Another Mouse Tale, Part V

Part I

Part II

Part III


Part IV





I awoke mildly dispirited from the night before, and lest I be labeled a “sissy” or other such term, it is worth noting the importance of not killing without reason. To wantonly destroy is not “wrong” – concepts such as “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” are merely constructions that exist in our minds – but it does, if repeatedly enacted, reduce the ecological diversity of an area, and doing that reduces the fitness of that portion of the ecosystem. Reduced fitness, multiplied, is extinction. Thus, to destroy without reason (i.e., for purposes other than food or defense) risks creating a state of mind that, generation upon generation, could lead to our own destruction. It was with this sort of selfish thinking that I rose and lamented the unnecessary death of my roommate. Such sadness, however, would be short lived.





As I entered the kitchen I expected to have a quick clean-up job before me, but to my surprise, the bait that I had left out – a handful of sunflower seeds – was gone. I left out a few more to see if the experiment would repeat itself and, indeed, the following morning those, too, had disappeared. Any sadness I had held was slowly converted into mild disdain for the melancholy (and erroneous) psychological state mouse had subjected me to. I thought it over and concluded that the weight of the bowl landing on him must have dislocated something in a painful way, though he must have been able to relocate it while I had my head turned. Such a thing is not implausible. Mice have the extraordinary ability to squeeze through minute crevices, which I assume is tied to an ability to move their joints in and out of sockets as they fit into spaces too small for their fully rendered forms. Perhaps I had only caused this to happen en masse for mouse, and he needed a minute to pull himself back together. In any case, his health was clear, for he boldly reappeared that next evening as I was preparing the next day’s lesson plans, looking fit as ever. Greater measures clearly were called for.





Resigned to accept the wisdom of others, I visited the local hardware store and inspected their mouse traps. Most of the previously mentioned styles were there, including an epic, live catch machine that could hold up to 20 mice at a time (for the kind-hearted slumlord). I opted for a smaller version.

Based on a simple “see saw” system, this trap's balance would shift once mouse's weight was in the back of it and, by doing so, force the very lightly supported hatch to close on my roommate. Having full faith in my new purchase, I set it up, including more sunflower seeds as bait (ever popular with mouse), and headed out for the evening.

I got back several hours later and, with a bit of excitement, immediately examined the trap. The lid was DOWN. Wary of mouse’s wily ways, I picked it up for the full inspection. Sure enough, it was double the weight it had been when I set it down. Finally.

Vindication

There must have been karma at work, for the day after I convinced mouse to vacate the premises, the raccoon cage was finally taken down. The chicken had slowly decomposed to the point of inducing nausea in anyone who came close, and I assume that the impact of this convinced the grounds keeper, who is also, by chance, the trash-man, that such a thing could not be kept in proximity to his working environment. Nothing had ever triggered the trap, yet the garbage had been, nightly, ransacked by what I imagine must have been a quietly chuckling raccoon. Mr. S_____ remains, as far as I know, frustrated by his inability to control all aspects of his surroundings, though he has, by now, surely forgotten about mouse and the poison he laid out in his own kitchen to try and dispatch him.





Hours after I released mouse to the night, a humidity-driven, New England thunderstorm raced into town. Lightning dropped almost without cessation for 20 minutes as torrential rains poured down. I couldn’t help but think of mouse, relegated to his genetic fate, out in the downpour. What hole might he jump into, unwittingly, that held any number of predators? Which one of the numerous, nesting goshawks (which, by the way, I recently found are very territorial...a story for another day) would spot him in the field? What about the big garter snake that made a home of the rock wall near my apartment? With so many enemies he would have to structure his day around, how could he hope to live a prosperous, fulfilling life? Such were my thoughts as I went through my tasks the next day, filling out the required, “professional development” forms that my job was dependent on, paying my taxes, as ordered, and attending tedious meetings from which little, if any, lasting good would come. I wondered, for all the terror that his days must be fraught with, does Mus musculus have so rough a life as I imagine?











Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But och! I backward cast my e'e,

On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,

I guess an' fear!





-Robert Burns, “To A Mouse”

Another Mouse Tale, Part IV

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...

Another Mouse Tale, Part III

Part I

Part II





It is at this point that the story takes on a decidedly darker hue. Among the contributing factors to my new earnestness to capture the mouse was the activity of my upstairs neighbor. Now, he and I share a door. Our apartments are, in fact,
designed to work as a single unit, in case the school we work for ever found itself in need of a very large apartment for a family with several children. Like one of those connected hotel rooms with the door locked from both sides. He, his wife, and I, aren't enemies, but neither do we get along particularly well, and as such the door has remained permanently locked. What acts as a barrier for us, however, is nothing of the sort to this story's antagonist.





It was after several weeks of comfortable cohabitation, just prior to the aforementioned issues that developed between mouse and I, that I was walking the main dorm floor, fending off inane questions from freshman boys.

Just another day in the freshman dorm.

"No, Renting and borrowing are not the same thing. No, traveling circuses don't visit this part of Connecticut. Yes, this is going on your permanent record."





Amidst the general confusion of the common room, however, one of the older boys (a sophomore resident assistant, charged with trying to quell the rabble when no dorm parents are around) slid up to me in his usually sly style.





"Mr. Jackson."


"Hm?"


"Did you hear about the mouse in Mr. S_____'s apartment?"


"What mouse?"


"Yeah, well, that mouse is in HIS apartment too. He found out that you were feeding it and kept saying 'He's feeding it?' as if he couldn't make sense of the idea - why ARE you feeding it? - anyway, he and Mrs. S_____ chased it around their apartment with brooms but I guess they couldn't kill it. He says he's going to put out poison for it."





I was a bit taken aback by my neighbor's outright hostility towards mouse, an act I perhaps should not have been surprised by, given mouse's place in the food chain, I walked back down to my apartment with the realization that mouse was drifting between our two homes for food. Moreover, he was going to be served more than food the next time he landed himself upstairs. Some sort of evil karma must have infiltrated the building, because upon returning to my apartment I noticed something through the window, just outside. It was a large, rectangular trap. Investigating, I found a paper plate laden with raw (and rapidly transforming) chicken at the back of the cage. Five feet long and easily a foot square, this trap was for no mouse. It had been a few weeks earlier when Mr. S_____ had complained to me, and subsequently to the campus grounds keeper, that a raccoon had been filtering through our trash, late at night. This was no news to me. I live next to the trash bins and was aware of the raccoon’s devious attempts to steal that which we had already decided to throw away. Moreover, I had seen him many times, in the dusk of early evening, skittering into the trees when I passed by the area he seemed to like to inhabit. Mr. S_____, however, found his presence unnerving. As he told me, "That animal is dangerous. What if it bites a student? There's a serious legal case, right there. There shouldn't be a wild animal like that roaming about our campus." I retorted, "But, we live mere yards away from a major nature preserve. I think he probably considers this his territory. Besides, these kids get slaughtered on the ice and the field every day in athletics, and we’re worried about a raccoon? I don’t see any torn ACL’s or broken wrists as a result of his presence." "Yeahhhhh," Mr. S_____ returned, "but we still can't have it just walking around, carrying trash off." "You mean, like the trash-man does?" I thought to myself, wisely biting my tongue. My argument fallen on a deaf mind, I retreated from the field of debate. This trap, laid out next to the trash bins, was surely the culmination of my failure to dissuade Mr. S_____ from attempting to reign dominion over all he saw. My spirits sank as I thought of mouse and the raccoon, both condemned for living their lives as they were designed to, and I felt some kinship over the many traps I had evaded, and even those that I had fallen into, as I tried to be as human as possible. I didn't want mouse to be choked on poison, but if he was determined to share apartments with the both of us (which, I assumed, he also could not be dissuaded from), then he would have to go. Whether his method of "going" would be through death or displacement was a matter for the battling ingenuities of Mr. S_____ and myself to decide.





To be continued in Part IV...

Another Mouse Tale, Part II

Part I





Now, I have told this story to others and have been accused of "over thinking" things in my life (whatever that means), but I swear by such an overactive thought process. I thought about the situation and realized that both the mouse and I were in a bit of a bind. The entire reason that the mouse was in my apartment was due to a series of chance events: two doors that were rarely open at the same time had, in fact, opened simultaneously, right when the mouse was in their proximity. This meant that, in order to escape by "natural" means, a similarly unlikely event would need to occur. As already stated, the dorm was new and seemed quite impervious to rodent penetration, and as happy as I was about that, it also meant that mouse and I were new roommates, he as unable to leave as I was to evict him.





So I kept thinking, and I thought that if I kept the place clean of food and debris, as I normally did, he would have nothing to eat. If had nothing to eat, he would die. If he died, he would smell bad and, in all likelihood, continue to smell bad unless I could find what was left him. As I have since found out, he was able to inhabit quite a good many locations that I simply have no way of accessing: nooks, crannies, and the like, behind fixed shelves and counters. I resolved to let no such end come to pass. Soon enough, a small plate of sunflower seeds was on the floor, and with it, a small ramekin of water. Such was the beginning of our co-habitation.





The next morning there was not a single seed left. Even Santa had left bits of cookies on the mantle. This one was the hungry type, apparently, and though something in the back of my mind warned me that such a system was unsustainable, rather than commit to the great trouble of catching the mouse I continued to leave food out. Being that his food was also my food, as I ate variety, so did he. One night it was pumpkin seeds, another raisins, and one night, that must surely have sent him into ecstasy, was shredded coconut. He ate it all. Not a scrap remained, ever. He had also become bolder. I often prepared for the next day's classes in the late evening, anywhere from 9:00 to 11:00pm, usually on the couch in my living room, which, as chance would have it, is also my kitchen, and also my dining room. A quintessential bachelor's pad that was now home to two single males. Of course, he could have been female, but regardless of gender, mouse had made himself comfortable enough to risk exposure. It happened one night, as I was tracing through pages of The Crucible, that a dark bullet darted through the periphery of my vision, to the right, in the portion of the room I called "kitchen." I shifted my eyes toward the spot and left them there. Moments later, another dart, from cover to cover, and then another. Then, in a flash, he was on the plate, stuffing his cheeks with seeds at a furious pace before flying back into the safety of a dark corner. Indeed, he was fast. Our relationship passed time, like this, for a series of days. Sometimes students would be over, discussing a recent paper or assignment, and they would observe him as he busied himself with the act of gathering. Some laughed and thought me odd - a not atypical opinion of me at the school - while most others considered it a "filthy" creature to have around. I was forced to remind some of the latter that they reeked of lacrosse sweat, after which they more humbly exited my apartment. Despite popular resentment, things seemed well between mouse and I.





As with all good roommates, however, things became strained. I noticed one morning that the kitchen counter, usually laden with drying dishes, was strewn with mouse droppings. I surmised that mouse had finally figured out how to climb the metal rigging that ran up the back of the refrigerator and had thus granted himself access to a larger world. This, in itself, wasn't a big problem, as the droppings were very easily swept into the sink and washed away. At the time I hadn't worried about the nefarious hantavirus that is supposedly carried in some mouse feces, and, illogically, I still don't. What did get me, however, was the mouse's increased bravado. It was as early as 9:00pm, one night, with the evening's dirty dishes still laid out on the counter for cleaning, when I heard a spoon jangle about in a glass bowl. I looked over from around the corner, where I was sitting at my computer. Nothing. Odd. Back to work. A minute more and it jangled again, this time more audibly. I looked again, and again nothing. I knew I wasn't imagining things, though, so I kept my stare and waited. It was mere seconds before mouse returned, hopping into a bowl that had, in previous hours, held a mixture of seeds and raisins, coconut and sugary, agave nectar. A dessert treat, to say the least, and I wasn't the only one who thought so. A nibble here and there and then *pop*, back out the mouse went, disrupting the spoon on the way. I thought to myself, utterly irrationally, "I give you food every night and yet you climb onto my counter and tell me that it is not enough? What gratitude?!"





Eventually, things added up. I have a tall mug, perhaps 10 inches high, that I sometimes make large drinks in. Even this, to my amazement, I found mouse leavings in, meaning that the critter had somehow bounded 10 inches high, straight into the air, to get both in and out of the cylinder. Visions of mouse-made Stonehenges crossed my mind as I calculated the prowess of such a surprisingly capable creature. The droppings, in fact, became more numerous everywhere and some civilized note of disgust crept into my psyche. Also, I grew tired of putting out food. The only thing that kept me doing so was the nagging thought that he couldn't get out and would die if left unfed, potentially causing the "smell" problem earlier alluded to. Thus was dissent sown and the way for the great trapping laid bare.





To be continued in Part III...

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...