We live in the country. I mean, the COUNTRY. If you look at my house on google maps, there's a little cluster of four cottages and we're surrounded by a radius of, I would say, two miles of fields in all directions. It's beautiful - and comes with it's own wildlife zoo. Sometime last year, I recall posting about the rats that turned up in the garden. Luckily late last summer, the cats at the farm had some kittens and now that we have four badass mogs kicking about the place, we no longer have rats. This, believe me, is a good thing. The cats however didn't deter a stoat from killing the two giant rabbits that one of our neighbours had. I don't know why the stoat has never been interested in our godzilla rabbits. Maybe they're bigger - one of them bit me last week trying to get some food out of my hand and man it hurt.
Anyway, a few days ago, we saw a little mouse sitting in the middle of the floor while we were watching TV. He looked very well fed - lending some gravity to Eleanor's theory that yes, the guinea pig food had been going down faster than normal. He's actually quite a pretty mouse and every night we've heard him rustling about, no doubt searching for tasty morsels consisting of house wiring and whatever else mice eat - anything he can find probably. So, the day before yesterday, we put all the guinea pig food into plastic boxes in the hope he would go elsewhere for his daily bread.
Last night, neither of us could be bothered to cook, so we bought some pizza. Eleanor left a couple of crusts on her plate and put the plate on the floor and within seconds, the little mouse ran out from underneath the sofa, grabbed the biggest crust on the plate and disappeared back under the sofa with it. Brave! Sofa was moved, crust was binned and there was no sign of our little friend... until about 2am this morning when Eleanor found him sitting on her bedside table chewing the corner of her book.
I'm quite reluctant to poison him because he is actually quite a sweet little thing and he's only looking for easy food - and then she spoke the words out loud that I had only been thinking.
Maybe it's not the same mouse.
So today, I'm going to get a couple of humane traps along with some poison. I'll give him a couple of days to get in the box and if he's smart, I'll release him into the wild, otherwise it's the tasty looking arsenic laden corn. I'm not sure that the humane trap is all that kind though. It will make us happy but those cats will find him in no time at all and that will be the end for him.
I just hope there's only one of them.
