Thursday, February 12, 2009

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!

5 comments:

  1. Hmmm..lets do the math. 8 adult looking mice. Adult mice multiply at an alarming rate.....anyway, I am sure that your trap will wear itself out.
    Will, you never anticipated when you moved to Haiti that you would be surrounded by such a variety of creatures. You have always loved animals so much: even mice!

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  2. I just want to thank you for keeping your blog, so the rest of us can journey with you. I was in Pignon through Haiti Outreach trip almost a year ago, and I miss Haiti very much. I can't wait for the chance to go back. We just adopted our third daughter, so travel is out for a while. Thanks again for you great stories.

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  3. Uuugghhhh, how can you video that Jay?!?! I jumped a mile just sitting here watching it. I really hope you won't find anymore of those furry friends. I totally agree Will, Jay should be the one emptying the traps. I know I made Ron do it here a few weeks ago, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that! Yuck!

    PS... They are actually sort of cute though aren't they!

    Hope you guys are well... love Anita

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  4. Hi Jason and Will.
    What amazing stories and pictures. My heart is stirred by them. Reading about your mouse situation, Shelley found mice turds (terds?) in our kitchen cupboards the other day. So I picked up a couple of traps last night, set the traps with peanut butter, and voila, two dead mice this morning! I've reset them and will see what awaits us when we get home. Wretched little creatures. Take care, blessings, Randy

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  5. Yep we have mice too, and it's peanut butter that catches them every time!

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