And all through the house …
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous Christmas Eve post.]
… a creature was stirring.
On Christmas Eve I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.
A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.
A mouse. Very much stirring.
I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.
But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?
The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.
What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till my son would arrive. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.
Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.
But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.
And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.
I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.
And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):
But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.
I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.
My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is kind of cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.
One of my favorite posts of yours Neo.
Merry Christmas!
Something about the XX chromosome and mice. We had one or two in our apartment earlier in the year. For me a minor annoyance, but for my wife it was highly traumatic. We ended up spending over $1000 on exterminators and contractors to seal up every possible hole in any wall, laying traps all over. My wife was on the verge of moving to a hotel, but eventually, somehow, the mouse or mice disappeared, maybe no longer able to get back in through one of the holes we covered (no corpse was ever found). Still, it took a couple of weeks of no mouse sightings before my wife could relax.
Jimmy:
Only a couple of weeks? That’s pretty good.
My first border collie made great sport of chasing down and killing the mice that came into the house every winter. What fun it was for her! She’d created a job for herself, and it entailed being a predator! At last she could fulfill her destiny as a predator instead of holding back, as she was trained to do with sheep. She also killed all the field mice and chipmunks in the back yard and buried them along the fence. Sometimes she would dig them up and bring them into the house and plop them down proudly at our feet. Tail wagging, eyes bright: sharing the hunt with the alpha, what bliss!
We always praised her effusively, of course.
Merry Christmas y’all!
Looks like it is going to get hot, but not too unbearable. Family surrounds and all the good things are set. Radically blessed and praying the same for you.
Mice in the wild may be cute,but if they enter my space they are treated as the destructive,disease spreading pests they are. Having spent significant time and treasure purging two motor homes, a shed, lawn tractor and other places around the house of the results of their intrusion, no method of extermination is off the table!
Neo;
Have you considered getting a cat??
They are quiet, low maintenance, do not need to be taken on daily walks, cover their own poop and will certainly keep your home rodent free.
They will also catch and kill roaches and other assorted bugs.
Just a suggestion.
I live on a ranch. No crops, just horses and goats. Our twelve cats seem to keep the mice outdoors.
John Tyler:
Sorry, but I don’t like cats, nor do I like being given dead mice as a present
My cousin has 5 horses. She gets feral cats from the local Humane Society to stock her barn. The cats keep the barn mice-free. My cousin says she still leaves food out for her cats. Even on a full stomach, they kill mice. And if there are no mice to kill, they need to be fed.
Several months ago water leaked into my downstairs bathroom and adjacent closet. I found out my next door neighbor had the same problem. I called a plumber who had done the best diagnosis of our boiler room’s pipe configuration. Within five minutes he found the problem. In search of a water source, a mouse/rat had bit into the flexible plastic tubing connecting to my neighbor’s washing machine. (I don’t have a washing machine.)
As a board member of my HOA, I have observed a lot of plumbers. Plumbers have a wide variety of abilities. The best some plumbers can do is to change washers. Other plumbers, such as the one I called, have the 3-d problem-solving ability one associates with engineers. (He would also need good math ability to be an engineer. I assume he has the math ability. In any case, he makes more money as a plumber than most engineers.)
I shared an apartment with a Buddhist for several years. He discovered a rat in a trap I had placed in our bathroom. Due to his religious principles, he could not kill the rat. So I did the honors.
About ten years ago I had occasion with several friends to spend the night in Inyokern, CA. It is a smallish town on the edge of a large military facility and has perhaps a dozen motels, but for some reason the person who was picking up the tab for our overnight stay decided to put us all in one of the fifties-era motels one finds the length of US 395.
This seemed like a nice enough place, albeit very old. We all dropped out bags in our respective rooms and went to a local restaurant.
When we returned from dinner I said goodnight and went to bed as we had an early morning the next day. After brushing my teeth I went to extinguish the light and thought I caught a small movement out of the corner of my eye. Hmm — probably a lone mouse in my room. So I turned off the light and went to bed.
I went right to sleep, but woke up within the hour when I felt something crawling next to me under the covers. Damn! The mouse was back. I turned on the light and saw two mice — one scurrying across the floor toward the corner, and another using the walls that made up the corner of the room to run up as if it was well practiced at this.
Looking over the situation, I decided the mouse in my bed had probably crawled up the blanket, which touched the floor, and gotten into the bed that way, so I pulled the blanket up so it wouldn’t reach the floor.
I fell asleep quickly, but was wakened within an hour by at least one mouse running around the bed again.
I was getting angry, but didn’t have anything to catch mice with, so figured I just had to find a way to keep them out of my bed. I ended up covering myself entirely with the sheet and tucking in under me all the way around.
I don’t know if that kept the mice away, or I just fell into a deep enough sleep that I no longer woke up.
Those fifties era motels along US 395 are picturesque, but they are not mouse-proof!