Planet of the Mice

I’ve been saving up to do this post for a while now, but I think it’s finally safe. Brace yourselves- this is a long and frightening story. I do apologize for the length; skip down to the summary if need be.

Here goes.

A few weeks ago, around dinnertime, I happened to walk in the kitchen in time to see something run across the floor. I saw a tail, so unlike the last time it’d happened (a year ago in my own house), I knew I saw a mouse and was not hallucinating. I informed my roommates and it was decided that we would call our housing managers in the morning (it was a Sunday, and they are closed on Sunday). The next day, one of my roommates comes home by herself after class to hear a scratching noise. Through the crack of our kitchen door (seen immediately when you enter the front door), she sees that the source of the noise is a mouse stuck to a sticky trap. She had no idea there would be any traps, let alone any mice, and so she proceeds to freak out. Did I mention we’re a rather squeamish flat? This roommate, let’s call her Dana, runs upstairs to the other Bucknell flat in her distress. Did I mention that most of the upstairs flat is vegetarian, unlike our strictly omnivore flat? The single male Bucknellian, sensing her fearful paralysis, runs, in the rain, to the nearest food store and buys vegetable oil. Apparently that is the proper way to remove a mouse from a sticky trap. Did I mention that he is the most passionately vegetarian, and for ethical reasons? I walk in to the flat to see him getting oil all over our floor in his attempt to pour it on the trap, and Dana biting her nails in horrified suspense and worry. He closes the door to somehow finish the job, emerges a it later with a cereal box supposedly containing the mouse, and runs off to free it somewhere non-conspicuous. Note: there is no such thing as a non-conspicuous place to free a mouse in London. Dana and I exchange conspiracy theories while he is gone, which center around the mouse having gotten loose when the door was closed, and the mouse saver, we’ll call him David, did not tell us because he didn’t want us to do anything else to harm the furry creature of God. Anyway, Dana and I clean up the oily mess in our kitchen, and try to resume normal life. When we inform our third roommate, let’s name her Alex, she becomes rather upset. Did I mention she is the most squeamish? We think, wishfully, that perhaps this was the mouse I had seen earlier and also the only mouse in our apartment.

Nope.

A few days (maybe 2) later, we find another mouse stuck to a trap. Dana finds it in the morning when she wakes up and believes it is dead. I like to double-check these things, and before getting my breakfast (because looking at dead mice is so good for the appetite) I take a gander. It’s wriggling, and for simplicity’s sake I eliminate the possibility that it is a zombie mouse and inform Dana that is still alive. At this point we need to leave for class, so we resolve to handle the matter afterwards. When we come back, we wait for David to wake up, and then politely ask him to handle our mousy friend. I watch his method this time, you know, just in case it happens again. He takes the mouse out in another cereal box, and we clean up the oil on the floor. After cleaning, I notice we have a plastic bucket under the sink, which, if the trap and mouse were placed inside, there would be no mess to clean up on the floor afterwards. I hoped there wouldn’t be any other mice and that, as luck would have it, we would find this fantastic mouse catching tool after all the mice were caught.

Wrong.

Just a few hours later, there is a third mouse. This time, I man up and take care of it myself, using the bucket. My roommates are distressed, but I’m already in action mode. I got a good method going, and feel like I’m practically a mouse-freeing expert. I take the bucket to the little private garden at the end of our block and free the mouse, hoping people think I am merely carrying cleaning supplies. After our third mice in just 3 days, we call the housing management again. The next day, they come and fill the mouse hole in our kitchen with steel wool and grout, which apparently prevents them from chewing their way back in. They are very thorough, and inspect each room of the house for any other possible entrances. Fantastic. It seemed like our mice troubles may finally have been over.

Not so.

For a few days, all is well. Then, one night when Dana and I had just come back from a night out, and were in no mood, we find another mouse. Crap. We had decided to leave the traps out for about a week, just in case, but we didn’t expect any problems and have no idea how the mouse got there. But whatever, by now we’re pros. We got on it, since it seemed like a good idea to get rid of it before squeamish Alex returned. I get to work with my bucket and oil, feeling that I’ve perfected my method. I leave Dana in charge of watching the freed mouse in the bucket while I quickly put on some trousers [àremembered this time] and proper shoes, because I was not going to freeze my bum off in a dress and blister my feet in my nice shoes any longer. The last time I used the bucket, I was convinced that the mouse could get out, with the walls being fairly high and him being covered in slippery oil, and so I didn’t expect any problems there.

False.

In the 30 seconds Dana stopped hovering over the bucket to talk to me as I re-entered the kitchen, the mouse disappeared. We were both in shock when we found the bucket empty and the mouse having escaped before our very eyes. We traced his tracks, though, to find out where he got in, and decided to call the housing management AGAIN to let them know a mouse had broken through the patch. Since it is a Friday night, we have to wait the whole weekend to call. There’s nothing else we can do, so we clean up, set up strategic traps, and call it a night. I go back into the kitchen a little later to find one of the traps moved and paw prints on one side of it. I hope that this was just the mouse going back into the hole, or something that doesn’t require my immediate attention. I give up on the situation, close the kitchen door tightly, and figure we should be fine until the morning.

No.

Dana and I relax in our respective beds, doing whatever on our laptops. Eventually I am exhausted, and decide it is time to sleep. I go to set down my laptop… and there, a mere few six inches from my bed, is a dead, oil-covered mouse.

WTFNSAJASJ@MD#K$M!!! That is how I felt at that moment. Mind you, we had kept the kitchen door closed after the mouse had gotten free, and only had it open 2-3 times after that when we had to enter the kitchen. Even then, we were standing in the doorway and scouting for mice. Also keep in mind that if it had died a few seconds or inches later, it would have been under my bed and we would have never found it. Now it is my turn to completely freak out. I alert Dana and we exchange unanswerable questions in shocked and horrified voices. For example, HOW DID IT GET HERE?, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?, WHAT JUST HAPPENED?, HOW DID IT GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN?, HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY HAVE DIED RIGHT NEXT TO MY BED?, WHAT IS GOING ON?, and the like. I am tired. The stress of already attempting to free a mouse twice in a week and almost dropping my laptop on a dead one is getting to me. After my laptop slips closer to the mouse, I start crying (just a little) and Dana has to take over and find some way to dispose of the rodent corpse. She eventually got it into a cardboard box we had around, and I help tape the box shut- just in case. We agree that we are definitely calling the housing company asap, and decide to avoid telling our roommate until the hole is taken care of, because we don’t need anyone else freaking out. After convincing ourselves that mice can’t climb on to our beds, we sleep. We desperately hope this is the last escapade before calling on Monday.

Not quite.

We tell our roommate in the morning that we found another mouse, but leave off everything that happened after the initial catch, implying that it was caught and released without a hitch. I think it was the next day that we found another mouse, and this time I made sure to get ready to carry the mouse outside before freeing it. I covered the bucket when I washed my hands and put my coat on, and while I carried it outside. I took it to some weird little parking lot with a patch of grass, and hoped to never find another mouse. This time, though, I was prepared for the worst.

Finally, on Tuesday, the pest control people came again and filled the hole thoroughly. We haven’t had any problems since (it’s been about 2 weeks), but we still have our traps out and are praying this is all over. It seems like we are finally in the clear.

But you never know.

Sorry this is so long, I just didn’t think a shortened version would do it justice. But, here goes:

30-second summary: We caught five dead mice in our flat. We freed and released all but one outdoors; the other one escaped in the kitchen and ended up dying right next to my bed. No big deal.