Jaws

Opening a drawer I found a fat mouse who'd shredded my gift wrap and done numbers one and two on a year's worth of greeting and birthday cards. I think only moms-to-be would be so sneaky, persistent, and destructive. They chewed through particle board into a cabinet, left piles of sunflower-seed hulls and dried beans on the mantel and in my shoes, and turds in my apron pockets. I wept. With weather cooler than normal for August I thought to bake a cake, light and not too sweet, and share it like a good Missourian, and opening the oven where pans are kept I saw enthroned in my cake pan a mouse nest clawed out of oven insulation with, fortunately, no mice in it. After my nausea passed (instead of baking, I hosed down all the pans and set the dishwasher on "sanitize"), I sent the landlord a photo and demanded he address in all seriousness the plague of mice I've had since spring. One or two in winter is normal in a country house. But five or ten in late summer, openly running along the baseboards: no. Worst in 14 years. So bad I stopped feeding the birds.

Enter Tim the handyman with the familiar blue Tomcat poison saying, "You just gotta hope they die outside," and when he set eight of these new kind of traps I wailed that these mice were too smart for traps, and he joked, "You just gotta get out the ol' .22." They're baited with a dollop of black gel -- the mice have been so bad I have two peanut butter jars, one for my mousetraps and one for me!! -- and one got caught along a major mouse thruway. With these I needn't touch the dead ones. Outside along the foundation Tim placed larger traps containing immense cakes of poison and said to refill them in two weeks. I said, there must be a hole there, why don't you find it and patch it up? Guess whose job that's gonna be.

Mice Ate My Lipstick

I'd vacuumed up all crumbs, cleaned and bleached the kitchen and its trash can, even tightened the tops of the spice jars and the toothpaste, all because a very bold and demonic mouse or mice for weeks had scampered across my living room and eaten peanut butter out of my traps, without triggering them -- and, the final straw, had scrambled across my bed one night while I was in it. With my house sparkling clean, I then left for eight days, and returned to mouse droppings just about everywhere although there was no food. Wait; I'd left out some makeup, a suite of Sephora brush-on lipsticks ranging from pink to red. Every color had been nibbled, clawed, and messed with. Disgusted, I declared war, and told a friend. She said perhaps the mice had wanted only to look prettier.

Tossing the lipsticks and the traps that work so well on my stupider mice, I bought at Dickey Bub's another, sneakier, super-hair-trigger mousetrap which holds the peanut-butter bait farther out of reach. This morning I beheld the very satisfactory results, and proof that at least one mouse (the one with the glowing eyes) was in fact demonic.

The Field of Battle

Sorry if the picture makes you queasy but it's a lot worse in person. I buy mousetraps a bagful at a time. I've stuffed mouse thruways and hideaways in this house with steel wool. I've tried poisons, glue traps, live traps -- nothing works as well as a classic Victor spring-loaded trap, which I haven't been able to find for a whole year. Instead, Victor now sells the "Easy Set" (TM) model with the large yellow plastic bait platform supposedly scented with invisible mouse attractant.

After a year I am qualified to say that the new model does not work well. The "cheeselike" platform, complete with Swiss-like holes, has never worked; I dollop the platform with never-fail peanut butter. The trigger is so stupid-sensitive I have to hook the end with a pliers to set it. Worst of all, it doesn't kill mice outright. Good traps kill mice instantly, snap, by breaking their necks. I hate meeses to pieces, but worse is hearing the trap snap beneath the sink and then hearing struggles within.

These two mice were caught within 20 minutes of each other. The one at the top went first, and writhed and knocked around for 10 minutes while I fought to hold my dinner down --because as much as I hate any mouse, I won't pour bleach on it or hammer-crush its skull to put it out of its misery, nor will I put it to sleep in my freezer, as some humane people do. So I have to listen to it die (meanwhile fearing that it won't die, that it'll get away). The other body shows the problem with the "Easy Set" model. Instead of hitting the mouse on the neck, the large platform permits the mouse to nibble from the edge where the trap hits not the neck but the "craniofacial" region. This is not a quick, humane kill. They wriggle, bleed and convulse. I like the older model which they don't sell in the hardware stores around here any more. They do sell it online, though.

Three Dead Mice

One morning this week I woke up and just outside the bedroom a small mouse was dragging itself across the carpet. It didn't run from me. It looked sick and just about to drop. I put it out of its misery, bagged it and emptied the bag outside for the ghoul squad.

In the kitchen fixing breakfast, I saw a small dead mouse curled up almost beneath the stove and did a double-take. I had just dumped a mouse outside! It couldn't have fallen from the bag on the way out; I saw it plop from the bag into the grass! Using barbecue tongs, I put this body outside. Went about my business. Later in the living room, I smelled that funny dead-mouse-rotting smell, as if it were right in the room. Looked with a flashlight beneath the couch and such. Nothing. Hoped it would go away on its own, knowing it never does. I went out all evening, and back home went straight to bed.

Today, opening the shade in the living room I looked down among the computer cables and there's a little dead mouse curled up there and that's what stunk.

That first mouse looked poisoned, but I don't use mouse poison any more, precisely because poisoned mice die in inaccessible places like the attic or beneath the water heater, and stink for as long as six weeks. I use traps. So what's going on? Was there a nest? I can't find it. Were they family? They were pretty well grown, completely formed and furred, able to make their way; why aren't they surviving?

A Better Mousetrap

I didn't want to buy the new kind of mousetrap (on the right) but it was the only kind at the hardware store, and I really needed them, and found it's a genuine improvement on the classic model at left. I catch a mouse every time I set one -- last week, four days in a row, so often I began to feel a little queasy. The new model has a large yellow plastic bait platform that supposedly looks like cheese (the instructions in Spanish say "queso"). This is supposed to attract mice without the use of bait. However, I never baited with cheese because peanut butter works so well. So it's not the fake cheese that makes the new trap better -- it's the size of the bait platform. On the original model it's less than an inch long and only 3/8 of an inch wide and so sensitive it was hard to put it on the floor after it was set --  the slightest tremor made it SNAP! The new model's trigger tucks under the cheese platform quite firmly and stays there while I place it in my meese's favorite spot (beneath the sink, where they used to nibble at the food traces on my potholders in there, and chew 'em up; I bought silicone potholders to confound them, but they come there anyway).

There are other mousetrap manufacturers but I like this brand, stamped "Woodstream Corp., Lititz, PA USA," because of the mouse-head graphic inside the red "V". It just gives me that thrill of blood lust.

Come & Get It, You Little B-------d

Today on this first truly cold day of the season (high 32 degrees) I was making my famous Christmas cookies and had just lit the stove when a little gray blob shot across my kitchen floor. I hate meeses to pieces. So I loaded up a mousetrap.

Over many years I have learned:

1. Bait it with peanut butter.
2. Just a scant trace of peanut butter. Even a little too much and they’ll eat it without triggering the trap, the little cowards. The photo shows the bait dolloped and OVERFILLED.
3. Lay the trap in a tight spot so the mouse has to wend and elbow its way toward the trap and can’t weasel back out.
4. Listen for the sweet “snap” and gloat when you hear it.
5. Set the trap the night before you expect a guest or guests who is/are a real mensch and not too squeamish to take the icky trap with the broken-necked mouse outside and dump the body in the field.

World of Warcraft, Country Style

Anyone who digs violent video games ought to try annihilating the mice in their house. This is not a game for sissies. This is rated Triple-X for real life and real death.

A foe made out of pixels is nothing compared to an enemy who scrabbles inside your walls all night, poops and pees on your stove and kitchen counter to taunt you, chews open triple-wrapped foil to eat your leftover pizza, and can squeeze through a dime-sized hole. Its speed and cunning make mincemeat of human weaponry and strategy.

I like 'em dead.

A cat is its only true match. Without one, I tried mousetraps. Meeses are, however, masters at eating up every atom of peanut butter without triggering the trap. When a trap gets 'em, its fun to see them dead -- their necks slammed flat beneath the wire, their beady eyes wide open, surprised. Crow about your victory, but there's lots more where that one came from, and each generation is bolder and sneakier. They'll peer at me over the sofa back, or run across my bed while I'm sleeping in it. They've stored corn in the bindings of my cookbooks, and in toes of my shoes. Little bastards.

My weapon of choice now is poison. They die. But they return to haunt me. Last year one died beneath the water heater, and the warm rotting corpse, inaccessible, stank ineffably for a full six weeks. The year before one died in the attic right above the bedroom. Little f----r.

One mouse actually crawled into a packing box and moved to a new house with me. For three weeks I worked almost full-time trying to kill it. Then one day, sick from poison it staggered out from beneath a cabinet. I got my broom. But before I put it out of its misery, and out of mine, I granted it its due. "You have been a most worthy opponent," I said, and I meant it.