Our mouse problem.

We have a mouse problem.

For weeks now, the cat has been staking out the corner in the kitchen just outside the cabinets. We have a rug here, by the sink you see, and the cat sits on the rug in semi-alert crouch pose, face pointing at the closed cabinet door, behind which sit our pots and pans. For hours. Waiting.

We've found tell-tale mouse droppings (note: these are small and if CV wasn't around to tell me otherwise I would just pretend they were some dirt, possibly from where a bit of the cabinet flaked off, no big) in the corner of that cabinet, the one in which we keep our pans which is the one that extends back toward the outside wall and so is always kind of cold. We've likewise found droppings in the drawer, higher up, in which we keep the aluminum foil, parchment paper, and red "Glad wrap" (I don't think this stuff really works: I can never get it actually to stick to anything). Sometimes we can hear the little scratching, like someone in our baseboards, playing Tiddlywinks with toothpicks.

I know you think that I mean the problem is the presence in our cabinets of mice, but in fact this is not the problem. The problem is, instead, that it is winter.

Because CV and I are not actually going to kill the mice. Good lord. That would be so... unnecessary. And bloody. We're both vegetarians, for ethical reasons as well as general preference. And the mice are, well, cute. And CV's ardent anti-speciesist sentiments (yes, a speciesist is like a racist) are borne out in articles like this one, which tells about experiments in which researchers proved that rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese. Rats are not as cute as mice, but ours is fortunately a mouse problem. And mice are these clever little creatures, pocket-size versions of my darling pets. (It could also be that I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and Stuart Little and Abel's Island and The Mouse and the Motorcycle at an impressionable age. It's never till now occurred to me, in fact, how very many books there are that star mice, nor the disjunction between childish empathy for these mouse-size heros, and the adult world in which you are required to get rid of your mice.)

So the problem is what to do with them. We actually have a humane trap, in which CV once (claims he) caught a mouse. This trap is like a little crate for a mouse: the mouse comes in to nibble the peanut butter, then the door clangs shut and he's stuck in there. It's humane, though, because then you take the little crate and carry the little guy outside somewhere, like a nice garden or something, and let him go, someplace where the landscape is more exciting than are your kitchen cabinets.


But last time we set the trap out, a couple of weeks ago, a mouse set it off but didn't get caught.

So we have just been sort of ignoring the mice, since we'd never actually seen them: UNTIL TODAY. CV was at the store; the cat and I were hanging out on the bed. Suddenly we heard that ting-ting-tinging sound our pans make when something's boiling in them vigorously.

The cat and I looked at each other.

You didn't leave the stove on accidentally, did you? he asked me with his 3-D eyes.

"I most certainly did not," I replied. So we came into the kitchen to check it out. I opened the cabinet door, and there was the cute little mouse, skittering across the lid for the dutch oven.

"Go get it, kitty!" I said. The cat seemed entirely taken aback; sure he'd been staking out the cabinet, but he didn't think it was a mouse in there. But he got in gamely and poked around, before crawling back out.

It's weird about that. I'm on the mouse's side. But I have this motherly instinct to GIVE THE CAT A CHANCE TO FULFILL HIS DESTINY, to earn his nuts. (Impossible, of course, as they are gone.)

Anyway CV and I were talking about it later.

"Should we get out the humane trap?" I asked.

CV looked appealing at me, like the dog when she really wants some of my pizza.

"It's so cold outside," he said. "I'd hate to have to put anything out in weather like this."

And that, friends, is where we've left it.