Mouse brings memories of past encounters

December 11, 2005

Sunday Sampler\Sammye Pokryfki

Quite a surprise awaited me when I opened the laundry room door the other day - a tiny, equally surprised mouse scurried across the floor and disappeared through a crack next to the dryer hose. I jumped about a foot, yelped, and dropped the basket of clothes I was carrying.

It doesn't matter that I have experienced this particular surprise more than once; each time it happens is just as unsettling as the first. From my former days in a drafty old house in the woods to now, when I live in an increasingly urbanized community, I have occasionally been the unwitting host of a furry, whiskered visitor.

Considering how the temperature dropped last week, I don't blame a mouse for seeking shelter from the elements, and I suppose it comes with the territory of living in a cold climate. But seeing a mouse in the house still makes me feel that my homeland is being invaded, and my immediate reaction is to defend.

It is such a female cliché to be afraid of a little mouse. I remember the first time I saw one indoors. My mom was visiting from Tennessee shortly after the birth of my first child 21 years ago.

We were sitting and talking while the baby napped, and suddenly this little brown blur went whizzing across the room. Two calm rational women instantly morphed into Lucy and Ethel as we jumped up on our chairs squealing.

We immediately drove to the hardware store, bought every trap they had in stock, and wore knee-high boots in the house for the rest of the day. The next morning, we were horrified (yet also relieved) to find the mutilated carcass in the trap.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the method of disposal, but let's just say that bribery and rubber gloves were involved. In future years, I had cats that took care of this business, but my last cat died several years ago and it was only a matter of time before I had to make another trip to the hardware store.

As soon as I spotted the critter in the laundry room, I went shopping and discovered that mouse removal merchandise has evolved over the years. There is now a vast array of devices for ridding the house of vermin.

Some of the mouse traps are huge. You could lose a leg in one of those things. Some are expensive and require batteries (as if), others use high-frequency sound waves to chase them off (um, sure), while still other models coax unsuspecting little crawlers into trap-boxes, from which you can release them unharmed.

I applaud the humaneness of this approach, but shudder at the thought. What if the released prisoner turned around and attacked? Or ran off to invite its friends to my house, advertising a place where mice can get free food and rides for the kids? Or took revenge by climbing into my bed and bearing its young?

Don't laugh - this actually happened to someone I knew, who came home from a week on the North Slope to find a nursing mother vole and her recent offspring between the sheets. If that doesn't peg out the gross-o-meter, I don't know what does.

Needless to say, she went shopping too, for a new mattress and sheets. I opted for the smallest trap on the shelf and, coincidentally, the least expensive: the old-fashioned wooden version with the bait bar and spring release that isn't humane at all but certainly takes care of the problem. I'm somewhat apologetic about killing the mice, but I justify it by remembering that I'm not attacking, I'm just defending.

My husband, the great white hunter, smeared the traps with peanut butter and placed them strategically next to the walls in both the laundry room and the kitchen pantry. Imagine our dismay when the next day we found the traps licked clean, empty and unsprung.

Not to be outdone, we tightened the spring release to a hair-trigger tension, with my husband accidentally snapping his fingers several times in the process. Three mornings in a row we have tiptoed into the laundry room and pantry, only to find that the traps are free of mice and peanut butter.

You can actually see little lick marks on the bait bar, right next to tiny forks and spoons and a miniature napkin tucked under the spring. Tomorrow I expect a microscopic thank-you note.

We have decided that the mouse in our house is either so tiny as to be nearly weightless and, therefore, unable to trip the spring, or it is super savvy - maybe both - proving once again that you can never be too smart or too thin.

This mouse may be a worthwhile adversary, but nevertheless, it is one that must be stopped in defense of home and hearth, not to mention the gross-out factor.

That is why you'll find me at the hardware store this afternoon.

I'll be the one with the expensive high-frequency sound-wave emitter, extra batteries, and a tiny sign that says &#8220No Mice Allowed.”

Sammye Pokryfki lives and writes in Wasilla. Contact her at sammyepokryfki@hotmail.com.