The Better Mouse Trap

For the past month I’ve played ‘cat and mouse,’ with a couple of real mice. That leaves me in the role of the cat.

Because I have dogs, I don’t use poison bait to kill the mice. In fact I prefer to live-trap them, then release them far away from the neighborhood, deep in the desert scrub.

Unfortunately, Mr. Mouse and his buddies are too smart for their own good, evading every live-trap I’d set to capture them with. So, I finally had to resort to a few good old-fashioned mouse traps.

The end of the first mouse came at around four in the morning when Mary woke me saying, “I jus’ heard the trap go off.”

She left for work shortly afterwards and that’s when I got up and disposed of the now broken dead mouse. All my other traps remained unsprung even though the bait of peanut butter I left on them was gone.

Since that morning, I’ve managed to get two more mice — and as counter-intuitive as it might sound — killing mice should be easy to do, but on the contrary, it upsets my tiny universe and leaves me out of sorts.