mousetrap, from billaday's flickr stream

Warning: the following contains scenes of a pest-control nature, and no actual recipes, either. The gentlest of heart among you might want to look away now.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an unexpected guest. The guest did not make himself known to me by the usual means of a Facebook message, a text, or even a phone call. I was not aware that he’d raided my larder until I picked up the bag of dog treats to give September a reward, and noticed that my hand rose rather more rapidly than might’ve been expected. Think of the feeling you get when you step down onto what you think is the last step of a staircase, from what actually was the last step of the staircase. Now, imagine it in reverse, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The bag was empty. In its corner, a hole had been chewed, through which the treats had been extracted. A hole just big enough for the head of a mouse.

Immediately, I tore the kitchen apart, and found what I most dreaded. Mouseshit marked a mouse trail along the back-splash of my counter, in much the same way as discarded fast food wrappers mark the edges of our nation’s highways. Mouse or man, you shall know them by what they leave behind. I’m not the most scrupulous kitchen-cleaner around. You won’t find me going over each crevice with a bowl of bleach and a toothbrush, like a deranged dental hygienist in her time off. I do like to keep things neat. I wipe down my counters. I spray down the stove with spray-cleaner after I cook on it, and do my best to return it to a reasonable facsimile of its pre-cooking condition. I don’t leave dog food sitting around, unless it’s in a sealed bag. A sealed bag that turned out not to be mouse-proof. In the bottom corner of the mylar-foil, zipper-top dog food bag that I keep in the cabinet precisely and cleverly sized to hold no sealable container manufactured anywhere in the world, I found another little hole, surrounded by little silvery aluminized mylar shreds. I’m all for the circle of life and everything. I recognize that, whether it’s personalities or creatures, it takes all kinds. But not only had this mouse failed to pick up after himself, he’d violated the sanctity of September’s kibble and her liver treats, and that sanctity must be preserved.

I got on my basket bike and rode to the hardware store. (This may sound prissy, but it isn’t. My basket bike isn’t a pink step-through with a little wicker Toto-sized bin on the bars. It’s an Andre the Giant among bicycles, a rust-spotted 64cm road frame from a legendary French handbuilder, fitted with a fixed gear and the kind of steel delivery basket that can hold roughly three cubic feet of whatever you care to cram into it, or more with judicious bungee-cording. This is a bicycle that puts me on eye-level with full-sized SUVs, and makes oncoming joggers in the bike lane get out of the way in a hurry. When running errands, this is how I roll.) Avoiding the glue traps, which I’d been warned were unconscionably cruel, I held up a couple of snap traps to the owner, and asked which he liked better.
“I have no opinion,” he said. “I stock a little bit of everything.”
“So the cheap ones are as good as the fancy ones?”
“They’re all fine, but you’ll get little pieces of mouse everywhere. A glue trap is no mess.”
“So you do have an opinion.”
“I don’t care. I stock everything.”
It took a customer to point out to me the humane catch-and-release traps on the opposite shelf, and to confirm their efficacy, with several tales of mice caught, nourished, and released unharmed, as though they were on a Carnival cruise with slightly better chow. The price tag — $11, or nearly twenty times that of a basic snap trap — convinced me that I’d found the trap I was looking for. Expensive and cruelty-free, it was the cage-free egg of mousetraps. I bought one, thanked the customer, scowled at the owner, and went to Trader Joe’s, where I searched the shelves in vain for the kind of dog treats that the mouse liked so much. When I couldn’t find them, I found myself genuinely concerned. I settled on another kind of dog treat, but couldn’t help but worry that the mouse wouldn’t care for these.

Returning home, I baited the humane trap with dog treats (belatedly tossing one to the dog), moved the dog food to a high shelf in the next room, and set the trap where the mouse had so obviously roamed. That night, I went to sleep confident that the mouse would soon be moved to greener pastures. I was going to gentrify his ass out of my neighborhood.

Of course, it didn’t work. Over the next few days, I changed baits and locations. It still didn’t work. I got a little crazy, spreading cayenne pepper on known mouse-trails, to act as a deterrent and, if not, to catch footprints. I gave the mouse a name: Fucktard, or Efti for short. One night, I spotted him, scurrying onto the counter from beside the stove. I tore my kitchen apart again. That’s when I opened the doodad drawer. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s in every kitchen, filled with thumbtacks, bits of string, fuses, and so on. It’s the one that would have been my silverware drawer, had it been large enough to hold the narrowest silverware caddy ever made. As it was, I used it to stow the fridge and microwave manuals that my landlord insisted that I keep. Those manuals were covered in mouseshit. Not that there was any food in there, and not that the manuals had been chewed up for nest-building purposes. No, the doodad drawer was simply the mouse’s favorite hangout.

I went apoplectic. I visited several hardware stores, buying up half a dozen snap traps, and two different ultra-sonic anti-mouse boomboxes. These are little speakers that plug into the wall and pump out 120dB of mouse-siren at 30,000Hz, guaranteed to drive any rodent in the vicinity off his nut. (Actually, if I could get one of these to which I could upload mp3s for ultrasonic playback, I’d buy it in an instant. The associated website would contain a user-updated anti-mouse music database, which could provide insight into the music that annoyed mice in a given region most, be it black metal or Barry Manilow.) That, I decided, constituted fair warning. If Efti wouldn’t be kept away, he’d have to face the consequences. I baited the snap traps with peanut butter, set them in the doodad drawer and other likely areas, and waited. The next night, I had my mouse. He had passed rather suddenly in the doodad drawer.

All this time, somehow I knew that, if there was one mouse on the loose in my kitchen, there probably were more. My suspicions were confirmed when the baits began to disappear from the rebaited trap in the doodad drawer, and from those under the sink. It seemed that Efti was merely the dumb one. I knew what I had to do. I concentrated my forces, setting the drawer with three traps. (Naturally, the doodad drawer was too narrow to contain the catch-and-release trap.) On the advice of a Twitter friend, who actually recommended Trefoils, the shortbread Girl Scout cookies, for this purpose, I mixed the peanut butter with a little chewed-up bread, which hardened around the triggers of the snap-traps, making the bait harder to remove. In two more days, the traps caught two more mice. The humane trap, in place all the while, caught none.

I have not seen mouse-sign since. If there are more — and if three, the old song notwithstanding, why not five? — perhaps they have taken the death metal as their warning, and elected to stay away. A baited trap remains in the doodad drawer, just in case. The humane mousetrap, too, remains, as a monument to my well-meaning folly.

Since you’re wondering, it did occur to me whether I ought to do a Farley Mowat and eat the mice that I caught. After all, they’re wild-caught meat, right? But, like, I don’t know where they’ve been, or what parasites they might’ve carried. Not that I know that much about the meat at the grocery store. Perhaps, if the mice came branded with little USDA stamps, that would be all the motivation I’d need.