Of Mice and Men

We have a mouse. It’s a house mouse, so it probably doesn’t carry any diseases or anything, but still: unwelcome.

It turned up a few days ago. I was sitting on the floor with the computer; something caught my eye and I looked up to find a little mouse sitting in my doorway, just staring. I lunged at it (what I thought I was going to do, I have no idea; this is an instinct I didn’t know I had) and it took off into my roommate’s bedroom.

An hour or so later, it was back and again, just staring. This time, I suppressed my urge to jump at it and just looked it in the eye. I sort of expected it to take off again, but it looked back at me. Mouse has an attitude.

Since it was late at night and we had no mousetraps, I rigged up a Rube Goldberg-esque trap of my own, involving a ramp, a platform and a paper towel tube with peanut butter at the end which the mouse was supposed to walk into, shifting the center of gravity of the rig off the edge of the platform and tipping mouse and tube into a conveniently placed trash bin. The plan was to catch the mouse alive and then turn it loose in the park, where it would be free to live a happy mousey life or more probably get eaten by a snake or something.

It worked, actually, but apparently mice can climb, so it just sort of fell in, ate the peanut butter out of the tube and climbed back out again.

Also: mice can be trained, it turns out. I reset the trap and sat and watched it this time, ready to put something over the top of the bin when it got in there. Mouse emerged from my closet, where he had taken refuge, looked at me, climbed up the ramp, looked at the tube, looked back at me, foofed out his whiskers, which might be the mouse equivalent of sticking out your tongue or perhaps giving the finger, and turned and headed back down the ramp and into Roommate’s room.

So, I got a real trap, but the mouse seems to be avoiding it. (Mouse poo all around the trap, but no mouse to be found. Nice.) Instead, it foraged in my trash can last night as I slept, which prompted me to jump out of bed and try to put something over the bin, but my wild sheet tossing and scrambling across the room tipped it off, I guess, and it was gone by the time I got there. Now the mouse trap is in the trash can. Success? We’ll see.