Mice

My apartment in Poultney, Vermont was essentially a cabin in the woods over a garage. I remember one morning of opening my front door and being face-to-face with a huge buck who looked prepared to knock and ask for a cup of coffee. There were also squirrels, raccoons, birds, and most anything else you could expect to find in the Vermont near-woods.

And mice. Let's not forget the mice.

The mice clearly had ownership of the downstairs kitchen, as I found out when I came down one evening to saw them chewing on some bread I'd left on the counter. I growled at them and waved my arms, appearing as what I was - a gigantic carnivore.

The mice stared at me for a moment, cocking their heads to one side - then kept eating. Even when I walked right up to them, they didn't move until I slammed my fist down on the counter. Barely moved out of the way, I might add.

The next day I called my landlord to see if he had any traps around. He stopped by with a couple of "safety" spring-loaded plastic traps. They worked on the same theory as the regular traps (snap down to break neck), but a plastic hood came down instead off a metal bar. You could reset the trap by means of a clamp on one side, so no need to risk breaking a finger or touching dead mice. It seemed perfect.

Kartik came over the next night, when we heard a loud thunking sound from the kitchen. We crept down the stairs to see one of the traps trying to crawl under the refrigerator. The trap was too big, and it thumped and squeaked every time it hit the edge.

I released the trap, and saw something grey attached to the side. It was a mouse foot. And that was the end of the traps. I agreed to just let the mice live, and all would be fine.

However, my girlfriend Stephanie moved in a month or so later, and the instant the mice got into her cooking supplies she said they had to go. Neither of us liked traps, and she was adamantly against D-Con. So we decided the best decision would be to get cats.

So we got a pair of cats from her brother and his girlfriend, who had seven cats and a Rottweiler living in a one-bedroom mobile home. We got the two that the girlfriend said "had no personality" - Spot and Gimpy, a pair of mostly white cats with some black spots.

I had no idea what Spot looked like for the first three months we owned him. He never came out when people were around. Ever. Hid under the bed. Ate only at night. He was a shadow.

Gimpy was...well, the name fit. Gimpy was farsighted (would run up to dropped food, stop one foot short, then spend five minutes sniffing it out), he had a bent tail, his hips were built funny to give him a perpetual swagger, and he would thunk you with his head for affection and fall over from hitting too hard. His eyes looked disturbingly human. And he was allergic to cat dander.

Yes - Gimpy was allergic to himself. Sneezing and weepy eyes all the time. Though he got much better after not being locked up with six other cats and a dog.

And the mice? Gimpy thought they were fascinating. He would sit on the stairs and watch them for hours as they ran back and forth across the counter. Apparently farsightedness really cuts into hunting ability - who knew? Or maybe he was allergic to them.

I mentioned the situation to Mark, my landlord, and he came up with a suggestion - his dad was going out of town, and needed someone to watch his cat for him. Tough cat. Big old alley cat that had been living near feral in a junkyard for the first year of his life, then in a car with a homeless person for another year. Popsicle was his name, as that was his food of choice during the homeless year.

Popsicle was a huge, long-haired tiger cat who also ruled the downstairs. He tried to come upstairs a few times, but Gimpy would bat at his head and hiss, and Popsicle (who could have eaten Gimpy) would stay in the kitchen.

Two days after Popsicle's arrival I went to the back of the kitchen to get coffee, and saw a mouse's head on the floor near where the mice routinely went in and out. Just the head...and the spine. I had visions of the pirates hanged at the entrances to Caribbean ports as a warning, or of heads on pikes after a victorious medieval battle. And Popsicle was purring in the corner, asleep.

And after that, there were no more mice.