side of the dry, shrub covered path at high velocity, kicking up all manner of dust and small debris. This thought was immediately allayed, however, as the dust was quickly made to clear by the beating of his wings, pulling him back into the sky. Wriggling in his talons was what appeared to be a wildly unhappy mouse, helping to fulfill his role as fresh meat.





All said, the mouse certainly has been given a glum lease on life. Watch one closely enough and you'll notice the darting eyes, the twitching whiskers, and the general attention deficit disorder that keeps him alive. Think about the mouse's daily affairs, some of which are captured in the aforementioned music and literature, and the reasons for this neurotic behavior is more easily understood. All taken, I find a soft spot for the tiny beast. Socio-political analogies abound in my last account of mice, men, and Montana grasslands, and my affection remains quite staunchly in the corner of the rodent. I could digress into pseudo-science and declare my closer genetic tie to the mouse as evidence for my preference for him over the snake or the (ugh) tarantula, but it is suffice to say that watching him (squ)eek out a living with what seems the whole world against him makes me feel all the closer to Mus musculus. Of course, on an eight point "conservation status" scale, virtually every species of mouse lands in the "lowest possible risk" category, the opposite end being "extinct." In fact, according to Wikipedia (which is always right), "due to [the mouse's] remarkable adaptability to almost any environment, and its ability to live commensally with humans, the mouse is regarded to be the third most successful mammalian species living on Earth today, after humans and the rat." Alas, such information does not aid the process of creating empathy for the lowly mouse, but for me, the comparison is simple enough. Though I have little compassion for humanity as a race, I take great stock in many of the individuals that comprise it. I likewise lose no sleep over the fate of mouse kind, though the thought of the plowed over field mouse, the night-scurrying house mouse, and individual, brown mouse, do strike a bit of a chord. After all, this is a story about one mouse.





This dorm is brand new. I am my apartment's first resident, as are the many freshman boys to their dorm rooms in the floors above me. While I have heard of rodent issues occurring in some of the less-clean dorm rooms of the older buildings on campus, this house has yet to be ravaged by the wily machinations of the burrowing, gnawing, and amazingly squeezable mouse. As such, my apartment has remained solely my own for this passing school year, even when I have failed to get the dishes done in a timely fashion. That is, until a week ago.





My apartment has two doors: one exterior door and one interior door, the latter of which leads to the greater dorm facility. I have found that freshman boys (in high school, mind you) are largely incapable of taking care of themselves in even the most simple ways. I am constantly called upon to answer questions that scrape the very depths of imbecility ("Mr. Jackson! Mr. Jackson! We have a bet: If a man and a monkey had sex, you would get a chimpanzee, right?" Unfortunately, I am not kidding.). Equally often I am the key master, the possessor of the dorm's skeleton key that will open any dorm room, regardless of how many times the owner has lost their key. It was fascinating, when the snow melted, to see just how many dorm keys littered the thawing lawns. Digressions aside, my station here in the dorm leads me to often leave my interior, apartment door propped open so that the freshman flood may come and go as it pleases (with hopeful emphasis on the go), a practice that had never caused me any undue trouble. Last week, however, in the waning hours of evening, I was visited by a shriek in the hallway. With a girlish scream that could only be accomplished by a 14 year old boy's voice, I was informed that a rodent had infiltrated the hallway. This I gathered upon interrogating the frightened boy about his wail.





"Well, was it a rat?"


"No, I think it was a mouse," he said, still shuddering.


"A large one, then?"


"Um, well, it was kind of small. But very fast."


"Four inches long?" He seems confused by the idea of a calculated measurement, so I held my hands apart to simulate the size. His eyes widened.


"I would have run out of the hallway if it had been that big."


"So what you're saying to me, then, is that this was a very small mouse."


"Yes.................but very fast."


"And where did it run off to?"


"Right into your open apartment." Now I'm the one sighing. "I think it ran into your closet, there."



The boy had been taking out the trash by using an exterior door to the hallway, right next to the previously mentioned interior door that I had kept open. In the mere seconds that the breach between nature and dorm had existed this mouse had found its way into the hallway, further on into my own hallway, and finally into the vast maelstrom of confusion and safety known as my closet. I knew I was beaten. I hadn't a chance to track down the mouse in the piles of mayhem that constituted my closet, so I shut the door, turning my back on the dorm, and began to think over the situation.





To be continued in Part II...