RANTS: FARWELL MY STEALTHY

“I set a trap and killed a mouse—a little murder in my house.”

Like most people these days, my sleep patterns are a bit off. I often stay up quite late, reading—two or three in the morning—before falling asleep. I usually read science fiction or detective stories, plot-driven affairs that keep my awake-train chugging along into the wee hours. My small reading lamp is positioned to comfortably shine on the pages, and it also shines across my room to the door as kind of weak spotlight. One night as I lay reading, I saw a skittering in the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw a small mouse enter the room and make a bee-line for the nearest wall, racing in cautious spurts around the baseboards until it reached my open closet door. It went inside for a few minutes then exited, following the same route back. I thought there might be a nest in there, so the next day I checked, but could find no sign of any mousey habitation.

Ed's family tried social distancing, but....

"Darn it. I'm putting my foot down this time!"

Determined not to let the matter stand, I got in my carona-car, drove to the store and bought a packet of mousetraps. That night I set one up in the kitchen by the stove and said some words of farewell over it, in case my intruder was listening nearby. I turned out the light and left the rest up to fate.

"You know I love you." "Are you six feet away?"

Dear reader, you won’t be surprised to learn (else, why would I be writing this) that the next morning I found the trap was untouched and the food-bit gone!

Annoyed with myself for not properly setting the trap or locating the food bit thereon—or so I assumed—I reloaded Acme’s Guaranteed Mouse Ender^© mousetrap with a small dab of peanut butter and set the hold-down bar carefully onto the catch.

Sally Sphinx before her makeover.

“Bye-bye, little mouse,” I thought, as I went to bed to read, confident I would hear a snapping sound come from the kitchen before I fell asleep. But again, I was wrong! The trap had not been sprung, and all the peanut butter and food bit had been carefully licked away by Stealthy, as I came to call my hungry tenant. After two or three unsuccessful tries, I gave up, feeling vaguely troubled that human technology had been overcome by one of nature’s more humble creatures. In addition, Stealthy visited my room and closet two more times during this period. She would arrive at about the same time each night--between 11pm and 12pm and leave after a short visit. I never found out what she was up to, though I'm sure it was of some importance.
Perhaps during this time of coronavirus, when the world seems more out of kilter than usual, a new breed of mouse has come into existence? I read that night as usual, but with a new wariness for my tiny house guest. “I’m running a B&B for mice!” I thought. Would we two learn to co-exist? And what if there were more!?

"Did you hear Ronnie's got Covid?" "Yaaa! Guess who gave it to him, girl!"

The next day, I went back to the store and bought a more expensive trap with a different “catch” configuration that was easier to spring. “Old school!” I thought, “got ya!” I cleverly adjusted the position of my new trap near the stove, putting a couple of boots on either side with the trap’s rear abutting the garbage can. This would act like a 'funnel' so that Stealthy would have to approach the trap head on, and be in position to receive the hammer’s spring arm when it snapped down. It's almost as deadly as a buffalo jump, I thought, proud of my new-found hunter-gatherer skills. For Stealthy's last snack I put on a dollop of peanut butter and a piece of cheese over the catch and went to bed confident I had set my mouse’s execution into motion.

"Hey, cutie! Wanna come social distance with me?"

Well, of course, the next day the cheese and all the peanut butter were gone, and the trap was untouched. Is this a more evolved species, I wondered. Was Stealthy an escapee from a laboratory where she had been experimented on? What was I doing wrong?


I read a bit about Mus musculus domesticus or the common Western house mouse. Males are territorial (what else is new) with testicles that protrude from their body and are disproportionately large. (Right on!) They usually live in groups of one male and several females. (Again, you go dawg!) And this particular sub-species of mouse does not do well in the wild; they have evolved over time to depend on human habitation for their living space. (Not mine!) I did not know that mice use their tails to regulate body temperature, increasing blood flow there when their little bodies heat up (like when they are chased around the room by cats!) The blood, of course, draws out excess heat from the body’s core. So it was really a nasty business when the farmer’s wife cut off their tails with a butcher's knife in that children’s rhyme.

Another interesting fact is that the females develop a “copulation plug” after sex that prevents further hanky-panky until she gives birth. The gestation period is around twenty-one days with litters of 4 to 6 young. Females can have five to six litters per year, so that keeps them pretty busy. Mus musculus probably originated in Asia, but found its way west 13,000 years ago with the growth of agriculture and all that tasty grain on display.  

"Was that the doorbell? I'm sure that was the doorbell!"

Interestingly, we are related to mice. (No wonder I like cheese so much!) We share a common ancestor, albeit some sixty-five million years ago, but family is still family. After the dinosaurs were killed off—probably by a meteor strike—small mammals colonized the ecological niche left by the dead, big guys, and one critter was a rodent-like creature that eventually gave rise to a number of mammalian families, including mice and humans.

Finally, the present-day rodent we are familiar with, both as pets and pests, most likely developed in India and South-East Asia some 10-13 million years ago.   

I learned so much about something so small, but I still had to figure out how to set a better trap. So, I took the gloves off and went for the superglue! This mammal was going to use its technology to sort the problem. So, I kept the same placement of the trap between the pair of boots, but I superglued half a peanut to the mousetrap catch. (I am so clever!) And this time it worked, along with an odd instance of synchronicity, that I’ll tell you about.   

…..

Lights appeared just before the aliens came for them.

"No more Middle Ages! No more Middle Ages! No more..."

That night in bed, I had just started reading Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut and was reading how the main character, Dr. Paul Proteus, brought a stray cat to his office. He’s not sure why he's done so. He's been feeling ‘out of sorts’ recently, a little strange, like he didn't belong there. Perhaps he'd brought the cat to his office to be a good “mouser” for the factory he manages. Some machinery wires had been gnawed away by mice. Yes,  that must be why. When his subordinate Bud Calhoun asks him about it, Paul makes something up on the spur of the moment. The cat, he says, was there to act as inspiration for him to come up with a new consumer product:

Paul snapped his fingers. “Say, I’m glad you asked me that. I have a project for you, Bud. I want some sort of signaling device that will tell this cat where she can find a mouse.”

“Electronic?”

“I should hope so.”

“You’d need some kind of sensin’ element thet could smell a mouse.”
“Or a rat. I want you to work on it while…” (10)

At home exercising, if inelegantly, during the pandemic.

And I kid you not; as I’m reading this passage, I hear a loud snap, followed immediately by the sound of a small, soft body hitting the side of the stove. Stealthy, in the instant the trap’s hammer arm sprung down breaking her neck, had reflexively jumped back, flipping over the mousetrap in a last spurt of her life’s energy. She jumped and hit the stove over two feet away. Perhaps the force of the trap snapping shut shot her backwards through the 'kill-shute' between my boots like a mousey bullet, but it was still a gruesome impact. Yuk! 
For a while I lay there, surprised (and a bit queasy). I thought the trap might have cut her body in half (it hadn’t) and that there would be splattered blood and mouse guts in the corner by the stove where I had so cleverly assembled my execution station (there wasn’t).

So, now I know that my mouse was dead; Stealthy is gone. I hope her relatives won’t be too pissed with me. Strange about that bit of synchronicity while reading Vonnegut, though. I wonder what it means. Anything?

Cheers, Jake

"Must...Turn...Off...Teevee... Must..."