poplar road

But a good night's sleep was not to be. I awoke just before 6am to the awareness of empty air where Richard had been, and a noise in the kitchen. I ran down the hall as my eyes adjusted to the sight of a large naked man chasing a tiny mouse across the great room floor. He thought the mouse (which runs like a racehorse on those tiny legs, how is that possible?) had run past me to the stairwell and down to the basement, so he ran down there barefoot (no mean feat with our unfinished steps and cluttered concrete floors). While he was looking for it in the rafters below the fireplace, I stood still and listened. Sure enough, the sound of something rolling came from the door to my office. Rolling is the key – we sometimes leave wolferin, a dessicating blood thinner poison – in chunks in mouse-ridden spots, where the little bugger chews the edges round, and rolls it to its cache location of choice (ie a plant pot, a box of electrical equipment, Richard's old shoes). So I wasn't surprised it was rolling something. But when I surprised it and it fled through the crack between the drywall and the brick fireplace, the ball of poison it left on my office step turned out not to be poison at all. "Richard!" I called.

He came running up the stairs, having given up trying to locate the mouse's route upward. I presented him with the mouse's booty. The hoarse inward gasp and look of horror on Richard's face is hard to describe. He dashed to the tall end table behind the couch, on which I had an arrangement of greenery, golden pear ornaments and fresh pomegranates, on top of which he'd left his box of Purdy's. The mouse hadn't touched the pomegranates while we were away, and as far as we knew had not ventured at all up the side of the couch to the tabletop before this. But the little bugger must have a fine-tuned chocolate-loving nose, because it had only taken it four hours, from my 2 am bedtime until Richard woke to its noises just before 6:00, for it to map the potentially uncharted wilds of the top of the couch (prior residents knew the interior of the couch well, sad to say), find its way to the box of Purdy's, pry up the fitted plastic lid, and steal the pecan-topped truffle (Richard's favourite), rolling it back down the couch, onto the floor (probably the noise which woke Richard), and under the other couch. Which is where it must have been hiding until I stood still long enough. We wouldn't even have known, if the chocolate wasn't a bit too big for the mouse to squeeze along after itself through the gap in the wall. Had I gone to bed when Richard did at 10, who knows how many the thief might have stolen. Richard inspected the remains of his Christmas present, found only the one missing, and put the rest up on the shelf with mine. He was already padding back down the hall to bed when I heard the mouse again, in the kitchen this time. I spooked it and it ran, first to the hallway, where Richard shouted and blocked its path to the stairwell. It swerved and ran towards the hall closet. I grabbed a pair of boots out of the way and opened the front door, shrieking. It ran out at lightning speed, its little heart probably beating half out of its chest. I slammed the door. "It's out," I said, and collapsed in massive giggles. Naked man and giggly girl went back to bed.

You could say we won that battle, having deprived the thief of its sugar fix. And being cautious, I kept the kitchen spotless – with extra Windex – for the remainder of the week, also replacing the stashes of mouse poison we'd so foolishly stopped using after a mouse-free summer. All seemed quiet. No telltale rolling noises, no poop in the sink (the poison makes the mouse thirsty). Until New Year's Eve, when Richard cooked the turkey we hadn't had for Christmas. A big meal with all the trimmings meant counters full of dishes, gravy and cheese sauce splashes, bits of cranberry-pecan stuffing (it must have been the pecans), and the pervasive scent of turkey. Too much cleanup for me on a New Year's Eve. Too much food for a wise mouse to resist. On New Year's day, surveying the massive cleanup job ahead of me, I found a chunk of poison moved from its spot on the counter to the stovetop next to the front right element. Ugh. I also found poop – black, not green, which meant the bugger hadn't eaten enough poison to kill it – in the sink beneath the dishes. "Bleach", Richard said. This was war.

I just wanted to know how the mouse was getting onto the counter top. I bleached the face of the cabinets, especially the drawers, thinking this mighty mouse might be climbing straight up like the grandfather clock in Hickory Dickory Dock (which I had always thought was impossible, but I was starting to change my mind). I pulled the hand towels from the drawer handles at the thought that mice might be using them to reach my counters. I made sure there were no other easy paths upward from the kitchen floor. A few days into the New Year, I solved the mystery. That morning, the poison wasn't just next to the element on the stove, it was jammed part way underneath it. I stared. The metal trays beneath our elements are tin-foil free: Richard feels that lining the trays changes heat distribution. So looking beneath the element, you see a metal tray with a large hole in the centre. This leads, Richard explained, to a cavity between the oven and the range for insulation, going around the back and underneath. I suddenly remembered the oven drawer, which had been empty since I discovered that mice had chewed up my oven mitts and made a disgusting mess on top of the roasting pans. I opened it to find a mouse dropping dungheap. There it was, the perfect countertop access: the new hole in the floor behind the oven for the gas line Chris added last summer, an undisturbed drawer, and a pathway complete with mouse-sized entrance to our stovetop. The only solution for now is more poison, and more bleach.

The battle continues, the chunk of poison always near the front element, and poop regularly in my sink, which was particularly awful when I'd left the clean dishes to drain and the poop appeared underneath AFTER I'd put all the dishes away. I dry them off and put them away before bed every night now. A good day is when the poison appears chewed and the droppings are green. I usually get a morning off if I bleached throroughly the night before. But each time the green and the quiet convince me I've gotten rid of the menace, the next day there's new evidence. Reading Lindsey Mitchell's blog, I am suddenly feeling a) guilty for using poison instead of humane traps and b) certain that my mice are close relatives of hers because they are also displaying NIMH-like tendencies, always moving and storing the damn poison but never eating enough of it, thus escaping certain extermination. (Except for the one that made a nest in our Christmas decorations box using the Santa hat and the basket of thread-wrapped ball ornaments, in which it died and turned into a perfect skeleton with a grey fur boa.) That said, I may have solved the not-eating-enough problem; instead of a chunk which can be rounded and rolled, I left a mound of loose shards in the oven drawer hangout. I sat reading on Friday morning, trying at first to tune out a bizarre noise which I finally realized was the echoing-on-metal sound of it chewing like mad in the oven drawer. Then it had the gall (at 8:30 in the morning!) to run across my kitchen floor, under the main couch I was seated on, pause there while listening to me pull my feet onto the couch in instinctive fright, and then scurry in a smoky grey blur (how do the bloody little things move so fast!?) to the smaller couch and down into my office where it again squeezed through one of the gaps between the drywall and the brick fireplace. I have restocked the drawer in the hopes of imminent mummification, but when cousin Greg and Richard have finished their work on their Mogs for the weekend, I'm going to get Richard to go crazy with his bottle of expanding foam in every last nook and cranny, even the ones that appear too small for a 2 inch long critter to fit through. Because this has got to end soon or my nightmares are going to feature me in a nightgown and Richard in a brass-buttoned tin soldier jacket, doing battle with 6 foot tall sword-bearing rodents. I'm glad I didn't watch the Nutcracker Ballet this Christmas. All this angst over just one mouse. At least I'm not alone.