#mouse problems

Because you already knew there was an 'except' coming. Except, that night, while I was at my desk working on the computer I heard a squeak. A squeak from under the cabinets. And it wasn't a small squeak, no. It was the kind of squeak that held all the indignite surprise and mousy curse words something that small could possibly pack into it. The way the cabinets are set up, the 'floor' of the cabinet is actually raised off the floor of the kitchen an inch or so and apparently someone had been napping under them while my BIL had been busy sealing up all the exits. Waking up and ready for a night of mischief (and waving at me as they ran past on the counter) they'd instead found themselves sealed in!

So I've got a mouse trapped underneath my cabinets. No problem. I get the trap out, put some peanut butter in it and pull out the lowest drawer in the cabinets drawers to put the trap there. I know rodents can crawl up the backs of drawers though (because that's how the hamsters would often come to visit me when I was writing at my desk) so I seal it up with my good old standby of duct tape and go back to work. There's a bit of foamy gnawing, a few more squeaky curse words but nobody emerges into the kitchen and I figure it should only take a day or two for the peanut butter to work.

Wrong.

By day four the trap is still safely guarding its peanut butter and I'm starting to worry that the little mouse might be starving in there. Now, its probably a very small mouse and I should probably let it starve despite the smell because its only going to be a small smell for a little while but -

yeah. I can't let him starve. A hoard of previous hamsters rises up inside my heart. I pull up the duct tape and put down a little jelly lid with water in it and some of the birdseed I've been feeding the local chickens.

The next day the food is gone. The cage remains empty.

I clean the peanut butter out of the trap and put the seed in there instead. Two days go by. No mouse. I cave again and put some of the seeds on top of the cage. They're gone the next day.

So yeah. Basically what I'm saying is I provided bed and board to a mouse all winter long.

I tried the trap various times. I tried a different trap. I baited it with everything I thought a mouse could want. No go. Finally I just kind of gave in, bought real mouse food instead of bird seed and just made it a routine to replenish and rewater every other day. The mouse never came out. I never found a single poop or nibble anywhere in the kitchen, though from time to time I would hear little gnawing sounds or the unmistakable sound of a tiny mouse body doing tiny mouse things in one of the now empty, lower cabinets. I did find all the little holes in the cabinet though because the mouse smell did leak out of them and there's now decorative painter's tape in several areas. Everything that had been in the cabinets now found new homes in my bookcase. The Underneath was Mousey Territory now and we both stayed on our sides of that demarcation.

And then, one day, early this spring, I went to change the food and no one had eaten it. I kept an eye on things for almost two weeks but whoever my little surprise house elf friend had been, they didn't need my mouse food anymore. I keep a suspicious and sharp eye out but no mousey poop or chewed bags showed up anywhere else in the house. Maybe he died somewhere under the counter, asleep in a little curled ball in its nest of dandelion down I'd left for it but I never smelled anything whenever I opened the cabinets. I like to think he found a gap between the cabinets and the wall and is now running free, living his best mousey life in the newly planted corn fields with a wild story to tell all his mousey friends.

The cabinets remain empty and will continue to do so for the rest of my time here. If he did find a way out, I see no reason to encourage anyone else to move back in.