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To Catch A Mouse

The Source

I know that the Internet is good for piddling little things like finding lost relatives, looking up remedies for life-endangering diseases, and fireproofing your home, but I reserve my Google searches for the real crises in life…like finding the perfect bait for a mouse trap. The first advice most sites give is “plug any hole at which a mouse might enter your house.” In my house this is laughable. My home has holes that I could squeeze through. The local pest control service in its effort to kill any bug that even thinks about approaching my home seems to leave a gaseous trail that discourages most rodents, but every year when the temperature dives I begin to hear the prancing and pawing of each little mouse foot in my kitchen at night. So…I look up “mouse bait” in the nearest search engine. Peanut butter seems to be the leading vote getter. A recent entry was a boon to the pork industry: “Smash up a half slice of bacon with more peanut butter. They will lick the peanut butter off then bite into the bacon and SNAP!” Other sources recommend birdseed. Some tout the drawing power of dried cat food. (What kind of food do you feed a dried cat?) My dad swears by a sprinkling of flour. I once bought one of those glue boards that catch the culprit live and squealing, but the prospect of rising at two in the morning, walking out into the freezing night in my boxers to scrape a stuck mouse off the board…only to have the little bugger no doubt turn around and come back inside….well, that didn’t work. I recently bought a live trap that slams the door shut on Mickey once he comes in to eat the granola, but so far my little mouse hotel has had nothing but a “Vacancy” sign. Like you need to know this, but mice achieve sexual maturity at two months, produce 8 litters a year, each litter bearing 4-7 pups. If I could add I’ll tell you that’s a whole lot of mice. Their main feeding times are just before dawn and at dusk but they tend to nibble all day long. Sound like anyone you know? My problem doesn’t seem to be in finding the ideal bait. The mice absolutely enjoy whatever bait I set out for them. Again, finding a delicious bait is not the problem. I’ve no doubt that the word has already gone around my mouse neighborhood that I serve only the very best cuisine. (“Tired of just peanut butter? The guy next door is serving bacon with his!”) It’s getting the little rascals to stick their neck into the trap and trip the trigger. My theory: they work in pairs. Build a small stockade of four V-traps, each with the baited end pointing inward. There is no way in God’s creation that a mouse can lick trap number one without standing atop traps 2, 3 and 4. Unless he has help. He’s got to have help. If I placed a video camera in the right place I’m sure I could capture this. Mickey bites onto the end of Minnie’s tail, then stands on my raisin can and lowers her onto the traps. After a couple of delicious dips into the bait, the two mice twitch positions. They do this all night long, thus explaining the faint sounds of giggling that I hear in the kitchen every night. Knowing this is surely their strategy, I carefully remove anything that might serve as their holding platform. They bring their own. I’m sure they do. …a small, lightweight diving board sort of affair that they move into place. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it’s painted bright yellow with the flags of various nations. I wouldn’t doubt that they have little mouse judges sitting atop my bread wrapper holding up scorecards with the Russian mice giving the lowest scores. Of course poison is out of the question since you can never get a mouse to do the decent thing and die on the spot. He’ll always choose an inaccessible nook as his final resting place and you’ll spend the rest of the winter in a hopeless search for the source of the stench. I suppose you could shoot them. I mean, it would play heck with the splash guard on the stove, but…well. My grandpa always drove a new Buick. He’d trade every two years, put couple thousands miles on it driving to church and funerals, then trade for a new one. One day he called to ask if I’d trade my .22 rifle for his twelve-gauge shotgun. Heck yes. He said, “I’ve been shooting your grandma’s cats off the car and the shotgun is so damned hard on the finish.” Sorry, I must go…I hear something in the kitchen.