AT HOME: The Mouse Incident
A lesson on nature arrives at my door.
By Loraine Page
COLUMNIST
One of the things I have liked best about my apartment is that it is bug free — mostly. Ants do sometimes mistake my home for theirs, but a sprinkle of baking soda sends them on their way.
I have also liked that it is mouse free. I’m on the second floor, and I have assumed they prefer not to climb.
I do my freelance writing in the kitchen. There’s a nice big window here that I gaze out of when I’m lost in thought. It's a placid space.
When my cat is inside, she sits on my desk or on the floor and stares at me. She is the love of my life.
We are inseparable, except when she takes excursions outside once or twice a day.
I leave the front door cracked open for her, so she can come and go. At almost five-years-old now, she has learned to appreciate both the outdoors and the comfort of being inside.
A staircase in my living room leads down to the door. One day, after she had been outside for a while, I heard her come in and run up the stairs. Usually, she'll then burst into the kitchen to check up on me and then run back outside. But something was different; she was quiet.
I got up and walked to the living room. A mouse dropped from her mouth and scurried across the floor. I screamed the high-pitch scream of a human seeing a mouse, which for reasons unknown is our response to seeing a tiny creature.
A blur of activity: I grab the cat and lock her in a bedroom. I run downstairs and open the front door all the way, hoping the mouse will see the exit and flee. I go to the kitchen and text my daughter: Come over right away! My cat got a mouse!
I count the minutes until she gets here. She walks in and says okay, where's the body? She thinks I meant a dead mouse. No, I tell her, it's alive, I think.
We got to work searching my apartment for the mouse. We used flashlights to check every nook and cranny. We went to the bedroom where the cat was crouched under the bed, but we found no mouse there.
Her task completed, my daughter left, assuring me the mouse had certainly left the house. I went back to my desk in the kitchen. I wanted to believe the mouse left. Of course, it left. It must have sensed the open door.
That night my cat and I acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and we went to bed at our usual time. She’s been sleeping with me since she was a kitten. It was her choice in the beginning, but now I count on it.
The next day she set up vigil at the refrigerator, staring at the space beneath it. Oh, god, the mouse is under the refrigerator.
Over the next few days, she only left the kitchen to take a nap. One day I saw the mouse. It skittered out from under the refrigerator until it saw me and did an about-face and skittered right back under.
It was a cute little mouse. Much tinier than I imagined, and it was bicolored — with dark and light fur.
After a day or two of this routine — mouse under the refrigerator, cat keeping vigil there, me somewhat worried about the situation — I wondered if I should do something to help the mouse. It could probably use some food and water. So I pushed some of both under the refrigerator — water in a bottle cap and cornflakes that I crunched. The next day I cut small bits of cheese and pushed those under.
In the mornings the food and water would be gone. Emboldened, I thought I could catch the mouse by putting a favorite food in a cardboard box, then grab the box and take the mouse out to freedom, maybe in a nice field nearby.
On the internet I read that mice cannot resist candy, so I bought a bag of caramel creams. I put one in a box, and to my surprise that evening while watching TV I heard the mouse grab the caramel from the box! I ran to kitchen, but I was too late.
But wow, a mouse that likes candy. Who knew?
However, as they say, all good things come to an end. That night, which was maybe the fifth day since the mouse arrived in my cat’s mouth, I went to bed as usual. At some point I was awakened to a tumult coming from the living room. I reached around in the blankets and did not feel my cat there.
I knew this was the night of doom. The event I had been trying to forestall. I had been trying to beat nature at its game of predator and prey. I knew that I had failed.
In the morning, I found a strip of dark skin on my living room carpet. I examined it and could make out a hint of a tail attached to the skin. Nothing else of the mouse was ever found.
What I had always avoided on PBS nature programs had occurred in real life, in my living room. My avoidance of violent movies had done me no good. I beat myself up wondering if I could have, or should have, done more.
I couldn’t talk about it for a couple of days. My cat and I went back to our usual routines. She became my pretty girl again. Did the experience change me in some spiritual, higher level? Did an enlightenment of some sort occur within me?
It made me sad, still does when I think about it. But no, the only change was on a pragmatic level: I don’t leave the door open a crack for my cat to come and go. I open it for her when she’s ready to come in. Call it a security measure.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”
I'm glad the writer came to have an appreciation for the mouse and tried to save it. It is all too easy to see these smaller creatures as less-than, but in reality that mouse had no desire to be in the apartment and no doubt wanted earnestly to go back to its little mousie life, pre-capture. Sad that it ended this way, but again I applaud the writer for giving the mouse food & water and for trying to rescue it.
Please note that cats going outdoors can be exceptionally damaging to wildlife and are domestic not native to North America, therefore wildlife (including birds and baby birds) have no natural defense against them. I'm a huge cat lover (have had at least one in my household for 30+ years) but keep them indoors for their safety & the safety of wildlife.
The whole incident would have been avoided with that tactic in place. If cat parents want to consider a compromise, there are collars that apparently birds can spot and have a chance at avoiding a predatory cat. Google "bird safe cat collars."