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A Mouse in the House by James Mason Tuesday, March 16, 1999 I just caught the mouse thats been sneaking around our apartment these past four weeks or so. It had crawled up and into the bag of wild bird food I keep und er the desk. Its [It's] been very quiet in the last two hours since this happ ened. No rustling of papers and book pages on the floor and against the walls of my office. No pitter-patter of sneaky little mouse feet. I realized I had trapped him when I heard him (I've decided for the purposes of my own fanta sy and this story it's a man mouse) in the paper bag of seed, scratching his way up, trapped, the distance was too far for him to ascend. I quickly carrie d the twenty pound bird seed bag, with my little captive scratching about fr antically, out from under the desk and into the center of my room, so I could have a better look at the little fellow under the main light. Retrieving the bag I reached for the bag's edges carefully. I thought about getting bitten by this mouse, about rabies, and wondered if mice carry it. Where would I g et a mouse bite treated this time of night? How would I react if he bit me righ t now? If he did bite me, would I be ready or caught by surprise? Would I jum p too quickly and throw the little fellow against the bedroom wall by accident? I almost had a cute-attack. There he was, light brown in color and about t he size of a narrow walnut, with his rear legs spread-out for jumping action an d half buried in bird seeds, his front paws stretched out and grabbing the wall of the bag, his long tail waggling behind him. With his frightened miniature face looking up at me, he looked just like Mickey Mouse. "waggling behind him ." It's no wonder those California cartoonists at Disney came up with that a dorable face; the California field mice are Mickeys and Minnies. After look ing at me for a second, he frantically jumped dozens of times towards the openi ng of the big bag. With little success, he was just a couple of inches away with each determined leap from the seed. His little heart must have been beating like crazy. I sympathized instantly with the little guy's life-threatening predicament. I began analyzing rapidly. I would take him outside, far away, and set him free in a field somewhere. My first reaction was to find a conta iner to put him in. As I stormed off to the kitchen I thought about the dead ly Hanta virus outbreaks in the Southwest U.S. a few years back. Was Norther n California prone to have this virus in its environment? Then the words of aneighbor echoed in my thoughts: "You know, when you see a mouse in your house , its never just one!" He took a breather and stopped jumping in the bag f or a minute or so. As I returned to the birdseed bag with a plastic bowl from the kitchen, I thought about this horrible rainy and cold weather we've been having. I pictured him out there, placed in the wild; a rapid journey from t he birdseed bag of doom to the plastic bowl of the human, to a cold and wet gra ssy field in the night - what a horrible transition this would be for him to go through. I imagined he had children and a Mrs. under the floor somewhere, waiting for him. I would be breaking apart a family. A personal moral dilemma wa s before me. I would have to make a decision. I'm an animal lover, so bein g compassionate to all animals is a general way of life for me. But, I draw t he line with roaches, most spiders, and sometimes ants (I admire ants because they work very hard and never complain to the queen ant). My point of view on wild animals in contact with people is this: we intrude on them, not the ot her way around. It's been human sprawl and rapid development with little fore thought for the creatures, which has driven these animals into our daily and urban civilized lives. It's not their fault. They are innocent in situations like this. A man with the ideal that he is protecting his household from vermi n and parasites, acting instinctively, may go out and buy mousetraps. You know the ones: wooden, three for a dollar sometimes, with a heavy metal wire that b reaks the mouse's neck in an instant -- if it works just right. Having a ca t around the house might have prevented this dilemma also - I could have been blissfully unaware of the death and destruction that my cat was bringing to the neighborhood mouse population, while free of infestation of rodents. Think q uick, what would Captain Picard do? Janeway would probably save it, find a pl anet for it, a planet full of mice rejected from their home-worlds, labeled pa rasites, abandoned and exiled, maybe driven out by a fascist cat society. No. Reality time. Frightened mouse before me. Again my neighbor's comments fr om the other day came to me, ". . its never just one!" Wow. That means th ere will be a mouse running around here anyway, regardless of what I do now.be a mouse running around here anyway, regardless of what I do now.Good thinking. And he's been scurrying around here for almost a month and no one's gotten sick. And I was kind of getting used to having his presence in my room. And in setting him free it'll be a joyous moment for me. My ro om certainly isn't the African grasslands but still, it'll be a nice thing. Born free - as free as the wind blows - as free as the sea flows . . .ta da da da da da da! I can let it go right here where he got trapped and it'll be lik e nothing ever happened. It'll be between him and me. So I did. I tipped overthe bird seed ["birdseed"] bag and out jumped Mickey like a brown blur. He hit the floor for an instant of light and disappeared again under the desk. By the way, don't tell any of my roommates I had one and set it free. |
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