Mus musculus
We have a mouse.
It’s been living in our house for at least the past four days, but I’m not really that sure how it got in there. All I know is that, a few days ago, I heard a faint scuffling. I stopped what I was doing and listened. The sound had vanished.
The next day I heard a similar sound, this time from the other side of the attic. I turned off the air conditioner and strained to hear something – anything. Silence again.
This morning, however, Kerrie heard it. She mentioned something to me while I was in a coma-like state at 7 am and I quickly forgot about it – until I came home from work and something reminded me of it.
“Did you say you heard a squirrel in our house this morning?” I asked, suddenly confused as to why that thought popped into my head at that time.
The comment was confirmed, and we both tramped up stairs to search for the source of the elusive sound. We crawled back into a side closet, after reassembling the contents all over the floor, and pulled back a hidden wall to reveal the rest of our attic. It was dark.
I flashed a light inside and noticed something immediately: a stain, with rodent droppings scattered in a small circle inside of it, joining together to form a lovely piece of “excretionary” art. We asked for a second opinion, and Don gravely agreed.
A mouse. In our house.
So today I begin the battle of the attic. I have purchased mousetraps, which are every bit as stereotypical as those shown in Tom and Jerry cartoons. I’ll place them in the crawl space tonight, and I’ll await the first shot in our mammalian war. Peanut butter is my ammunition of choice.
I’ll have to kill them in an area I can catch them, so poison is out of the question – what if the mouse crawls back into the hidden and inaccessible recesses of our dormer and disappears, only to make itself known every summer when the room heats up?
Armed with balsa wood and peanut butter; some warrior I am.
–UPDATE–
After a long deliberation with her mom, Kerrie has come to the conclusion that it is probably not a mouse, but a bat. We’ve jumped the gun a little too much, I guess.
I’ll have to take my balsa wood mouse traps back.
*sigh* I thought I was so witty to put the scientific name of the house mouse as the title, but alas. Bats.