The little mouse that has been living in our house has finally been trapped. After several nights of us feeding her macadamia nuts covered in peanut butter, she finally stepped into one of those Havahart humane traps. The Havahart trap looks a bit like a tiny cage, with two balanced doors that swing locked shut when the animal takes the bait. Today's drawing captures the look and size of our rodent invader just about right. In brief, too cute for words.
It's not that we were trying to feed the mouse. She was just too fast or too clever for our previous traps. Precisely at twelve thirty each night, she would foray into the snare, take her prize, and vanish back into her lair beneath the oven. The only trace of her exploit would be the sudden rattle of macadamia nut against whatever material the trap was made of, and then of course, the total disappearance of the macadamia nut. For a while, I thought my brother-in-law might be eating the nuts, but the Havahart trap proved otherwise.
Mousey Tongue (as we called her, a play on the name of the deceased First Chairman of the Chinese Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong) was fast and she was smart, but she did not have a credit card. Once we settled on a trap that worked, we escorted our little houseguest on a midnight drive across the Pitt River to a nice, remote undisclosed location, where she was allowed to run free and live wild.
Please click here to see my previous rendering of the house mouse. I may have been a little off with my earlier version of the critter.
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