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Breakfast! Yeah! Caught by me!
My poem "Fasti" is now online at Heliotrope. It takes place in the same city as my story "Time May Be" (Singing Innocence and Experience), with thanks to Ovid and the Basilica di San Clemente. The rest of this post has nothing to do with the calendar.
I feel rather like Krosp. For the last couple of days, there has been a mouse in our kitchen. Or at least there has been something behind the stove that made scrabbling, skittering, scratchily metallic noises with such intensity that I decided either we had a very dedicated mouse or a beaver was trying to chew through the gas main—on occasion, it was loud enough to keep me awake, and I am sleeping a music room, a bathroom, a dining room, and a tangential portion of the living room away from the kitchen. This mouse was hardcore.
Last night, my mother baked two pear cakes. In the half-hour that they were cooling on the countertop beside the stove, I heard the rustling of tin foil and ran into the kitchen in time to see the mouse dart out from under the foil, off the plate, and back behind the stove. We had to throw out both cakes. They were comfort food for my mother and she had used the last of the pears in the house. This was an act of war. I set a trap with a metal mixing bowl, a pencil stub, three inches of green ribbon, and a fragment of pear cake salvaged from the trash, and went to bed.
In the morning, the bowl was down flat against the counter, but when I tapped it gently, there seemed to be no weight inside. The mouse had nibbled just enough of the cake to trip it, but had escaped in the time it took the bowl to fall. I lack mad cat skillz. Just to be sure before I dismantled the trap and left for my doctor's appointment, I lifted the bowl a fingernail's width from the counter—and a long tail whisked out frantically. I slammed the bowl back down. I had a mouse.
I was fairly surprised. And now I had a mouse to remove from the kitchen. On the assumption that mice, like cats, are infinitely compressible when it comes to narrow spaces provided by incautious humans, I unfolded the lid of a cardboard packing box, slid it underneath the bowl—and now I heard the scrabble of tiny claws so intimately familiar to me from the last few nights—tipped it all gently upside down, and carried the bowlful of mouse outside. I did not want to release it into the lot across the street, where our neighbors grow tomatoes and zucchini, because one of my parents' sadder stories from our old house is the week they trapped the same mouse four times in a row. (My father finally marked it with a spot of paint. They had been taking it out into the backyard, whence it scampered promptly back into the house and started eating the breakfast cereal again.) So I walked this one several blocks down to the path that runs around the Arlington Reservoir, set down the bowl, and lifted away the cardboard. I figured the mouse, which had been scratching busily at the inside of the bowl as I walked, would make a leap for it.
It sat there. It blinked immense bead-black eyes at me. It quivered its whiskers. Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous my left foot. It was in a small safe space with a substantial portion of pear cake—what was it going to run from? I had to rap on the bowl a few times with my nails before it realized I was not providing it with an in-flight snack, and then it bounded away across the grass in a manner I associate more with chipmunks or cartoon skunks than with mice.
From the pictures I took on my phone, it seems to have been a white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) or a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). I lean toward the latter, because of the length of the tail, but I was not paying much attention to the finer points of its coloration and the photo quality is terrible; I didn't get a look at its teeth. The point is, it is not currently in my kitchen: and I will set another trap tonight, in case it has cousins it invited in. Or a keen sense of direction. Take that, pear cake thieves. Next time it's honey and poppy seeds for you.
If it returns, however, I am totally naming it P. Decius Mus.
I feel rather like Krosp. For the last couple of days, there has been a mouse in our kitchen. Or at least there has been something behind the stove that made scrabbling, skittering, scratchily metallic noises with such intensity that I decided either we had a very dedicated mouse or a beaver was trying to chew through the gas main—on occasion, it was loud enough to keep me awake, and I am sleeping a music room, a bathroom, a dining room, and a tangential portion of the living room away from the kitchen. This mouse was hardcore.
Last night, my mother baked two pear cakes. In the half-hour that they were cooling on the countertop beside the stove, I heard the rustling of tin foil and ran into the kitchen in time to see the mouse dart out from under the foil, off the plate, and back behind the stove. We had to throw out both cakes. They were comfort food for my mother and she had used the last of the pears in the house. This was an act of war. I set a trap with a metal mixing bowl, a pencil stub, three inches of green ribbon, and a fragment of pear cake salvaged from the trash, and went to bed.
In the morning, the bowl was down flat against the counter, but when I tapped it gently, there seemed to be no weight inside. The mouse had nibbled just enough of the cake to trip it, but had escaped in the time it took the bowl to fall. I lack mad cat skillz. Just to be sure before I dismantled the trap and left for my doctor's appointment, I lifted the bowl a fingernail's width from the counter—and a long tail whisked out frantically. I slammed the bowl back down. I had a mouse.
I was fairly surprised. And now I had a mouse to remove from the kitchen. On the assumption that mice, like cats, are infinitely compressible when it comes to narrow spaces provided by incautious humans, I unfolded the lid of a cardboard packing box, slid it underneath the bowl—and now I heard the scrabble of tiny claws so intimately familiar to me from the last few nights—tipped it all gently upside down, and carried the bowlful of mouse outside. I did not want to release it into the lot across the street, where our neighbors grow tomatoes and zucchini, because one of my parents' sadder stories from our old house is the week they trapped the same mouse four times in a row. (My father finally marked it with a spot of paint. They had been taking it out into the backyard, whence it scampered promptly back into the house and started eating the breakfast cereal again.) So I walked this one several blocks down to the path that runs around the Arlington Reservoir, set down the bowl, and lifted away the cardboard. I figured the mouse, which had been scratching busily at the inside of the bowl as I walked, would make a leap for it.
It sat there. It blinked immense bead-black eyes at me. It quivered its whiskers. Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous my left foot. It was in a small safe space with a substantial portion of pear cake—what was it going to run from? I had to rap on the bowl a few times with my nails before it realized I was not providing it with an in-flight snack, and then it bounded away across the grass in a manner I associate more with chipmunks or cartoon skunks than with mice.
From the pictures I took on my phone, it seems to have been a white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) or a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). I lean toward the latter, because of the length of the tail, but I was not paying much attention to the finer points of its coloration and the photo quality is terrible; I didn't get a look at its teeth. The point is, it is not currently in my kitchen: and I will set another trap tonight, in case it has cousins it invited in. Or a keen sense of direction. Take that, pear cake thieves. Next time it's honey and poppy seeds for you.
If it returns, however, I am totally naming it P. Decius Mus.
no subject
Then it was definitely a deer mouse. The photos are off my cellphone, and therefore terrible:
Neither (in my experience) is commonly an indoor mouse.
I'm not sure we've ever had a commonly indoor mouse in this kitchen. The last two interlopers we had to remove were a vole and a star-nosed mole. Maybe our linoleum is some kind of small mammal vacation spot.
Do you have a woodpile?
Yes, but it's indoors. Or do you mean that it could have sheltered the mouse?
no subject
Bernd Heinrich writes:I can't believe you didn't let him keep the cake. After you gift-wrapped it, too.
I have been told that amount of whiteness on underparts and length of tail are indicators of different species, but clearly that's wrong, if Heinrich says so.
The house must have a good hole or crack somewhere, fairly close to ground level. Inspect before your shrubs (if any) leaf out. There's a type of foam stuff they can put in the holes around your foundation where the mice are getting in---it really does deter them. Or is there a gap under the door?
One sign a house has mice is that when snow falls, little bumped-up tunnel networks appear. Mice burrow under the snow for grass seed. When they can't get cake.
no subject
This will come as no surprise to my parents. Maybe the mole was on reconnaissance.
The whole crowd returned by the second night, noisily announcing their presence with the drumming of their tiny feet (a sound now familiar to me). Deer mice, which utter no vocal sounds perceptive [sic] to our ears, use these drumrolls to communicate messages to one another---messages that remain undeciphered by man.
This explains the noise in the stove . . .
I can't believe you didn't let him keep the cake. After you gift-wrapped it, too.
Oh, trust me, this was a well-fed mouse when I evicted him!
Or is there a gap under the door?
There is my father, who has been in the habit of rolling up the garage door during the day (as long as someone's home) and is now annoyed with himself. The mouse may not have needed to sneak in.
no subject
I presume I would feel differently had it been my pear-cake.
Good trap, though. I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of it, mentally.
--R
(Do I get points for not calling it an epic tail?)
no subject
It was very cute! It's just much cuter when it's not in our kitchen!
Good trap, though. I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of it, mentally.
The pear cake (or whatever sort of bait) is attached to the inside of the mixing bowl on just enough string (or decorative green ribbon) that the mouse has to reach up and pull a little to nibble on it, and the bowl has been propped up on its rim with about the two-inch stub of a pencil, balanced point-down, so that it's very precarious. The idea is that the tug of getting at the bait should be enough to unbalance the bowl so that the pencil stub falls away and the bowl clonks down around the mouse. Which can then eat all the pear cake it wants—and not go anywhere.
That may have been the worst explanation of mechanics ever. I should have taken photographs of the set trap. I just didn't expect it would honestly contain a mouse the next day.
(Do I get points for not calling it an epic tail?)
. . . Yes.
no subject
Nice trap design. My only experiment with mice and bowls involved dropping a cut-crystal bowl over a mouse that a cat had caught. Much hilarity. Mouse goes round and round the inside, cat goes round and round the outside.