Today while we were eating lunch Bob noticed our Labrador, Damsi, sniffing around the wooden rocker in the living room. “What do you think he’s sniffing at?” Bob asked.
“Probably a mouse,” I said, mostly serious because recently we’d found some toilet paper gnawed over and also because we live on forty acres that are partially wooded, next to farm animals.
So Bob gets up and walks over and then screams, “Oh! My! God! A MOUSE!” And he perches like he’s going to make a run for it.
I walk over and inspect it. It’s the tiniest mouse I’ve ever seen. And it’s dead. “Bob, it’s dead,” I say. “Just get a tissue and get rid of it.”
Bob looks a little panicked but he goes out to the garage and in a couple of minutes returns with the largest of our four shovels, along with a relatively large gardening spade. When I question my husband, he tells me he was going to take the mouse into the woods. “OK,” I say, “but it isn’t going to come back to life and crawl up the shovel handle. Plus, you’re taking the trash out today so you could really just throw him away.” Bob looks uncertain but he complies.
Since moving back to Southern Illinois last year (my home), Bob has decided he wants to be a farmer and now I’m unsure if I should tell him that the mice in our house? They come from that field he wants to farm. Honestly, though, Bob doesn’t really want to farm. He just wants a tractor. Every time we pass a display of tractors Bob visually sorts through them. Recently he’s had his eye on one that has been compared to a mining machine and he wants all the doohickeys that come with it, even though neither of us have any idea what any of them are used for. He wants one with a cab and air conditioning. Thankfully, we can’t afford a tractor.
That mouse incident is even more ironic since we just moved here from the mountains of Colorado. A bear crawled through our window. Another bear plastered his face against my office window, scaring the crap out of my dogs, who were lying just below the window on a big ottoman. Bears lumbered across our property from time to time, and Bob and I occasionally saw them when we hiked. One time a mountain lion brought down a moose in our next door neighbor’s yard and it lay there for a few weeks before they could get someone to haul it off.
In comparison a mouse hardly seems a threat to our safety, although yes, I know, they carry diseases. But this one was so tiny that even Damsi sniffed it and walked away.
I remember having mice sneak into our house when I was growing up. My parents were fans of d-CON and of course, after the mouse ate it, it would crawl into a back corner where we couldn’t get to it and our house would smell like rotten beans for several days. Sometimes dad would find one live, scampering across the house, and he’d sweep it up in his bare hands, chase me around the living room for five or ten seconds, then flush it down the toilet.
Dad got his practice with mice at the coal mines, where he worked all of his life. He had a boss named Arlie who he said was terrified of mice, so naturally my dad would catch one and put it in Arlie’s toothpick box so that when Arlie opened it up, the mouse would jump out at him.
“I’ll kill the guy who done this!” Arlie would rave. “Kill him!” And while Arlie was in the bathroom composing himself, my dad would catch another mouse and put it back inside the toothpick box and the dance and threats would start all over again.
A few minutes ago Bob arrived home with an armload of mouse traps. I won’t let him put out d-CON or traps that snap a mouse’s neck or those sticky things where the little critters sometimes pull their own legs off trying to get loose. But I get it that we can’t have little rodents running around so I relent as long as they’re the little boxes where they get trapped and either die or get released back into the field.
I just know that once Bob figures out how many mice are out there, he’ll probably decide once and for all that we’ll hire someone to mow all of this grass. Either that or I’d better watch my step. We just may end up with a field full of mouse traps.