This Side of the Pond

Our home is under siege, defenses have been eroded, damage has been done and its occupants are living in terror. All of which wouldn’t be too much of an embarrassment if it weren’t that our attackers are three inches long.

We have mice, for the first time since I moved to this country. However it is that we’ve managed to live out in the sticks for this long without spotting a single rodent, it doesn’t seem to be working any more.

I was first alerted to the infiltration late one evening, as I sat in the back room curled up with a book. “Huh,” said my husband. “We’ve got a mouse.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It’s looking at me,” he said, and he was right.

Sure enough, there was the mouse, sat on the top shelf of a cubby, up high next to the microwave. Its twitching nose peeked out from between a salt shaker in the shape of a cow and a bag of dog breath fresheners that hadn’t gone down well with the offending pooch.

From this lofty position, it could observe all the territory it intended to claim while the cat snoozed quietly in a corner. I should point out that the cat couldn’t have been more than six feet from its natural prey, but didn’t move a whisker to do anything about it.

I had just hung a bath towel over a cabinet because it was slightly damp when it came out of the dryer, and the cat had predictably claimed it for a bed when nobody was looking. This was not the first proof we’ve had that the cat is awful at being a cat, but it was probably the most concrete.

The mouse was likewise undeterred by the presence of its most formidable enemy, having worked out long before we did that she isn’t much of a huntress. I think, across the years, she’s managed to catch four bugs, but I gave up on her predatory nature the day I watched her let a spider run across her paws.

Obstacle one had been cleared: the guard at the door was fast asleep. The mouse was not bothered by the buzzy thing we have plugged into the bathroom wall, either.

I’m not entirely clear what the buzzy thing does, which I’m assuming you’ve already guessed, but the general idea appears to be that it makes a noise the mouse doesn’t like. It’s been in the house longer than I have and I’ve never paid it much mind, but it had clearly given up the ghost.

Obstacle three had been bypassed long before the mouse appeared in the kitchen. The vermin seems to have come in through the shop to which our apartment is attached, which means it avoided the outside cat completely.

Plank (so named because he’s as thick as two short ones) appeared one day on our doorstep looking hungry and distinctly cross-eyed. For the first month or so after we agreed to feed him, he would announce it was dinnertime by banging his head against the patio door.

He would then stick his face in the bowl and chase it back and forth across the deck until it fell on the grass, which confused him even more. I feel great kinship to this cat.

Plank is a better hunter than Tinker, but his territory is at the front of the house. I don’t know if the mouse spotted him while he had his face covered by bowl or had other plans from the start, but it chose to use the back door either way.

The final obstacle should also have been the most difficult: there wasn’t supposed to be a way for a mouse to get in. There hadn’t been before our new friend put in an appearance, but things had recently changed.

We’ve been doing some remodeling, you see, including the transformation of one section of the shop into a bedroom and another part of the building into a studio for my artistic spouse. A couple of mice had already explored the studio and been shooed away, but this one had found an entry point through a vent above the microwave.

So while Mouse One was quickly encouraged to leave the premises, we all know the golden rule that, where one rodent appears, there are bound to be more waiting in the wings. We also know a mouse who has discovered your pantry is not going to go back to house-hunting, so the dog was told she would just have to suffer stinky breath and the top shelf was cleared to hold a semi-permanent trap.

“We’ve got a second mouse,” said the husband a few days later.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“It’s looking at me,” he said, and he was right.

We seemed to reach the end of the rodent stream about a week ago, but there must have been gossip out in the fields. Just as we began to celebrate a full day without the trap going off, the cavalry arrived…but, unfortunately, it wasn’t out cavalry.

It started as scratching and scritching on the outside wall, which is always an alarming thing to hear, and ended as a battle between man and unidentified vermin. Our best guess is a squirrel cache, which would explain why it refused to be chased away when we banged on the wall with a broom, but it could just as easily be the next mouse family gearing up for an attack.

It’s been a long road of unexpected noises, but I remain determinedly optimistic that we’re close to its end. Meanwhile, I feel compelled to make something clear to the rodent population of Crook County.

I know there’s been a trend over the past few years for an “elf on the shelf” to appear at Christmas, and I do think that’s a lovely idea. “Mouse in a cubby”, however, is simply not an acceptable substitute.