Einstein of mice is dominating my life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2017 (3192 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call me a courageous newspaper columnist with naturally curly hair if you must, but I’m not sure I can take much more of this.

I’m barely sleeping. My nerves are frayed. I skulk around the house in my ratty bathrobe with my startle reflex in overdrive. And the screaming. Oh, dear, God, the incessant high-pitched screaming.

This is what life is like when you have a mouse in the house.

I first became aware of this mouse a couple of weeks ago when I returned from a trip to the West Coast and spotted a furry little shadow darting under the cushions of the bedraggled couch in our den.

Instantly, I called in a professional exterminator, who has filled our house from top to bottom with enough poison to lay low a legion of mice, let alone the single rogue invader I personally blame for turning our lives upside down.

Nothing has been the same since this cheese-eating monster pulled into town. When I go to bed, I dream of mice. When I get up, I creep around the house, perspiring heavily, wringing my hands and peering into corners, searching for the slightest sign an unwelcome visitor has been nibbling our dog treats or attempting to gain entrance to the Tupperware container protecting my supply of day-old doughnuts.

When I am out and about — at the office or the supermarket or the liquor store — people, often complete strangers, will come up to me with a look of pity in their eyes and ask: “Hey, Doug, catch that (bad word) mouse yet?” Or: “Gee, Doug, you don’t look so good. Are you letting a little mouse get the better of you?”

The answer is, yes, I am (very bad word) letting a little mouse get the better me. I have become obsessed with this rogue rodent. I know they tend to travel in packs, but I am convinced this speedy little squeaker is working alone, the rodent equivalent of a lone gunman.

So there I was the other night putting on my least-wrinkled clothing because my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, and I were joining friends at a concert featuring a group called Kongero, an all-female Swedish a cappella quartet with the voices of angels and a penchant for belting out Nordic “herding songs,” which are designed to encourage runaway Swedish cows to return home to their loving families.

Suddenly, an ear-shattering scream echoed down the hallway from my daughter’s room, where my wife has been storing her overflow shoes while our daughter is working and going to school in Ontario.

When I scuttled down the hallway, armed with a kitchen broom, there was my wife, repeatedly hopping up and down and shrieking: “I SAW A MOUSE! IT WAS HIDING IN THE SHOES! GET IT! GET IT!!!”

So I poked the broom into the vast storehouse of shoes, which prompted the mouse to bolt out of the room and in the general direction of my wife, who was cringing by the back door.

“OHMYGAWD!” my wife howled. “IT’S CHARGING ME! IT’S CHARGING ME! HELP! HELP!”

As best as I can recall, I began swinging the broom like Connor McDavid taking a slapshot, thereby chasing the mouse under a bookshelf, then back into my daughter’s room, then down the hallway and into our room, then back out into the hallway.

There, it may or may not have taken refuge in a closet, which I immediately loaded up with snap traps and glue boards.

We arrived a few minutes late at a local church for the big Swedish songfest, and immediately ran into my buddy Bob and his wife, Lena, who happens to be extremely Swedish.

Glancing at my bright-red face, Bob sensed something was amiss. “What’s wrong with you?” he chirped.

So I told him.

I told him everything. I told him how a devilishly elusive beast had broken into our home and was making us miserable and laughing at our efforts to track it down.

What with being a former farm boy, Bob simply rolled his eyes, then sniffed: “Doug, it’s just a mouse.”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? This is NOT just a mouse.

This thing is the Einstein of mice, a rodent so wickedly intelligent that it can overcome any anti-mouse device put in its way.

If you looked at our kitchen counter right now, what you would see is a veritable minefield of snap traps and glue boards — all of them baited with delicious peanut butter and waiting, patiently, to deliver my wife and me from the grip of this beady-eyed mouse mastermind.

We have trapped mice before, but this one simply weaves his way through, over and around our death-dealing devices, much as a super-spy in a Hollywood movie navigates a high-tech trap festooned with lasers as he attempts to steal a secret formula or, possibly, a delicious muffin at the end of the counter.

The night after the concert, screams again rang out from our kitchen, and when I arrived my wife explained the Devil Mouse From Hell had scuttled under a counter, where it was hiding among mounds of debris, including old coffee-makers and Christmas decorations.

I surrounded the corner with every glue trap in the house, creating an impenetrable field of stickiness — which the mouse bolted through in a heartbeat the moment I hoisted up the water-cooler he was lurking behind.

When I last had the courage to look, this evil genius was most likely taking cover under our stove, which is now completely encircled by glue traps and every other kind of trap in our arsenal.

So there is a sense of cautious optimism in our home right now — because, in an effort to drown out my wife’s screams, I have put the Swedish quartet’s CD on our stereo and am blasting a “herding” song at maximum volume.

With our luck, it’s only a matter of time before we’re invaded by cows.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca