SuperMouse Terrorizes Minneapolis Household

We are under assault, my friends. By a mouse who apparently thinks it is a member of our family now, or wants to be. I became aware of its presence in early January, when I decided to make a caprese salad. I reached for a tomato I had sitting on the kitchen counter, and saw that sometime in the night, something had eaten half of it. Hm, I thought, A mouse. Gross. Ah, well, kitty will take care of it.

Kitty did NOT take care of it.

Two weeks later, I was stirring a pot of soup when suddenly the mouse darted across the stove top. Actually, it was super fast; the only thing I saw was its butt and tail disappear in that crack on the top of the stove. I screamed bloody murder. Unfortunately, I was talking to my dad on the phone at the time. I'm sure he was very, very proud of his spawn.

See, I can handle knowing there is a mouse. But OMG, I cannot handle seeing the mouse. I cannot act rationally around rodents. Witness 20-year-old Anna, living in her basement apartment in St. Paul, aunt & uncle live upstairs. At 2 a.m., she is reading on the sofa when she hears a high-pitched squeak. She sees a vole nosing around near the bottom of the steps. She freezes. Blood stops flowing. Shallow breaths. After many minutes, she works up the courage to grab a box. After many more minutes, she manages to bring the box down on the vole, with the intent to trap it. But she actually brings the side of the box down ON the vole, squishing it. She tries not to puke. She panics; brings the box down again. Same result. On the third try, she manages to trap the vole under the box. She piles a bunch of books on top of the box. She backs away slowly, sits on the couch, refuses to take her eyes off the box. What she is afraid of, exactly, we cannot say...but it seems to be something along the lines of if I don't keep watching this box all night, that vole is going to gnaw its way through it, find me in my bed and chew my eyes out while I sleep. Twenty-year-old Anna sits, paralyzed, eyes transfixed on the box, until her uncle wakes up, around 6 a.m. She shouts up to him, and he came downstairs to rescue her. When he lifts the box, a dead vole is found underneath. Though an autopsy was never performed on this sorry creature, it is assumed that it was basically smushed to death during the botched trapping attempts. (The vole resurfaces on the hood of her car later that day; uncle Kevin can be kind of a jerk.)

Needless to say, in this house, I am responsible for insects, and Shad is responsible for rodents.

Anyway, back to the SuperMouse. I complain to Shad that we have a mouse. "I know," he says. "It's been around for several weeks."

"Well, I need to you to kill it."

"You know I don't kill mice."

Here I should explain the mouse-hunting procedure in our house. First, probably because we have a cat, we don't get them very often. Shad is responsible for the mice, but he refuses to kill them. So what happens is that he and the worthless cat hunt the mice together and then he catches the mouse alive and puts it in the alley (where, presumably it finds its way back inside eventually and the process repeats). The cat doesn't kill mice, either, but she can catch them sometimes. She keeps them alive and bats them around, and eventually, I think, brings them to Shad.

Shad is not displaying an appropriate level of concern about this issue. His main attitude seems to be actual admiration for the mouse, since it is gutsy enough to prance across the stove while I am cooking.

We have a little Come-to-Jesus meeting about the mouse. It is interfering with my quality of life. I cannot cook with mice scampering across the stove. Shad's position is that the mouse is not causing any problems; the cat is probably dirtier than the mouse is; humans have taken over the animals' natural habitat and the least we can do is share our resources with them; it's cold outside for the poor little mousie; we can cohabitate peacefully with the creature, etc. He challenges me to name one disease that we could get from the mouse. Rabies? He says no.

I finally convince him to buy a live trap. The trap doesn't work. We add a couple of good ol' neck-breaking snap-traps, which pleases me greatly. But these traps do not work either. Shad decides to start baiting them with my chili. "This guy really likes your chili," he says. He is actually serious. I swear to God, my spouse has befriended this mouse. He tells me a story about how he was watching TV and the mouse jumped into the empty popcorn bowl and started nosing around the kernels. I picture him sitting on the couch next to the mouse, he with his popcorn, the mouse with a teeny little bowl of its own, Shad points to the movie--You see that? The mouse squeaks, nods, tosses a handful of popcorn in its mouth.

I don't think the mouse likes my chili. We go back to peanut butter. Still nothing. The mouse gets gutsier (or, possibly, because I was spending more time at home, I hear it rustling around more). I become convinced that the worthless cat is in cahoots with the mouse. Together they are living off of our bounty. She actually pretents to stalk the mouse. It is so sick. Does she really expect me to believe she has spent every day of the past couple months lurping near the kitchen hunting that mouse? She is just keeping up appearances.

One day last week, I opened the refrigerator and realized that everything was warm. I opened the freezer, and everything was thawed. Totally thawed. I threw out four garbage bags of ruined food; lots of good meat; meals I had prepared and frozen; it was sad, sad, sad. As I stood in my kitchen basking in the aroma of raw chicken, I thought, I bet that damn mouse broke my refrigerator.

My suspicions were confirmed by the repairman. He told me the mouse had chewed through some wires and handed me a bill for $161. Investigation revealed that the mouse had chewed through a bunch of insulation and had hoarded probably a full pound of almonds in a little nest under the refigerator.

So, I'm getting pretty crabby about this little bastard. If you count the repair bill, all of the food I had to throw away, and that bag of fancy organic almonds from the co-op, he's cost us upwards of $400. And it REFUSES TO DIE! We have something like 10 traps set up now, but they are useless. It's a wily little bugger. And actually, I think it has gotten pretty fat, possibly too fat to catch in the little traps. I'm entertaining the idea of lying in wait with a .22 to take him out.