If you type in the words “how to catch a mouse” in the Google search engine, you will find 48,400,000 results pop up. What!? Forty-eight million results? Must be a lot of people in the world trying to get rid of a lot of mice.
I’m one of them, except in my case, it’s just one.
The saga of the mouse in the house began Sunday. My daughter, Megan, and I spent the morning in the Tri-Cities shopping for vinyl records, books and DVDs (hey – we shopped Hermiston first, but they didn’t have what we were looking for, OK! Sorry, just a pre-emptive defense of spending our money out of town). We bought a few things, had a nice lunch and watched some of the air show over the Columbia River that was going on between heats of the Columbia Cup.
It was a great morning and it was still early in the afternoon when we got back home. That was good, I thought to myself. I was tired and wanted to take a nice afternoon nap. Just as I kicked off my shoes and flopped onto the bed, Megan came in and said, “Mom wants you.” I instinctively put on an elaborate show of effort, taking great pains to pull myself off the bed, complete with a heavy sigh to indicate this had better be important because I was just about to fall into a deep, coma-like sleep that I so desperately needed. (Note: Megan had already left the room and Michelle was in another part of the house, so I had no audience for this, but a real pro always gives his or her best performance).
I trudge my way into the family room and was greeted with these four words:
“We have a mouse.”
Where?
“In the closet.”
Great. This is a walk-in closet with three large shelves covering two of the walls filled with what appears to be 90 percent of our belongings. There’s about two square feet of space to actually walk around in. The mouse could be anywhere. Michelle said she was moving something on one of the shelves when a mouse scurried from behind a box, Michelle screamed, the mouse jumped and squeaked and scurried back out of sight.
This should have been an easy fix for someone with half a brain. The mouse was in an enclosed space. All I had to do was set up a couple of traps and wait for the inevitable. I, however, have what is likely only 25 to 30 percent of my brain functioning properly, so this turned out to be much more work than it ever should have.
It was at this point that I turned to my constant companion, Mr. Google. I decided I really didn’t want to see a dead mouse with its back snapped in half and so, with the encouragement of my daughter, went looking for a non-lethal way to catch it so we could let it loose in some field somewhere. That’s when I saw the 48,400,000 results on Google. I quickly found one that appealed to me. It called for putting some peanut butter at the end of paper towel tube, balancing it on the edge of a shelf and placing a large container directly underneath the tube. The mouse would walk inside the tube to get to the peanut butter and as it got toward the end, the tube – and mouse – would fall into the container (the container had to be tall enough to prevent the mouse from being able to jump out). Ha!
This might have worked well for someone who had even a modicum of patience. I gave it about two hours and, having found no tube or mouse in the container, gave up on that idea. Then I hit upon what I knew would be a sure-fire solution. I went outside and got one of our four cats . . . OK, before I go on, I need to go off on a little tangent and vent:
How in the world can a mouse get inside a house that has four cats! Not one cat. Not two cats. Not even three cats – but FOUR CATS! And I know they are predatory carnivores because they leave bird carcasses in the yard all the time! We have no complaints about the birds, but they drop like flies.
It was at this point that I gave up looking into any of the other 47,999,999 possible options Mr. Google had presented to me. (Remember, while assessing just how big of an idiot I am, you need to keep in mind that the simple mouse trap option was available to me all along.)
“OK,” I said with a badly misplaced air of authority. “We’re going to remove things from the closet one piece at a time until I have the mouse trapped (ha!) and I’ll throw a box over it (ha! ha!!) and Megan and I will release it in some far away field.” (It was here where someone needed to hit me over the head with a brick but, unfortunately, no one did, so the blame for what we went through is not entirely my fault. Just sayin’.)
Little by little, box by box, item by item, piece by piece, we began emptying the closet. Christmas decorations. Halloween stuff. What literally seemed like tons of Girl Scouts stuff. Suitcases. Office supplies. School supplies. Boxes of my old comic books from my childhood. A crib that hasn’t been used in 14 years. Backpacks. A footlocker filled with more mementoes from my childhood. More boxes of stuff.
At one point, with the closet half empty, Michelle went out back to change the sprinklers. While she was out, I removed another box, the mouse scurried out, I let out some noise (it WAS NOT a scream, I swear), the mouse jumped and squeaked and scurried back behind something else. Ah ha! I got you now, I said to the mouse. (Insert your own laugh here. I’m out of them.) I slowly removed a couple more items.
“Move them quickly,” Michelle said after she came back in and I told her the good news. “Otherwise you’re giving the mouse time to scoot behind something else.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’ve gotten us this far, haven’t I?” I think those may have been the same words Custer uttered at Little Big Horn.
“Yes, you have,” Michelle replied in a rather accusatory tone.
There was one last box in the corner of the shelf. I truly had the mouse trapped this time. I had my would-be mouse container in one hand and with the other, I slowly moved the box away from the wall and . . .
nothing. No mouse. What the hell? Great. He must have moved down to the bottom shelf. Fast forward and 30 minutes later, the closet was empty – no boxes, no footlocker, no backpacks, no mouse – nothing. There are no holes in the wall, so how did the mouse get away? We had the doorway blocked tight with boxes and a suitcase so if he jumped over them, we’d have seen him, right?
It was then – and only then – that I decided to do what I should have done from the very beginning. I called a realtor and said we’re selling the house. No, I didn’t actually do that, although that might have been an easier solution than what I’d been doing for the past few hours. I admitted defeat and went to the store and bought six mouse traps. Two were placed in the closet, baited with peanut butter and a bit of cheese, and the rest were placed in other parts of the house. Snapped back or not, I was going to rid the house of this holy terror.
Monday morning, we check the traps and, again, no mouse! This morning, we check and traps and still no mouse! I can only surmise that it must have squeezed through our barrier and escaped out the door next to the closet when Michelle came back in during the time I thought I was cornering it. Sunday night I had texted a friend of mine and told him about our misadventures. He texted back and said what I had already come to learn:
“Them’s sneaky bastards.”
On an entirely unrelated note, the Kane family has four cats to give away. In the spirit of full disclosure, however, they don’t get along, can’t catch a mouse, but otherwise make good pets. Call to arrange pick-up time.
