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The one where Charlie earns his keep

Around 3:30 this morning, I woke to a commotion in the bedroom. I didn't wake up fast enough to figure out what it was, so I just lay there in the dark to see if it was still ongoing, ergo something requiring my attention. After a few minutes passed, I heard a little squeak followed by Charlie pawing around under the bed and thumping against the wall. When I heard it a second time, I determined he'd trapped a mouse in the bedroom.

We get a few mice in the house around this time every year, and based on what I've seen so far, Charlie doesn't have a great history as a mouser. His normal modus operandi has been to corner the mouse under the stove or refrigerator, miss its subsequent wily escape, and camp out there for days waiting for it to return to that exact spot since that's where he saw it last. Since the mouse never returns again after the wily escape, that's served the purpose well enough up until now.

Over the last two years or so, though, he's gotten better. He maimed a mouse which escaped to and died under the refrigerator (allowing me to retrieve it with a yardstick), he had a particularly vicious session with a vole downstairs, and within the last six months, he got a mouse into a stalemate where it was out of his reach but had no viable escape path — a situation resolved by me inadvertently providing an escape path, unleashing the appropriate profanity, and catching it myself that night with a snap trap. I was therefore pretty impressed he'd gotten this far.

The scuffle continued for about a half hour, and I continued to lie there, quietly listening, feeling much like Mac Eliot watching the Predator out in the jungle, knowing the noise would eventually wake Martha up as well. Pretty soon she stirred and lifted the covers preparing to get out of bed. I stopped her by touching her on the arm, and I waited until I heard the mouse squeak and the thump of Charlie pouncing on it.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered to her. She said she did, and I brought her up to speed: "He's got a mouse in here." We remained silent for about ten minutes, listening to the battle. Then came the inevitable, something I knew was part of the reason she woke up, and something I'd also pushed down since I woke up myself. "I really have to pee."

She decided to go for the bathroom in the hall instead of our bathroom as an attempt to avoid interfering, so she went to the bedroom door and turned on the light in the hall. With light on the scene now, I sat up to see what had visibly transpired. Charlie sat at the doorway to our bedroom, huddled down and facing into the hall — and I heard Martha praising him. Something big was obviously going on. With this, my curiosity was piqued and I got up.

Charlie was in the hall with a half-dead mouse, sniffing and batting it. Every time he batted the mouse, it squeaked and made a half-hearted attempt to escape, which the cat easily thwarted. He was purring loudly, and when he saw me standing there watching him, he came over to rub on my legs, knowing I am the alpha cat in the house. (Humans think cats are weird little people, while cats think humans are big funny cats.) The mouse realized this was an opportunity to escape, so he started to shuffle off. The key word in that sentence is shuffle. The situation was that far gone.

The mouse shuffled into Andrew's bedroom, where Charlie trapped it again and started toying with it some more. I definitely didn't want Andrew involved in this situation, and I decided enough was enough — so I beaned the mouse on the head with a Maglite and knocked it unconscious. I picked it up by the tail, brought it back into the hall, called the cat to it, and watched as he moved in to finish things off.

After the killing and devouring was over, all that was left was an internal organ I couldn't identify and a few spots of blood. I cleaned up while Charlie licked his paws, and with the cat and mouse game finally over, I got back in bed glad to know it ended in a victory for the home team.

Posted October 25, 2009 @ 14:53:20 EDT. 2 comments.

Comments on "The one where Charlie earns his keep":

That picture is fantastic! (And as someone who has several pet snakes in her care, I totally know what you mean about mice having unidentifiable internal organs. Eww.)

Go Charlie!!

# Posted by Lisa on October 26, 2009 @ 09:55:47 EDT.

They mysterious internal organ is what Terry Pratchett refers to as "the green wobbly bit," in his book "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents."

# Posted by Stephen Beckner on October 26, 2009 @ 12:15:01 EDT.

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