honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, August 8, 2005

Sorry tale of mice and men

By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer

spacer

We thought the first mouse was a fluke, a misplaced trophy from Dumb Blond Cat.

The second mouse got us thinking, although not enough to act. Hey, it was already dead.

But the third one, which Mrs. G. and I found to be very much alive, was a call to arms.

We were sound asleep when the frantic mewing of Dumb Blond Cat jolted us awake. We knew what he was saying.

This was an invasion. The little varmints had breached the gate. They were in the house.

I struggled to think clearly.

Remember that scene in "Dr. No" where James Bond, macho secret agent, wakes up in the middle of the night because a huge hairy spider is crawling up his arm? How does he react? He turns it into spider pulp, beating it with a shoe.

So, with a folded newspaper in hand, I attacked the mouse and tossed its carcass out the door.

The next night, another mouse had taken its place.

Whack, whack, whack!

How disturbing would it be to wake up in the middle of the night feeling the pin-prick scamper of mice feet on my head?

Whack, whack, whack!

It's irrational to react this way. A grown man should approach these things calmly, even with something small and furry running around his feet.

As a child of the tropics, I should be used to this. The landscape here is alive with a variety of crawling, skittering, scampering critters.

And I live higher on the food chain. My slippers are bigger than they are.

Mrs. G. bought traps. Small, snapping traps and sticky traps. And we set out one huge, finger-breaking rat trap ... just in case.

The war of the worlds would be fought with peanut butter, bits of dried cat food and lethal intentions.

When all this began, we initially blamed Dumb Blond Cat for bringing a mouse through his new cat door.

Dumb Blond leaves headless rats and mice at the back door, the main reason I had refused to install a cat door.

You know what will happen, I would tell her.

Mrs. G. insisted, though. The cat was a noisy pest when he wanted in or out of the house, especially when we were sound asleep.

Now, with traps all over the house, I could feel the words forming on my lips — "I told you so" — but I purged the temptation.

Instead, I looked at the trap under Mrs. G.'s desk, where she sits barefoot every day.

The mouse in the house has been here, I told her.

It ate all the bait.

And escaped.