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Cute Furry Rodent
It is an ongoing battle in which I climb up this hill imagining every morning the hideous beasts from nightmares caught in the frail store-bought snare only to be confronted with mostly empty traps licked clean of the peanut butter enticement.
And when not empty the captured beast turns out to be a little country mouse. You've seen the cartoons which depict the differences between the smart-talking, wily, city mouse and the barefoot, simple-minded country mouse. I know you have.
Except that the country mice out here are naked. I mean they are not wearing suspendered dungareees, sporting straw hats, or clenching between their dead jaws, a corncob pipe.
The score, not that this is a battle with a clear sense of winner and loser, is something like 14-3, in favor of the mice. Of course the 3 equals dead mice and the 14 is just a dab of licked clean peanut butter from an unsprung store-bought mouse trap. So clearly, the stakes are a little higher for rodents around here.
I have tried two slightly different versions of the standard, snap-your-neck mouse trap with equally unpredictable results. I sense there to be a master mouse who goes as yet untrapped, who may in fact be luring his lesser foot soldiers into scenarios of guaranteed expiration. It is the sense of this master mouse which has me peeking with clenched teeth into this kitchen every morning, expecting something horrific, like one of those modern experiments gone awry. Not just a mouse with a human ear growing from its side but maybe a miniature human head, that looks like Dick Cheney but speaks like George Bush and smokes cigarettes, like Laura.
But no, not yet. The three dead ones have all been cute--grey, furry, petite, non-threatening even in their horrific poses of surprise demise.
Nothing caught this morning. Score 16-3.