Part I
Part II
Part III
Now, when it comes to mouse traps, there are more out there than you might think. The variety is immense. There are "bucket" traps that involve convincing a mouse to jump into a bucket of water to get bait, where they drown. There are glue traps, flat boards with powerful adhesives that the mice run across and then get stuck on. (We actually had a variation on this in my college fraternity house where spilled beer on the kitchen linoleum from the night before would turn sticky and catch cockroaches by the handful. Should have patented it.) There are electric traps that shock mice to death. There are even traps that gas chamber the insidious and dangerous beasts, Nazi-style. And, of course, there is the classic, wood-based spring trap.
On top of all of these there are also what are termed "live catch" traps which are not dissimilar to the raccoon trap I previously mentioned, only much smaller, obviously. My goal was to "live catch" mouse and throw him out of my home, but I figured I could do the job without need of spending money on someone else's trap. Thus did I turn to the trusty, box-stick-string method, slightly modified for my own use. In the place of the box I pulled out one of my glass bowls. I had no "stick," per se, but a glass guitar slide seemed to fit the bill. Connected boot-laces were the finishing touches. Evening came on, and a few sunflower seeds later, the trap was set and baited.
Tried and true?
I sat down to do some reading, tying the string to one of my toes so that I might sit at a distance and require only a small jerk of the foot, rather than having to lean over and grab the line, potentially scaring off mouse. And I waited. Now, while it may seem that mouse and I had become enemies, it is important to remember that this process was taking place solely to save mouse from an untimely and unpleasant end. Some minutes went by as I read, knowing full well that I was in the middle of mouse's evening, active period. As if on cue, he appeared from out of an opening in the heating duct. He moved like a grounded butterfly, shifting direction erratically and with uneven bursts of speed. From one point of cover to the next, he quietly traversed the distance to the bowl, where the seeds awaited him, and I, the unseasoned hunter, began to get twitchy. Coming within the radius of the bowl, but not yet on the bait, I committed. Too soon! The bowl came down and mouse's brilliant reflexes had him outside of its sphere and back into the heater in a flash of an instance. Cursing myself, I reset the trap. Now, here, I wonder what the mouse thinks. There were many nights, before the neighborly battle began, where I would neglect to put food out. Yet, even without the scent of such things to draw him, mouse would diligently go and check out the spot in which food was typically left. This hints at some manner of learned intelligence, suggesting that mouse remembered that this was a potential source of food, even when none was there to entice him to the spot. If he could think like that, wouldn't the traumatic experience of a giant, glass clam shell trying to close on him have a reverse psychological effect? Wouldn't he be wary? Or was the bait simply too tempting? In any case, he was back, and in minutes. This time I resolved not to let my excitement get the better of me. Again he darted across the kitchen to the trap. Cautiously, slowly, driven by miniature bursts of speed, he approached the bait. What a reactionary life a mouse must have, always on the hunt, always hunted, never able to walk at anything but breakneck speed. Then he was on the bait. The slide flew; the bowl dropped. Yet all was not good.
Mouse was fast. Too fast. Like before, he had made a dash for freedom, but this time he was too far within the trap. He failed to get beyond the reach of the bowl, but neither did the bowl hold him to its spherical boundary. I ran up to the trap. The rim of the bowl was pinning mouse to the ground, having landed on his neck, doing precisely the thing that I had sought to avoid. Aghast, I lifted the bowl, revealing that he was not dead, though, despite this, he offered an unhappy sight. He squirmed about in a fashion that indicated a fatal injury, his back legs whirring while he dug his face into the carpet. His front legs seemed to have failed. Perhaps they were broken. It was unsettling to watch and even now casts a somber pall over me. He moved in short bursts of uncontrolled direction and I turned away for a moment so that I might not have to see what seemed his death throes. When I looked back he was gone, surely into one of the dark corners of the kitchen that he had come from. Still unsettled by what I assumed were his final moments, I guessed that perhaps he had found the strength to flee to the comfort of the dark, and there to sit and die. Distraught, I placed the bowl in the sink, leaving the mess of bait and string, and went to bed.
To be concluded in Part V...
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