Critters-1, Emrys-1

Last night we heard critters scampering in the ceiling over our bedroom. Actually, 'scampering' doesn't quite do justice. To be accurate, we should say that a crew of rodents spent the night constructing and testing out Upstate New York's first four-footed discotheque. So this morning I whipped out my brand-new Gorilla ladder (13 positions, stores smaller than a five-foot step ladder: urgh, urgh, UURRRGH!) and broke through the top of our closet into the crawl-space.

I had been worried about the amount of insulation between our ceiling and the roof--I worry no more. Seas of yellow and pink greeted the sweeping beam of my Mag-Lite as it swept under the rafters. Seas in which a legion of furry four-footers could easily live and breed for a decade and still have room to expand.

Why don't animals suffer ill effects from breathing in fibreglass insulation?

After covering the louvred vent to the outside--whose screen had been decimated by aggressive teeth and claws--I went to work beginning the end of our unwanted residents.

I don't know who invented the first mousetrap. I do know that Victor, a dominant vendor of rodent-destroying paraphernalia, now makes a plastic trap that is easy to load and less risky for human fingers. It's the better mousetrap of today . . . but I use the old ones. Why?

A few weeks ago I heard the plastic trap go off and found in its jaws--nothing! That experience, mixed with a fear that mice too can learn and combined with old-fashioned machismo has brought me back to the old wood-and-metal traps. That's right: the Tom-and-Jerry kind that have to be pulled all the way back and set very, very carefully lest you get a finger caught and curse like a drunken sailor (unseemly for a pastor).

I took my mousetrap--excuse, me, rat-trap: about four times bigger than a mousetrap and capable of nearly breaking human distal phalanges (believe me, I know)--and mounted the ladder to the crawl space. It took me twenty minutes to set the trap, because the half-teaspoon of peanut butter I used as bait was too heavy. You hear that? A half-teaspoon of peanut butter set off the trap! (Uh, huh. That's what I'm talking about.) Finally, with just a smear of the sweet-and-salty siren calling from its yellow tab, I set the trap in the crawl-space very, very carefully. (Why does the feeling of a trap going off in my hand scare me? I nearly shouted aloud when it happened the first time. The suspense of setting a trap makes me sweat!) Then I descended to other tasks around the house. Four hours later I went up to check the trap.

The beauty of the Victor mousetrap is its special-ops-style execution. It breaks the neck without breaking the skin. Crazy. Instantaneous (which makes it more "humane," I suppose) and bloodless. The subject dies without struggle or suffering--and I suppose if you wanted to preserve the pelt for production of a wardrobe piece, you could. I prefer to dump them out in the back 40.

That's what I did with the squirrel--not rat, not mouse, but squirrel--who found the peanut butter bait irresistible. One down. Let's see how many more are up there.

Rural life. Actual nature. Gotta love it.

~emrys