2 am.
Me: Dreaming of preparing and eating some crackly peanut brittle.
Henry: Mousies be crunchy!
7 am.
Me: Stepping almost but not quite on the lower body part of a mouse.
Tag: mouse
The Suicidal Mouse
Henry brought his first mouse of the year into the house. He couldn’t do it quietly and had to tell me about it. That means, he opened his mouth. And out dropped the mouse.
It ran into the bathroom. I knew he would hide behind in the gap between the wall and the washing machine and he might die there. We decided to close the bathroom door and deal with the situation in the morning.
This morning I entered the bathroom and was greeted by a drowned mouse in the toilet bowl. How` I don’t know. Why I don’t even want to think about.
Henry and the mouse
Yesterday Henry brought us his first mouse of the year. He took it straight to the guest toilet and we closed the door as we thought that the better option to having a mouse run wild in our flat. When Henry wanted out, we let him and searched for the little beasty. No mouse. We cleared the room (it’s not that big after all). No mouse. We checked the cat toilet. No mouse. We checked behind the toilet brush, behind the small shelf, behind and in the bucket with the cleaning products. NO MOUSE.
Henry thought otherwise. He laid himself in the doorway and kept watch. Whenever one of us passed he told us about the mouse. Although we tried to convince him that there was no mouse, he stayed adamant. And would not budge. We searched the little room again. We took all movable furniture out. I took the opportunity and mopped the floor. There was no mouse.
Until there was a mouse. And Henry caught it and was very proud. And smug.
We will never doubt him again.
“I’ve been robbed!”
I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding Henry. A certain kind of miaou can get me out of bed faster than I thought I was capable of. It means: “I am a great hunter! I am THE great hunter! Come and see!”
Of late, most of the mice Henry brings in are dead and I praise him and clear away the mess (usually by calling my husband). But occasionally they are not. This either means we have a living mouse in the house for a few days or we have a dead, rotting mouse in our house in a few days.
This time I was fast enough. Henry carried his playfood to the bathroom where it hid under the scale. I grabbed an old box which normally houses cleaning stuff and dumped it over the little rodent. While looking for a stiff piece of plastic or something to slide under the box I grabbed my camera, obviously.
No mouse was harmed this day. Henry, however, is confused. He inspects the bathroom ever so often. I guess the smell lingers on.
Henry likes it clean
Every now and again Henry disappears behind a cupboard or desk only to emerge again a little later covered in dust bunnies and cobwebs. He is a living duster.
I always thought he enjoyed this as part of discovering the nooks and crannies of our flat but now I’m not so sure anymore. Three, four nights ago he brought in a mouse and let it loose in our study. He tried to find it for a while behind the boxes and shelves and desks and then lost interest.
We closed the study door, resolved to find the little rodent in the morning when there would be better light. I heard it rummaging around in the morning and assumed it was still there and doing well.
By the time I got home from work our whole study had been turned upside down or rather inside out: most of it was standing on the patio. My husband had been mouse hunting, overseen by a bored and disinterested cat. But: No mouse. He was absolutely sure that the mouse could not have gotten out. But the room was definitely mouse-less. No squeek, no rustling.
Yet after a couple of days we couldn’t deny it anymore: there still was a mouse, it didn’t squeek anymore and it had started to smell.
We finally found the lifeless body of a little mouse, decomposing and seeping in the wooden floor behind the heavy desk. We removed it, buried what was left, cleaned the area, sanitised the area, put soda in an old sock to get rid of the smell. Our study hasn’t been so clean since we moved in.
I am beginning to suspect that this was Henry’s plan all along.
events are often synonymouse
I wrote this morning: “Maus am Morgen, vertreibt Kalorien und Sorgen.” A variation of a Germany proverb, more or less: “Mouse in the morning – repels calories and sorrows. It sounds better in Germany.
And now this: Henry has his private play mouse. The little mouse I caught
this morning and which I brought to the old, disused barn next door, was in the house again just now. I recognised him because he has a dud left hind leg. I don’t know if he has the leg because of Henry’s roughhousing, or if Henry keeps catching him because he has a dud leg.
If Henry should bring Synonymouse in to play again I will drive him in the nearby woods. I don’t care if he will miss his family.
team work
Henry and I make a good team.
I was awakened this morning by: “Damn, there is another mouse in the house!”
The mouse retired (or rather hid). My son insisted that he snug under his bed. Lothar and I doubted it, because the space he could have used was incredibly narrow. While the two men were still arguing, I saw that yes, this mouse could make itself almost as flat as a sheet of paper. And no, it wasn’t under the bed anymore but clung to the wall behind a mover’s box. Henry saw it too, scratched at it and mousey (who really was a shrew*) ran down the wall, out of the room and hit – of all things! – behind Henry’s cat loo in the guest toilet. I closed the door and Henry and I had five minutes of fun (I don’t think the shrew had much fun) until I managed to capture it in plastic bowl and covered it with a dustpan.
Lothar did the last bit and showed the shrew the way out, while Henry had a liver stick, and we highfived, Henry and I, that is.
* The fact that Henry brings shrews home to play kind of explains why the mousetrap baited with Nutella doesn’t work, as they are insectivores.
** Yeah, oh yeah! I can eat the whole glass of Nutella all by myself now!
cultural differences
One of my German language students recently had a mouse in his flat and asked my advice on a mouse trap. After helping him with the right words I added that the best mouse trap was a cat. —
Today I told the class about Henry bringing mice into the house to play with them (unappreciative little buggers, they seem not to enjoy his friendly advances). The student laughed and then asked if I had punished the cat. I was impressed by him using such fancy vocabulary and then tried to explain that Henry meant the mice as gifts to me. I explained how I praise Henry and then distract him with a reward in order to catch the mouse and send it outside. He looked at me incredulously. “Is this a German cat?” I said yes. He shrugged his shoulders, in a way that probably meant “That figures!”
the trills of having a cat
To be clear: there is no h missing in the header.
I am amazed at the noises Henry is capable of. He has always been quite vocal, much more so than any other cat I have owned, but I find it very intriguing how he tells me that he has brought a new plaything in the house – be it four or six legged. He is trilling and chirping, warbling and twittering in a very distinctive way which puts me immediatly in alert mode.
Which reminds me: the mouse is still in the house. Apparently. I haven’t seen it and the only indication that it is still there is Henry sitting in front of the kitchen skirting. It’s a waiting game.
living with a mouse
Henry has also brought home his first mouse. Unfortunately, the mouse was cleverer than he expected because it hit successfully in a flower pot. I don’t remember who lost interest first, Henry or me, but it was 2 am and I went to bed.
When my husband found the mouse cowering behind an orchid in the morning, he tried to take it outside (the whole flower pot) but mousey jumped and ran behind the living room cupboard. Henry followed – we had no idea that he could even get behind the cupboard – and appeared again in the CD rack. Mousey stayed hidden.
I bought a live trap but have so far been unable to set it up. Hence, we had another night of living with a mouse. I came into the living room this morning to find two pot plants lying on the floor and a cat mesmerized by the kitchen skirting.
On the upside we now know that there is no rotting mouse corpse somewhere in the flat.
Henry 