Or, as my wife would put it, we are being over-run by a seething blanket of vermin, who will destroy us and devour us in our sleep. She first realized we were under assault when she was up late with the baby one night and heard a scrabbling sound in the ceiling. She had enough presence of mind not to stand on top of a chair and shout “eek” like the women in old cartoons, but rest assured, I heard about it in the morning.
I followed my standard operating procedure when it comes to things in our house that might involve work on my part – I tried to pretend that it didn’t exist. To tell the truth, I had heard our tiny houseguests myself several weeks before, and had even found a tiny body lying in the laundry sink in the basement (which was quickly and surreptitiously consigned to a “burial at sea” upstairs in the bathroom), but the mice weren’t bothering me, so I had adopted a live-and-let-live policy.
“Are you sure they’re mice,” I asked my wife. “Maybe it was just the wind.”
“The wind does not have little scrabbling toenails,” my wife told me with narrowed eyes, “nor does it squeak.” (I could tell that she was serious about this, because she used the word “nor” in conversation, something she only does when I am on the verge of getting in trouble.)
“Oh,” I said thoughtfully. “Is he hurting you?”
This is when my wife fixed me with a Stage II narrowing of the eyes and icing up of the voice and informed me that “he” was the aforementioned seething blanket of vermin.
I told my wife to think of our houseguests / mouseguests less as a seething blanket of vermin and more like little, fuzzy herds of wildebeests migrating up the Transvaal of our crawlspace.
Perhaps not surprisingly, my wife was unwilling to adopt this philosophical perspective and told me to get rid of the mice, or – as she so eloquently put it, I would be migrating to the Transvaal.
I sighed and prepared to initiate our Rodent Relocation Initiative, or as I call it, RRI.
You see, there is a slight hitch when it comes to dealing with mice in our family. My wife, while firmly of the eek-eek-get-rid-of-it school of thought, mouse-wise, is also well aware of how cute they can be with their fuzzy little paws, velvet ears and black button eyes and really can’t deal with the guilt incurred when their tiny skulls get smashed to marmalade by a mousetrap. Poison is even worse, because she vividly imagines some poor mouse staggering home to his little home in the wall and giving a death-bed speech to his wife and hundreds of children, who will soon be orphans before staggering around and collapsing to the music of tiny violins.
Also, he’d probably die in the wall and make the house all stinky.
So, in the end, it fell to me as Man Of The House to protect my family from wild beasts, be they ever so fuzzy, and I had to search through our dark, mouse-ridden basement to find a live-capture trap. After some serious consideration, I decided to bate it with Cheez-Its.
The next morning we had a mouse.
I drove him a mile or so away and let him go with a small snack to tide him over until he got an apartment or something, then went home and set up the trap again.
And caught another mouse.
The next day I caught another.
And the following day.
And the day after that.
Eventually, I started to wonder if I was catching the same mouse over and over again, because – at the risk of offending any mice who might be reading this – you all look alike to me. I decided to take my mice for longer car rides. I have started taking the mice to work with me. I work about an hour’s drive from home, so unless these mice start standing on the side of the road with their little, clawed thumbs out, they are unlikely to get back to my house.
(I do realize that this kind of confidence is not only unwarranted, but probably dangerous. It would be just my luck to get a Cape Fear type of mouse who would cling to the undercarriage of my car and wreak his vengeance on me and my family. If you hear of us coming to a bad end on a houseboat somewhere, it was because we never got around to getting a cat.)
Now my wife is more-or-less happy, the mice are more-or-less alive and a town thirty miles away has gained some furry new residents, so everything should be hunky-dory, right? You’d think so. If, that is, you hadn’t considered the guilt-generating capability of a small mouse crouching and looking up at you with moist, black eyes, shivering in a parking lot at six in the morning.
I spent most of the day after my first workplace RRI completely distracted, consumed with thoughts of a homeless mouse hunched over, warming himself over a fire in a tiny trashcan, his collection of acorns, seeds and dandelion fluff stashed away in a tiny, little shopping cart.
Things got better the next day, though. As I released my second mouse, it occurred to me that these two mice not only must know each other, they were probably litter-mates. I could imagine them stumbling into each other in the woods and their previously terrified mouse faces breaking out into expressions of rodent joy.
“Fuzzy!” one might exclaim as he rushed toward his brother.
