I first saw him at the weekend. He stuck his mousey nose out from behind my exercise bike. I didn't panic. I'm much bigger than him, after all. As far as household pests go, a mouse is infinitely preferable to almost everything else. In New York, we had roaches. Eurgh. A mouse is
nice compared to that.
I roused Himself from bed, and we chased him around the sitting room, from couch to armchair to bookcase to exercise bike again. He was too fast for us. So the next day, off I went to the hardware shop around the corner.
"Have you any humane mousetraps, please?" I asked the nice youngfella who, I had learned the week before, knew very little about electric drills and probably even less about mousetraps.
Ten minutes of searching through the piles of hardware merchandise later, the youngfella had located some ordinary mousetraps and some poison. Ethical dilemma time. Obviously, I had wanted one of those 'capture' traps. When I caught the mouse, I could release him outside, to meet his slow and messy end at the claws of the rats along the canal, or the cats who sunbathe on the roof of our shed. You know, the humane option.
I took half a dozen ordinary traps home. The Internet informed me that cheese was a myth, propagated by Tom & Jerry. No, you want to bait your mousetraps with peanut butter. So I did. Little globs of peanut butter went on each of the traps, which were secreted around the place - behind the exercise bike, in the kitchen.
Nothing was heard or seen of the mouse for four days. I thought, ooh, we scared him off with our ineffectual chasing. Good riddance. Until last night.
The mouse was spotted scarpering across the kitchen counters. Eww! Thank Jeebus for my love of plastic containers for foodstuffs, and my Monica Gellar habit of always wiping the counter before and after I cook. I baited
two traps with peanut butter and placed them next to the gap behind the dishwasher into which the mouse had dived.
This morning, I came down to find both traps sprung, upside down, and mouseless. The peanut butter was gone. What the hell? Right, my fault, maybe I hadn't set them properly. I re-set one, more carefully this time, moved the other, and went about my day.
This afternoon, I checked them again and found this:
Apologies for the blurry crappiness.
That's right. The trap had been dragged across the counter, and the peanut butter removed
without springing the trap. Yes, those are teeth marks, or claw marks, or whatever, in the peanut butter.
The trap definitely works. I know this because the first thing I did was incredulously test it, and it sprang closed immediately on my fingers. It hurt like hell. Himself was caught by one as well, when we first set them. It's clear that the mouse is cleverer than both of us.
I am dealing with a goddamn CARTOON mouse here. How the hell did he do that? What am I going to do now?
