Mouse Trap!

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, crunch, crunch, crunch. I slowly open my eyes. The room is pitch black. What was that? Jason sits up beside me and turns on his flashlight. He points it in the general direction of the noise, straight into the eyes of a startled mouse. “Great”, I groan, “just what we need”. In the past months many insects and critters have visited our camp building, but besides spiders and mosquitoes, they’ve all stayed out of our bedroom. I know there is a rat living in our bathroom cupboard, a mouse in our kitchen, a bat up in our rafters and many a gecko on our ceiling, but until now the rat and mouse had at least left our bedroom in peace. Not any more. Although we hear the mouse scrounge around some more we decide to wait until the next morning to deal with it.
Hours later we wake up, crawl out of bed and start getting dressed. Jason opens his suitcase only to have the mouse jump right out at him. “That’s it” I said. “Let’s chase him out of here”. Since mice are so cute and small, I don’t have the heart to kill it, so we proceed to chase it outside. Well, easier said then done. As soon as it sees us the mouse dives under the bed. It then crawls up the inside of our mosquito net and falls down on top of our bed. In panic it hides under our covers. “Nice, now we have a mouse in our bed, just great!” I mutter. We shake out the covers and much to my relief the mouse makes a beeline for the door. Seconds later it’s outside. Ha, disaster averted, I think to myself.
The next night we hear it again. Rustle, rustle, chomp, chomp. “Okay, so maybe the whole chase it outside idea was not a very good one”, I groan. “We’re going to have to get the mouse trap out”, Jason says. “Do you have to do it now?” I complain. I really don’t relish the thought of waiting to hear the trap go off while trying to go back to sleep. “It’s now or never” Jason says. He stumbles to the kitchen with his flashlight and gets the trap ready. Just when we are falling back asleep, we hear a bang and a squeal. Sure enough, we’ve caught the mouse. Unfortunately the trap didn’t kill it instantly like it’s supposed to and I plug my ears to the squeals. “Jason, you have to get it out of here”, I say. I know I’m not touching that thing. After Jason’s cleaned it up we lay awake for awhile, but then comfort each other with the thought that we’ve gotten ridden of the only mouse in the building, and we won’t have to do that again.

We were so wrong! The next morning, we notice more mouse droppings in the kitchen. “I’m going to have to set that trap again,” Jason says. “It’s probably just from the same mouse”, I say hopefully. “I guess we will find out,” he answers. Boy, did we ever! 12 hours later we had caught a total of 8 mice. As soon as one was caught in the trap, Jason would take it out, stick another piece of bread in and ten minutes later, Bang! It happened so quick, Jason was even able to catch it on video. I refuse to watch that kind of stuff, and stay as far away as possible, but something had to be done! I’ve made a deal with Jason now. Since he doesn’t like tarantulas, I told him I would catch those if they came in our room, if he empties the mouse trap. I really hope 8 is it though. Please mice, stay out of here!