Oliver: Even if a mouse can win a battle, there’s no way it’s winning the war

Tony’s giggle was the first clue that something was amiss.

We were sitting on the couch and something caught his eye, prompting the laugh. We hadn’t been doing anything particularly funny, so I assumed it didn’t have anything to do with me.

As I looked up, I saw a dark flash. It was one of those things that I might have ignored had it not been for Tony’s reaction. Still, I thought I might be seeing things. After all, it was late morning on a Saturday.

I decided I’d better get off the couch and see if I could figure out what was going on. Every now and then we’ll get a larger-than-I-care-to-see spider, so I was dreading that.

Instead of an arachnid or another bug, I saw a mouse.

Oh no, this isn’t going to be good, I thought to myself. We haven’t had any free-range rodents in a very long time. Most do not get beyond a particular spot in the house, meeting their fate before they get a chance to explore the rest of the house.

How did this happen? I didn’t have much time to think about it since I now had to focus all my energy on what to do.

In the past, we had a couple of cats who were experts at alerting us to these rodent intruders. I can’t say they were very good at dispatching them, however. I think they preferred to use the mice as toys.

One particularly unhappy incident involved the two cats playing with a live mouse and tossing it onto the bed where Tony and I were sleeping. The next few minutes were pure chaos.

In those days, Tony handled the duty of dispatching the mice if somehow our traps failed or the cats refused to put us all out of our suffering. I wish I had paid a little more attention to his technique, but I was too busy getting out of the way.

I learned some things about myself in the minutes that followed.

First, I have no idea what I’m doing. I instinctively ran for a broom, thinking that might work.

I managed to chase the mouse back through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement. What I would have done once I caught up with it, I don’t know.

I’ll never know because I missed the last step and went crashing down to the ground, hyperextending one of my knees. As I sat at the bottom of the stairs, all I could think was, “No, no, no.” What if I couldn’t stand up? What if I couldn’t get back up the stairs? My phone wasn’t anywhere near me, and I knew that Tony would have no idea how to bring it to me.

Happily, I actually didn’t hurt myself badly enough to not be able to walk. Of course, now the mouse was gone.

In retracing the mouse’s tracks, I discovered that the mouse had managed to spring the trap that usually gets our mice but had eluded its fatal snap. That’s how it found its way into our living room.

Later in the day, I went to do some laundry. There, in one of the corners in the laundry room was the little mouse, huddled up.

Great, I thought to myself. I’m not really in the mood to chase this thing all over the house again. Besides, I probably shouldn’t be trying to run on my injured knee.

My next brilliant idea was to text a friend. Maybe I could get some ideas. I even sent her a photo of the rodent to prove that I wasn’t making this up. Not that I would.

To add to the irony of the situation, the mouse had parked itself not that far away from another trap. The peanut butter must not have been fresh because it wasn’t interested. For good measure, I threw down a chunk of something that’s supposed to attract mice. I even nudged it closer to the mouse.

I also discovered that I’m not personally able to kill another mammal in cold blood. I couldn’t bring myself to try to poke, beat or otherwise hurt the thing.

Not surprisingly, when I went to the laundry room in the morning, there was no sign of the mouse. It didn’t like that nearby trap and it had no interest in the “fatal food” I left for it.

Just when I started having visions of a full-on mouse invasion, I decided to check the initial trap it had somehow escaped from at the beginning of this adventure.

This time it wasn’t so lucky.

The end.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.