Oh, Snap!

Recently, my wife and I were surprised by a mouse we had startled out of our livingroom closet. It was late in the evening and as I opened the door, it zipped across the carpet looking for a better place to hide. It eventually found one, because neither my wife nor I could find where it had gone. I can't say we were looking very hard. We were both tired, and completely unprepared for a mouse in the house. We figured it couldn't hurt us upstairs in our bedroom, so we went to sleep. The next morning we saw it scurry from under the same closet door. We were considerably disappointed by this. I think we both had hoped it was just a misunderstanding. It was dark, and the mouse had just gotten lost. But with the second sighting we knew we were forced to do something about it.

There's nothing like a mouse to make you feel like a slob. The first thing most people ask when you mention an issue with pests is "Are you sure you haven't left any food lying around?" It's the same with bears while camping. Somehow if someone is mauled, the camper with a sweet tooth was asking for it. We took special offense to the idea it was our fault because we had recently become a bit lackadaisical in our cleaning. Sure we weren't anywhere near godliness, but fit for mice? Watch it buddy.

A little sheepishly, we told our friends Angie and Dave about our problem. Luckily, they were experienced with mice. Dave was nice enough to offer us a mousetrap. I soon realized I had no clue as to how they worked. They are all but three pieces, but still, I am no scientist. Dave showed me how to set it, but all the while, he was explaining how this sort of trap didn't work very well. I didn't know how to respond to this. I appreciated the gift of a mousetrap, but as he went through great lengths to keep my hopes down about the likelihood of it working, I was no longer sure the trap was better than nothing. In fact, by the sound of it, I'd have as much luck killing the mouse by swinging a sword at it. All the same, I gladly took the trap. If nothing else, it gave the illusion of caring. Now if someone was over and they saw the mouse, instead of shrugging my shoulders, I could show them the trap and confidently say, "We're working on it."

When I got home, my first try at setting the trap failed and it prematurely snapped. I was unharmed, but until I actually saw the trap in action, I hadn't thought about how barbaric the contraption was. Don't get me wrong, killing mice is okay with me, I just didn't think snapping it in half was the best way to go about it. When I finally had it set, I was terrified the thing might actually work. Every morning I came downstairs I dreaded looking into the closet where the trap was set. I opened the closet door slowly, millimeter by millimeter. I approached the door sort of like you might cover your eyes but leave slivers of space between your fingers during a scary movie. I was always releived when I saw that the trap was still in place. My greatest fear being that the mouse was still barely alive, maimed by the blunt spring-loaded guillotine. If killing the animal by trap didn't work, I had no answer for putting a mouse out of its misery. I didn't think I could do it, I simply didn't have what it takes. That was when I thought of my friend Tom.

Tom is absolutely the kindest person I have ever met. In a town full of nice people he could unanimously be nominated the nicest. He had a paper route in high school. It was an early morning delivery, and it was usually dark when he would drive around the backroads, "out in the country". Though there's no traffic so early in the morning, it's still pretty dangerous driving. Around the town of Washburn, Wisconsin, you can't expect to live through a year without hitting or nearly hitting one of the two million deer stuffed into the city limits.

One morning Tom hit a deer but was driving too slow to kill it outright. Now again, this is the nicest man in town we're talking about here, and he had just maimed a deer that was now lying in the road in utter agony. It was dark and far too early to get help. Knowing the deer was suffering badly, he frantically searched his car for anything that he could use to bring the deer to a more humane end. When he opened his trunk looking for something he could use, he found his only option. A putter.

I sincerely doubted my ability to kill a mouse I found struggling in my closet until I thought about the courage it must have took Tom to be able to draw that putter over his head like a mobster, and put that poor deer out of its misery. It's an inspirational image. If someone as good and decent as Tom can do something like that, someone like me should be able to kill a mouse for goodness sake. In the meantime, I'll cross my fingers that the mouse gets lost again.