This Side of the Pond

You don’t usually see the mouse in your house, just the mess it leaves behind – which is why I really wasn’t expecting one to run across my kitchen floor and sit in the doorway.

We’ve had issues with vermin before, so this wasn’t good news – during the last battle, it took a process of elimination over several months to figure out where the blasted things were coming from.

But those mice weren’t this brazen.

This mouse was staring at me across the living room.

I was so surprised that, “A mouse is looking at me,” was the best I could manage, which only served to tip my husband into a similar state of confusion.

The mouse, unbothered by the fuss, trotted down the hall and into the mudroom.

We all know the drill when a mouse is spotted: set traps and look for the infiltration point. After a hurried discussion, we concluded that our visitor had wandered through the back door while we were emptying the dogs, so we put a tentative pin in the second goal.

This was because chances were high that the mouse had been recently displaced from his home. The husband was tasked with dismantling the vegetable beds earlier in the week and told me he’d seen so many rodents skittering for safety as the sunflowers toppled that he’d felt like the villain in a children’s movie.

For the first goal, we placed a trap smeared in peanut butter on the mudroom floor. The dogs were understandably interested in a free dollop of their favorite treat, so we were obliged to disappoint them by closing doors around both the mouse and its fate. This was going to be tricky enough without having to pry a trap from the tongue of an energetic pup.

And then we waited.

An hour later, the husband went to check the trap. On the plus side, it had done its job of enticing our infiltrator. Unfortunately he came back in cursing under his breath.

We had used organic peanut butter, which we use to administer daily medication to our dog because it’s low in sugar. As it turns out, it’s runnier than the normal kind, so the mouse enjoyed our offering without triggering the trap.

I pointed out that we had not only failed to get rid of the mouse, but welcomed it into our living space with a hearty snack.

I should also note that all of this happened while two of our dogs sat around looking deeply confused and the one we consider our best hunter, who spends her afternoons patrolling the rock wall in the yard in the hopes of rooting out voles, snoozed on a chair. Our outside cat patiently waited for his dinner at the furthest door from the mouse.

Absolutely useless. I blame the parents.

By this point, it was getting close to time for bed, and neither of us wanted to be stared at by a rodent in our sleep. Most of the time when we get little visitors, they prefer to be at the kitchen end of the house for obvious reasons, but this one was about to be stuck with us at the snoozing end.

While the husband got the trap reset, I went to see if I could figure out its hiding place. I was fairly certain it was still in the mud room, but it wasn’t going to be easy to see.

Like most mud rooms, ours tends to end up being used as temporary storage for all the things that need to go outside but haven’t, and all the things that were outside but needed to come inside. Also, shoes.

As I leaned down to look under the pile, two tiny eyes stared back at me. There was the mouse, crouched by a boot, and I swear it was looking at me beseechingly.

I considered this further proof that the mouse was about as pleased with its predicament as its human hosts. Call me a sentimental fool (the look my husband gave me certainly did), but I couldn’t shake the feeling it hadn’t meant to come indoors and would deeply appreciate our assistance in fixing its error.

This led me to concoct a plan. We would open the door to the yard and bang on the pile with a stick until the mouse skittered out from its hiding place and shot into the great outdoors.

Simple, no? I explained it to the husband, who heaved a sigh and went to fetch his gloves.

Meanwhile, I stood behind the door leading to the bedroom area, my job to watch for the mouse to appear underneath and somehow explain in terms it could understand that it had once again gone the wrong way.

From the other side of the door, I could hear the husband muttering at the mouse, which didn’t seem inclined to make an appearance. I could also hear the occasional soft bang, the shuffling of footsteps, scraping and sliding and some noises I couldn’t identify.

All of this went on long enough that I was considering just going to bed and asking him how it went in the morning.

But eventually, my plan worked. And let me tell you, nobody is more surprised about this than me.

I came back into the mudroom to discover what it had taken for my husband to rid us of rodent. He’d managed to get it to make an appearance, but it kept running back underneath the pile as soon as it saw looming human.

The situation escalated to the point he had built barricades using my shoes leading from the mouse’s hiding spot to the door and corralled it using a walking stick, a bokken and – inexplicably – a baking tray.

This did not redeem his image as the villain of a kids’ movie.

Still, I slept pretty well that night, safe in the knowledge that nothing would be nibbling on my toes. But don’t worry, we’re not daft: like proper villains, we have traps set up in every corner of our lair.