The Hunting of the Mouse

8/23/11
It was a Tuesday night like any other. I was beat, and ready to crawl into bed and die. I tossed back the rest of the book I’d been nursing, and hit the lights. But then the door burst open, and she came in...and all my plans for the night came crashing down behind her.
“She” in this case was my cat, Felice - better known as Squeaky, though the Brainless Wonder would work too. She fancies herself a great huntress, though she couldn’t catch a cold in the pouring rain - which is a good thing, as she wouldn’t have the sense to come in out of it. She’d just done something loud; I don’t know what, and I probably don’t want to. But I came bolt upright out of a sound sleep with the sound of the crash still echoing in my ears.
I checked the time; it was 4:30 or so in the morning. I groaned, listened for a moment, but the sound wasn’t repeated. I started drifting off again.
Then I noticed something weird. The cat was alternating between silence and brief bursts of rapid scuffling. Slowly the thought percolated through my sleep-deprived brain: “The last time she sounded like that was when she’d cornered a mouse...” This was followed, in short order, by the realization that I was sleeping on a plain mattress on the floor - only a few inches above ground level...
I think I levitated upright. It certainly didn’t involve conscious thought. I turned the lights back on; sure enough, the cat was staring intently under my backpack, occasionally reaching a paw under to try to grab something, albeit fruitlessly. With a certain amount of resignation, I lifted the backpack enough to see a small brown mouse, who stared up at me for a moment before I put it back down.
I headed out of the room with the vague intention of finding a box or something to trap the thing. Sometime while I wasn’t looking, the mouse had abandoned the backpack in favor of hiding underneath a small bookcase in the hallway, still followed by the cat. I returned from my quest with a flashlight rather than a box. What can I say...almost 5 am.
When I located the mouse and started poking at it with something long and relatively sturdy that was close at hand, with Squeaky occasionally lending a paw, it decided enough was enough and scurried into a large pile of boxes, where the cat lost it. The mouse, not her mind; she never had that in the first place. I poked around for a while, then gave up and went back to bed. Not that I slept; fortunately, dawn wasn’t too far off.

8/24/11
3 am the next night. This time, it took me approximately three tenths of a second from the sound of scuffling to go from “asleep” to “OMGOMGKEEPITOFFME” while standing up and fumbling for the light switch. I must have been sleeping more lightly. Gee, I wonder why.
This time Her Ladyship had it cornered under the laptop. I lifted it to check and the thing promptly scampered off into another corner, the cat in hot pursuit. This time I actually managed to keep my wits enough to locate a small box.
I returned to my bedroom, armed and ready for battle. I looked for the cat to see where the mouse was; she was staring in confusion at a completely different corner. I checked it...and it was completely empty of murine life.
The cat had lost the mouse. In my bedroom.
THERE WAS A MOUSE SOMEWHERE IN MY BEDROOM!
I poked into one pile of stuff after another. No sign anywhere. Squeaky was no help whatsoever, making no attempt to locate the mouse herself, though she watched my explorations eagerly. It wasn’t in the closet, around the laundry baskets, behind the mattress, in the blankets - which last point I checked repeatedly...
Finally, as it was an insane hour of the morning and getting worse, I shook my blankets out one last time and set up the bed in the spare bedroom. I left the cat in my room. Let her dig out the creature.
At some point while I was sleeping, my father went hunting and found the mouse (still in my room). Yet once again, it managed to evade both him and Felice, allowing him only a brief glimpse before vanishing into the bowels of the room. Despite a microscopic search of every nook and cranny, the only trace that remained was an occasional ghostly snicker.
(Okay, maybe that was my dream. But still.)



8/25/11
Enough is enough. Two nights of severely interrupted sleep is unacceptable. No more Mrs. Nice Cat.
Over the course of Thursday, I gave my room a complete cleaning. There is nothing remaining on the floor for an intrepid mouse to hide behind. I’ve added another couple mattresses to the stack, putting me a slightly more comfortable distance from floor level. And to complete preparations, I set up by the door a nice mouse-sized cave of boxes...with a trap inside. (Don’t worry, it’s the humane kind. Unfortunately.)
Now it’s all up to the Mighty Huntress.
...We’re doomed.

9/21/11
Fast-forward almost a month. We had about given up hope that the thing was coming back...thought it might have finally come to its senses and stopped taunting the cat. I was starting to use the floor again, and in fact had put a box directly in front of the trap arrangement.
But then our less-than-welcome nocturnal visitor emerged once more from whatever deep, dark hole it was dwelling in.
Once again, I was awoken by the sound of thudding paws - at only 12:30 AM this time. I reached for my bedside lamp, discovered it was no longer there, and walked - rather jumpily - across the room to find the lightswitch.
Once again, the cat was dabbing a paw at the space under the backpack. I spent a few minutes debating how to corral it before it got tired of its cover vanishing and returning repeatedly, and started to make a break for it. The cat moved one way. The mouse moved the other. A moment later, Squeaky was poking hopefully into one corner, while the mouse crept quietly behind her and made for the nearest small, dark passageway.
Which happened to be the area between the trap setup and the box I’d put in front of it, which - completely unintentionally - was perfectly mouse-sized.
So when I picked up the cardboard on top to check, there was the mouse, curled up quietly in the trap. I put the trap in a box, yelled at the cat until she left it alone - at least until 5AM, at which point she got kicked outside - and went back to sleep.
Now the hard part: what to do with the thing.