I had an interesting day the Monday before Christmas— previously a creature had been stirring late at night and then one night not so late. I was grinding the beans for my morning coffee before turning in when a small gray mouse ran across the floor and disappeared. We’d had the exterminator come a few weeks previous, he serviced the house and the outside sheds, the basement, basically everywhere. He assured us we had a mouse or two, as he said, every house has a mouse its just a matter of whether or not you see it.
So he did his service and left with a warning that they would get slightly worse before they got better, apparently whatever he did would make them go crazy which lead to my encounter one Friday night. So to Amazon I went to find a humane mouse trap (for those applauding my concern for mouse life be warned it won’t end well). I’ll be honest with you, I was skeptical this would work, this plastic tube which you placed a piece of cheese, or in our case a small piece of dog food at one end, and you propped the front door open s when the mouse would enter the trap it would trigger the switch and he’d be caught.
The reviews were excellent, so good in fact that Veronica was convinced they were fake. We set the trap and went to bed. About fifteen minutes later she went back downstairs to make sure she had emptied the drier and she called up to me that we had caught him.
There he was in the trap— small, cute, incredily long tail, and frightened.
I added a piece of fresh cheese to the trap for him to snack on as I set him in the mud room— I’d deal with him in the morning.
Which led me to the interesting Monday before Christmas— it was unseasonably warm and raining harder than it had done for months— literally a hurricane that would have been a blizzard if we had normal December temps, but since it was in the 50s it was just rain.
My friend the mouse had eaten most of the cheese I’d given him. I took him outside and drowned him in the bucket of very cold water before saying a few words and pouring his corpse into a nearby sewer drain.
You see the mouse had crossed a line. He had dared to make an appearance in my presence. If he’d remained hidden in his nature I may have well driven him and his trap several miles away on a mission of errands and dumped him in a field somewhere. There is a part of me that would be concerned that like the stories of a loyal dog that he might find his way back, but the transgression sealed the pact and I pronounced a sentence of death as his punishment.
RIP Mickey.