Mouse Hunting

Editor’s note: This is an essay from many years ago — when we moved into our first house. Some of you may have read this before, but it seemed like something that belonged on Sparks. It is timely for the Wrathalls since they’re currently working on terminating some unwelcome rodents with extreme prejudice.

I broke the bad news to my wife last Monday.

“I think we’ve got a mouse in the house.”

“How do you know?”

“Mouse poop. A bunch of it around the kitchen sink.”

It seemed a little unfair. I could understand having mice if we’d just bought a 50-year-old house — but a brand-new house seems like it shouldn’t be rodent-infested. I’ve come to accept spider infested — easily over 100 spiders killed in the few months we’ve lived here. Not many other kinds of bugs, though.

Looking back on how gingerly I moved around the kitchen that morning is kind of comical now. I imagined that at any moment opening a cupboard or moving anything would send a mouse scurrying across the floor or counter-top. My wife probably spent less than 30 seconds in the kitchen that whole day.

I picked up a trap at the grocery store on my way home from work. It was the covered kind that tries to hide the technical details; spring-loaded lever on the back, and a cute cartoonish mouse hole on the front. Not that I had convinced myself that I would actually use it. Sure, I’ve killed a lot of ants, bees and spiders in my days, but when I shot a blue-bird out of our cherry tree as a boy, the guilt was a little too much. A mouse seemed more in the blue-bird category.

Poop was its undoing, though. It’s hard to eat breakfast with visions of mouse droppings in your head, lodged there from just having wiped them off the counter again. My delicate motion in the kitchen started to turn to bafflement. I started opening and moving everything. If that mouse was still in the kitchen, it had a darn good hiding place. And how on earth did it get up on the counter? Can mice jump that high? Did it come out of the sink? It definitely wasn’t hiding in the toaster or the popcorn popper.

The first night I set the trap was almost a pretense. I set it on the floor by the pantry. Maybe it came out of there. Still, I had a little trouble getting to sleep anticipating the snap of the trap. Sort of like waiting for the puff of air in a glaucoma test.

The trap was empty in the morning — the little ball of cheese sitting where I left it, so I moved it up onto the counter by the sink for the next night. Lying in bed before going to sleep again had that nervous expectation.

There were more mouse droppings in the morning, and trap was still cocked. I started to think that mice liking cheese was a myth until I discovered that there was no longer any cheese in the trap. The fuzzy little mouse in my mind transformed into a cunning rodent lounging in my kitchen with a stomach full of cheddar. I wasn’t particularly impressed with my mouse trap at that moment. The box had said, “The Better Mouse Trap”. Hah. I started testing it with a pencil.

“Hello?” Tap, tap, tap.

“I’m a mouse coming to get the cheese!” Tap, tap, tap.

“Hello? Yummy cheese here!” Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap… SNAP!

I didn’t think a mouse would be that persistent.

After a little experimentation, I discovered that the trigger mechanism could be pushed down slowly to a point just on the verge of springing the trap. I thought I had it sensitive enough that a heavy breath would set it off the next night. A little more cheese in the bait well and I was pretty confident something would happen.

Unfortunately, what happened was remarkably like the day before: cheese on the counter ex post digestion, and an empty, unsprung mousetrap in the middle of it all. The mouse was definitely moving from the blue-bird category into the ant, bee, and spider category. Being optimistic, I figured the mouse was getting comfortable with that cheese dispenser thing, and I might not even have to bother with bait the next night.

But then, after a self-denigrating tale to my coworkers of man vs. mouse, I learned the secret of mouse-catching. These guys gave me some advice so good that it should have been written on the side of the trap: peanut butter.

You can’t just quickly steal a whole glob of peanut butter like you can a piece of cheese. It has a viscosity unfavorable for a meal to go. I spread a nice, thick layer of it right on the trap’s trigger mechanism and found that its weight alone made the trap a much more sensitive device.

Lying in bed at about 11:20 that night, I finally heard the snap and a slight rustling noise that I hoped were the throes of death — a hope not inspired by my desire for triumph. You see, when I shot that blue-bird from the cherry tree, it wasn’t dead, and the thought of a wounded mouse in a trap made me shudder.

“I think we just got the mouse,” I said to my wife.

“Hmmmph,” she managed from the far edge of sleep.

In the morning I peeked down from the stairs to see a still tail and hindquarters protruding from the trap. It certainly looked dead, despite the shiny black eyes, but I don’t mind saying that it took a great deal of willpower to shake it loose from the trap into the garbage. I probably washed my hands five or six times, and all I had touched was the trap itself. At breakfast I kept imagining a spring-loaded metal bar smashing my face into my Cheerios.

What a relief it was, though, to know that it was gone. We cleaned the kitchen thoroughly the next day, and it was the first time in a week that I felt like I could set a fork on the counter.

On Monday morning, a week after the first signs of a mouse, I started to feel uncomfortable again. A bowl with left-over corn from Sunday’s dinner, lazily left on the counter over night, was strangely devoid of corn. I checked around the sink and found the familiar signs of a mouse’s passing.

One mouse has a sense of closure. You detect it, you get rid of it, and the problem is solved. Two mice, though, is uncomfortably open-ended. If two, why not three or ten or twenty?

Peanut butter was quickly mouse #2’s undoing as well, but this time the disposal process was a little less mentally difficult.

Tuesday morning will hopefully mark a week without a sign of the hypothetical mouse #3. I’m starting to believe that there were only two, and feel again the relief after having gotten the first one. My only regret is the lingering mystery of where they hid and how they climbed onto the counters.