Big (?) Game Hunter

Okay, I've spoken about all the times I tried to kill myself by accident, well except the fact that I discovered my cuddly purple sweater is all melted at the front after making tea while I was sick last week (guess it isn't cotton ;)), so I thought I'd convey one of the triumphs in my house. Gross, amusing, positively icky, but triumphant.

Yesterday, I was going about my innocent life in a house alone with way too many inquisitive, intelligent cats. You know when you hear the bump in the night? Well, let's just say it doesn't send me running for a baseball bat. The last time these cats got in trouble, they took out a glass bottle of thyroid medicine for our elderstateskitty (recently passed :().

Anyway, so when I start hearing them leaping off furniture and clatters and bangs, I go running out to rescue whatever next they're thinking to destroy, or to protect their paws from glass shards if that's what card I draw.

This time, it was the worst I could ever imagine! My Siamese kitten (1.5 years old), who has been gently brought up and hand reared (okay, since he was 6 weeks), had a mouse in his mouth. No, it wasn't the toy kind. When he dropped it, it wriggled. Ewww.

So here he is, dropping and grabbing, dropping and grabbing, and growling at Fawkes (a street cat picked up from the pound).

Well, glass had been bad enough, I didn't want to be cleaning up mouse guts. So I grabbed a paper towel, grabbed Randy, and told him to drop. It only took two tries before he released the squirmy, furry object and I wrapped it up, went to the outside garbage, and tossed it in...not hard enough because it was still wriggling, but at least it was trapped.

So, torn between pride and gross-out, I search the house for an "appropriate" cat treat. Can't find any so call my hubby. Not only does he direct me to the treats, but he tells me he knew there were mice in the garage and had put out poison for them. Eep!

I lost a cat, my first one actually that I remember for real, to rat poison. Hearing he had tried to poison my cat was no fun, but he didn't think the mice could get into the house...and none of our pound-collected, formerly outdoor cats had ever had any success with mice. So I start the calls to the vet. She wants to know what poison. How do I know? I didn't even know we had mice :p. Hubby gets home, tells her the poison, and it turns out they have to ingest a high concentration directly. Thank goodness. He drops the rest of the poison on the mouse still trapped in the garbage can and we go on about our lives. It's all over.

Or so we thought...

On comes family time. Right now, we're watching tapes of Space Above and Beyond because the networks have decided that sci-fi buffs like me don't exist :p. It's a weird, tense moment and suddenly a burst of violent action. Is it the show? Of course not.

Hubby goes to investigate.

It's another mouse.

Pause the show, on with the lights, and now we have four humans trying to catch the mouse. Randy backs off, disgusted, Fawkes comes in to investigate, but can't help at all.

Me, I'm the beater. I'm great at flushing the little furry creature out from behind bookcases and cabinets with an old legal-sized file folder and a piece of cardboard. Just don't ask me to touch it. Much to my kids' delight, I go all girly with the tiptoes and squeaking. I don't want that thing to run over my bare feet, no way! The mouse would have looked all cute and cuddly in a cage in a pet store. In my house, leaving unmentionables about wherever it pleases? I think not.

I flush it out. The others scramble with boxes and cans. It goes into hiding. I flush it out again, scramble, nothing.

It ends up snug with two spare CPUs under hubby's desk. He gets to crawl under and flush that time. Success. It runs over his lap. Eww! No catch.

In saunters Randy. He tries to get into my prime flushing spot. I tell him to go the other way and I'll scare the mouse out. Wonder of wonders, after a nudge with cardboard, he does.

The mouse is on the run. Jaws close.

The Randy is on the run. Did he get it? Yeah. And this time he's not so happy with his mummy. Must have thought I would toss it for him to play last time, not take it away. He finally releases (I'm his bonded human so I have to do this :p) and I'm stuck with a much more lively mouse this time. I hand it off to hubby who goes and kills it. This one wasn't poisoned for sure.

So now, the house is safe of more ickiness (at least until the babies starve or grow -- there's got to be babies, you know) and Randy has almost forgiven me. Somehow the treat I forced him to take (mint-flavored to take out the smell) just isn't as fun as proving himself the grand mouse hunter.

And since I didn't post this yet, an update. Poor Randy is bored with all his toys. He tests each one daily, but not a single on wriggles and tries to escape. And his humans have failed to provide any more of the live ones. We're mean.