Vintage Blog Post: Pippin the Mouse-Slayer

So I’ve had a blog since, I don’t know, 2003 sometime. I’ve deleted the old ones for the most part but I saved all the good posts before doing that, and so I’ve decided to start reposting some of them for the heck of it. I mean, why not show everyone I was a better writer in high school than I am now? Or at least a better blogger. I had more interesting stories then, I suppose. Like this one, for starters, which was originally posted on October 22, 2004.

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This morning I went to my friend Melissa’s house to work on a project for school. My parents went to Cave of the Winds for the day, so my sister was home by herself. When I got home around 1, the first thing my sister tells me is, “Pippin caught another mouse, only this one wasn’t dead, so I called Mom and she told me to put a trash can over it and put tins on top of it so that Pippin can’t get at it anymore, and then let you put it in the trash when you got home.”

The first thing I say is, “IT ISN’T DEAD?”

“Well, it wasn’t, probably it is now, since it was just lying there twitching earlier.”

So we go down into the basement, and sure enough, there is the trash can, upside down, with three tins of stuff on top of it. I asked my sister, “are you sure it’s dead?”

“Well, it probably is dead.”

“Okay.” So I take the tins off, and am about to lift the trash can… then, “Okay, I can’t do this. You do it. What if it’s still alive?”

“IT’S NOT ALIVE!”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll lift up the trash can, and you will take the dustpan and sweep it into there and we will put it in the trash, and it will be gone. Okay?”

What I learned today is that I am a wimp. I never thought I would be the kind of person who stands on a chair screaming about a tiny little mouse running around. But even though I know the mouse can’t really do anything to me besides leave poop everywhere, I still screamed when I lifted the trash can up a couple of inches and my sister said “OH MY GOSH, IT’S STILL ALIVE!”

Yeah. So the trash can goes back on the ground and I stand on the stairs, staring at it. FYI the stairs are probably… oh… at least 10 feet away from where the trash can was.

Finding a dead mouse is one thing. That is just gross and weird, because it’s dead. Finding a live one is really scary and disturbing. What are you supposed to do with a live mouse that you have trapped under a trash can? Here were the options my sister and I discussed:

a) Leave it there until our parents got home.
b) Somehow get it and put it outside.
c) Get it and throw it over the fence into someone else’s yard for them to deal with.
d) Get Pippin and make him kill it and throw it away before he starts feasting on its head.

The problem with A is that they told us to take care of it. The problem with B is that we were both too chicken to attempt it, and if we put it outside, it probably could just come inside again. C didn’t really have a problem, but again, we didn’t know how to get the mouse outside in the first place. So, we got Pippin.

Here is Pippin’s “killing strategy:”
1. Look at the mouse for a long time.
2. After a long time, look at it some more.
3. Touch it.
4. Look at it, again.
5. When the mouse finally realizes that Pippin isn’t doing anything but looking at him and starts running away, jump on it and carry it around in his mouth.
6. Put it on the ground in front of him and look at it.
7. Look at me and Katie.
8. Mouse starts running again while he is looking at us, we start shouting “PIPPIN GET IT GET IT IT’S RUNNING AWAY,” chases it around the basement and grabs it again.
9. Look at it.
10. Bat at it like it’s a toy mouse.
11. Grab it in his mouth and take it under the treadmill, where we can’t see it and don’t know if it’s dead or not. (Which it wasn’t.)
12. Repeat the first three steps four more times.

What I ended up doing was forcing my sister to get the mouse on the dustpan and put it in the trash. We put it in one of the really huge black plastic trash bags. I put a twisty on it and then put it in the Waste Management (the official trash haulers for the Colorado Avalanche) trash can in the garage. I felt sort of bad, since it wasn’t dead, not even after all the trauma it went through, because it was kind of cute from my vantage point on the stairs when it was running frantically away from the jaws of gruesome death. But we said a few words, which mostly was “he was a good mousie.”

Anyway. Just another joy of having a cat. At least I didn’t have to deal with his barf everywhere like last time. Oh yeah, I guess I should have updated on that situation: a couple hours later after finding the decapitated mouse, I went down into the basement again and there was barf ALL OVER THE PLACE. Well, just on the chair and on the floor. But I have never seen that much cat barf at once.

My dad brought home a glue trap, so that the mouse gets stuck in the glue and then we can just get rid of it that way. They weren’t falling for the live trap, so here we are. The original idea was to trap them and then put them out in the greenbelt, because, well, putting a mouse in the trash just seems heartless, right? But after the experiences of the past two days, I have this to say: the mouse deserves it. In the words of my good friend Jessica Gibbs, after she told me that they trapped a mommy mouse that had had babies in their house and then got rid of all the babies, too: “That’ll teach them not to come inside our house. They need to learn that this is a house of DEATH.”