The First Mouse My Wife Caught: Part 1

My wife is a physician, and has the womanly instinct to keep a safe distance from rats, mice, lizards, cockroaches etc. We would never have believed she would catch a mouse. But she did. We have this grain crusher and grinder that we use once a month. With a keen sense of using our real estate fully, we use the storage space of the grinder to store onions and potatoes for the remaining month. Its door has to be kept open to let air in, so that the contents don’t go bad. We never thought a mouse would climb to the third floor and enter our clean and tidy apartment. But that day one did so. It nibbled a tomato and two onions and then shitted all over the place. We were aghast the next day. That evening she closed the door of the grinder before going to bed to save onions from the monster. But the fellow had arrived before that and he got trapped in it. I got up in the middle of the night to the noise of the fellow biting through the plastic mesh covering the air outlet. I must admit 3:30 a.m. is the not a time at which I am at my best, especially with a terrified wife standing next to me giving instructions on methods of getting the fellow out of the house. So I put a wire mesh over the plastic mesh and stuck it in place with packing tape. I shut off the other vents with the tape and went to bed. But the fellow wouldn’t let us sleep. He continued to nibble his escape tunnel with loud noises. I had to get up and push the grinder out of the house. Then we slept. The next day we debated the best way to get rid of him. We agreed it would be foolish to just let him go, because he would come back with a vengeance. We knew rats and mice had shredded our neighbor’s fancy clothes in the recent past. We were not keen on having our clothes treated similarly. I knew I was not fast and accurate enough to hit him if I just opened the door. So we settled on giving him a poisoned biscuit. Mice were said to go away looking for water once they ate such biscuits and not come back. She bought one in the evening. I banged on the grinder a few times to let him know I was opening the door and was armed and he should not try anything foolish. Then I opened the door and blinded the mouse with an LED torch that police would use on criminals during interrogation. There was no mouse there! It was in the inside somewhere. I quickly put the biscuit inside and closed the door. We had a peaceful night. I opened the door the next morning, the torch on as last night, expecting to find the fellow belly up, not breathing. The biscuit was nibbled, but the mouse was nowhere to be seen. I closed the door. We started another debate on what to do next. She had heard of a mouse catching board. We decided to buy one. I came home in the evening to find a board ready. It was like the hard cover of a book, folded in the middle, with strong glue on the inside. After going through the now familiar routine of banging on the grinder as warning and switching on the torch, I opened the door of the grinder and tried to place the board inside. It wouldn’t fit in. Finally I had to keep half on the bottom and the other half inclined against one of the side walls. The fellow was inside somewhere not making a noise. The neighbors had learned about the mouse by this time, and were keeping the door closed at all times, observing the proceedings through the peeping hole. That was fine with me. We had another peaceful night. I opened the grinder door the next morning after going through the standard ritual, to find that the fellow was definitely not stuck to the board, but had closed it so that he could move about freely. He was still hiding inside. There was no time for a debate, since I had a big operation list waiting for me at the hospital. In the evening I googled and found out that mice can stay alive for 16 to 20 days without food and water. We could not starve the fellow to death, because the thought of a live mouse there was quite unsettling. The cleaning woman and the neighbors were also demanding more prompt action.