By Jim Hagarty
It is strange the alliances a man makes as he goes through his life and the cruel way he is sometimes forced to bring some of them to an end.
One night five years ago I was in my basement office, working at my desk, when I heard a busy scratching noise in the ceiling above my head. In the fixed, stapled-on, tile ceiling above my head. In the ceiling that took many sweaty hours to affix and which simply could not be taken down to remove the source of a busy, scratching noise, no matter how annoying.
Rising from my chair, I followed the sound across the room as the source of it, which I quickly surmised was probably a member of the rodent family, seemed to be heading for the electrical box cupboard, the one place in the ceiling where it could probably crawl down. Flinging open the cupboard door, I saw a red plastic bag, moving on its own initiative. Grabbing the bag, and whatever was propelling it, I ran up the stairs, through the kitchen and into the garage where I hurled the whole affair onto the cold concrete floor there. From under the bag, scampered a small grey mouse which wasted no time scurrying for a small hole I could see in a corner of the garage next to the house wall. And I knew that, before I was sitting back down at my office table, the mouse was already back lounging in its comfortable ceiling apartment.
Every winter since that time, the mouse and I have shared our below-ground quarters and of the two of us, it has been by far the noisiest. I have no idea what that little guy was up to all that time but it had to be the most industrious rodent on the planet. It would tear from one end of the basement to the other in seconds. When I watched TV, I could hear it above my head. When I was on the computer, there it was again, above my noggin. And even when I slept in my bed, I could hear it dashing back and forth above me. In fact, it sometimes woke me from a deep sleep, so loud were the noises it could produce with its dashing about. I finally realized that it seemed to be following me about the place as it was too much of a coincidence that it could almost always be above whatever spot in the basement I was occupying.
The months went by, reasonably trouble-free for mouse and man, though it never sat very well with me that I had to share my space with a little furry creature who simply decided one day to take up permanent residence in my home.
But then came this past winter and the fortunes of the mouse started into an irreversible decline. To begin with, a telephone line downstairs went mysteriously dead and it didn’t take me long to realize the ceiling dweller had no doubt chewed through the wire. Relating this to a friend, I was told that next on its menu might be an electrical wire and that it could start a fire in the process.
Then my wife produced a newspaper article about a strange illness young children can sometimes get from breathing in the air around mouse poop. Having two young children and, after five years, a few shopping bags full of mouse poop in our ceiling, we realized an eviction was in the works.
The final straw came Christmas Day as we ate our bountiful meal to the sounds of our unwelcome ceiling inhabitant clawing out all the insulation from under our front-door sill, creating an ever-widening crack as it worked. In fact, I left the table to inspect at one point and could see its little leg and claws coming up through the crevice. I didn’t pass on this news to the other diners at the table or I might have spent the rest of the day alone.
However, if I have shared my home for five years with a determined little pest, I have dwelled there even longer with a human being who is even more strong-willed. On New Year’s Eve, she came back from the farm-supply store with a forty-dollar “ultrasonic” noise-maker that promised to drive all the mice in our home to distraction by upsetting their nervous systems, causing them to leave the premises immediately and to seek counselling. With high hopes, I plugged it in at one end of the basement. The sound it made drove all four humans in the house crazy but after a few days, it was apparent it was having no effect on the mouse. Surmising that the little guy probably couldn’t hear it through the ceiling tile, I found a way of fishing it through an opening and setting it up right in its living room. The ensuing, frantic mouse activity that went on almost non-stop for days, led me to realize that far from being the scary noise source the little gizmo promised to be, it was obviously being received by the mouse as a great new sound system and it was no doubt dancing up a storm to its emissions much as a teenager might go berserk at a rock concert. I am sure the mouse wondered at our great generosity in providing it with such a creature comfort.
Another trip to the farm-supply store saw me standing mouth-agog in front of racks and racks of mouse-killing and mouse-trapping machines ranging in price from ninety-nine cents to seventy dollars. After listening for twenty minutes to the sales clerk enumerating the various attributes of each device, I finally ran from the store in a panic, knowing that were I gifted with four university degrees in zoology, biology, sociology and anthropology, there was no absolutely no chance I would pick the right machine. Simple psychology told me that.
However, forced back to the store the next day by the “or else” look in the eyes of my exasperated wife who had visions of the mouse and his poop joining us in bed one night once he’d completely hacked through through the front-door insulation, I impulsively settled on two yellow, easy-to-set traps that promised that our mouse’s final meal would consist of the peanut butter slathered on the “bait cup.” I rushed home with my purchases. Carefully installing them by the hole in the garage wall, I spent the evening running out there to check on their progress.
Saturday night, the mouse had a farewell party, I guess, dancing up a storm to the music from its new sound system and generally having a ball.
Sunday morning, bright and early, I found it, head-first in one of the yellow traps, its mouth covered in peanut butter, its body cold and stiff. I released it into a garbage can, announced the news to my wife, and celebrated victory with a nice cup of coffee.
That night, I went down to the basement, dismantled junior’s sound system, and sat down to watch some TV. But my earlier jubilation at my tormentor’s capture and execution was slowly replaced by a strange and forlorn feeling.
Something, it seemed, akin to loneliness.
For a brief few minutes, I missed the little fella. And I felt just a little too smug in my big, blue easy chair in my big, blue, warm house while my old rec room associate lay stiff in a garbage can in my back yard.
However, sense soon overtook sentiment and I settled down to a relaxing evening, content in the knowledge we all wouldn’t have to die in a house fire or contract some mysterious disease from mouse poop.
Still, when I went to bed, I had trouble drifting off. It was just a little too quiet in the vacated apartment above. An apartment that will no longer be available for tenancy, as soon as I can get back out to the garage to pour some concrete down that darned mouse hole.
Look for that to happen sometime in the next five years.
Jan. 14/02
