Warning: a little bit of gruesomeness, and a long MPSIMS ramble.
A while back I posted about our cat’s propensity for depositing live mice in our bed. The good news lately is that there’s been less of that; the bad news is that it’s because about two years ago the cat adopted son #2 as her pet, and now she sleeps in his bed, and also bring HIM the late-night presents.
The other good news is that it’s been a rarer event, and we’ve been mostly mouse-free, at least until recently. To describe what’s changed, you have to understand the layout of our house, which was built in the 1700s - picture a VERY tall capital U, and then tip that U over onto its side. The very top end of the U is son #2’s room; the very bottom tip of the U is our bedroom, and then a long storage room, say 16’ x 10’. That storage room is actually washer/dryer, pantry, extra shelving, and then a lot of boxes/cases of stuff since we buy in bulk. And in addition to all that, the cat’s food and litterbox.
About a month ago, I became aware that the mice had noticed the cat’s night-time absences, and were starting to take her food. The clues weren’t too obvious, no little poops, but just occasionally when I got up for my inevitable 3AM bathroom trip, I’d hear the “ping!” of a mouse fleeing the ceramic bowl. It happened often enough that I went and bought a mouse trap, organized the cases in the storage room into little pathways to the food, and put a trap in each pathway. And sure enough, a few days later, 2AM or so, one got nabbed, except it went horribly awry - because I was putting traps where the cat might go, I’d bought these little enclosed plastic types, rather than the lethal and cheap wooden type. As a result, the incredibly fucking fat mouse (I have seen many mice, but none like this - and no, it wasn’t a rat) had its head caught in the trap, but wasn’t dead, and had flipped around on the floor until it landed in the food bowl. Ugh. I took it out and deposited it in the woods, where it staggered off.
I then put the trap back, thinking it had failed because the mouse was so big. And last night the same thing happened - snapping sound woke me up at 2AM, flopping sounds for a while, and then silence. I lay in bed feeling horribly guilty for not finding a different kind of trap, and then finally got up, turned on the light, went into the back room, and…no mouse. No trap. What the hell. For the next half hour I stacked and restacked boxes, looking for that goddamn thing, knowing it was in agony somewhere, but finally went back to bed. At 6:30 I got up, decided to work from home, and searched again for a while. Bear in mind - big room, lots of shelves and hidden areas, lots of cases. No luck.
Finally, about 9AM, son #2 comes down to where I’m working. Me: “Did you hear about the mouse?” Son: “You mean the one in the garbage?” Me: “What? No. The one in the back room. What one in the garbage?” Son: “You will not believe this, but around 3 this morning the cat jumps into the bed, and guess what - not only does she have a dead mouse, the damn mouse is still in the trap.”
So there you have it: presumably the cat found the mouse in the trap, and made the long journey all the way up to son #2s room to deposit it.
God I hate mice.