A couple of days have passed, and I’m still feeling a little guilty about The Bad Karma Mouse Incident.
Last Friday, I biked home early in order to tidy up the house before the viewing party for my TV appearance. I entered the house the way I normally do when I’m on my bicycle — through the back deck, which is accessible from the garage. While walking to the side door of the house, I said “Hello” to the neighbour’s cat, Pusskin, who was sunning himself. He turned his head towards me for just a moment, barely acknoledging my presence as indepedent cats are wont to do, and then resumed staring off into space.
“You wouldn’t be so standoffish if I were the one feeding you,” I said to the cat, as if a creature with no language centre, a brain the size of a walnut and the loyalty of a Third World mercenary soldier would understand or care.
Upon entering the house, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Tiny, circular movement. A little oval dragging a small line behind it. I took a step towards the movement, and the little oval froze. I flicked on the lights, and the oval turned out to be a mouse.
My house is a historical building that’s had its interior completely renovated. Part of the redesign was to expose the brick walls along the length of the house. While it looks cool, the imperfect joins where brick meets drywall-and-plaster make perfect entry points for the occasional mouse. Most of our mouse incursions stopped after my housemate Paul and I “sealed the borders” with several tubes of caulk. I’m not sure how our little visitor managed to find his way in, but maybe it’s time to do a house inspection again.
I grabbed an empty garbage can from the bathroom and inched my way towards the mouse, who stayed frozen in place, hoping that I wouldn’t notice him. I trapped the mouse by inverting the garbge can and dropping it over him. I then shimmied the garbage can with the mouse underneath it — it was kind of a slow motion rodent-oriented version of the shell game — towards the side door. While I was doing this, I talked to the mouse.
“Don’t worry, little fella, I’m not going to kill you. I’m just going to put you in the great outdoors.”
I don’t know why I was talking to the mouse; it had no language centre either, and its brain was even smaller than the cat’s.
I opened the side door, and with a flick of the garbage can, I gave the mouse a short toss. I just wanted to throw it far away enough to make sure it didn’t run back into the house. The motion with which I tossed the mouse was smooth, and the little creature made a low, graceful arc over three feet…
…and landed right between the paws of the neighbour’s lounging cat.
Pusskin looked at me and meowed once, as if to say “thanks, dude!” With a quick Ike Turner smack of his right paw, he stunned the mouse. He grabbed the mouse by the scruff of the neck and carried him into a quiet corner of the neighbour’s yard, where I’m sure some gruesome Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom activity ensued.
Instead of sparing the creature, which was my intent, I’d sent him off to a slow death. Cats don’t immediately kill mice; they tend to bat them about first, kind of like the way Freddy bounced Jason all over the room in Freddy vs. Jason, except that there are no cheesy pinball sound effects and you don’t have to waste eight bucks and an hour and a half of your life watching cinema-guano.
I certainly hope my own end is a little less hooray-I-escaped/oh-shit-I-didn’t ironic.
Mind you, there is a silver lining to all this: after knowing me for four years, the neighbour’s cat actually greets me now.
