Cappy Hanson

Thunderfoot and the Great Mouse

Infestation Cappy Hanson

Creative Writing Celebration, Memoir, 1st Place

It was a sunny May afternoon in the valley north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. At last, the Southwest spring gales that had shimmied the Siberian elms and cottonwoods for weeks had calmed. I walked through my mobile home, opening all the windows for the first time since the previous autumn. My South American parrots, Peaches and Maggie, had flown to the dining room curtain rod and were grooming each other. From there, they could also engage in squawky conversations with the wild birds. The parrots were larger than the sparrows and finches, smaller than the mouming doves, and noisier than any of them.

The last window I opened was in my office. The air was pungent with lilac. I settled at my desk, pleased at the prospect of an uninterrupted hour to work on a new poem.

Before I could finish experimenting with the line breaks in the first stanza, Peaches and Maggie broke the quiet with terrified screeches. My head snapped up. All thought of line length, enjambment, and other esoteric issues vaporized. Despite the urgency of the parrots’ cries, I made myself take a deep breath. I let it out slowly and shook my head before pushing myself out of the chair. I knew what the parrots were raising a ruckus about. It was a mouse. Probably not just any mouse, either. It was likely to be Thunderfoot. Again. Thunderfoot was part of the Great Mouse Infestation of 1997. It had begun the month before, when a pair of mice had built a nest in the cinder-block footing for one of the awning supports in front of the house. Virginia creeper vined in and out of the block, making a secure and charming rodent haven. Once the baby mice opened their eyes at around two weeks of age, they joined their parents on the walkway, where I scattered seed for the wild birds. Adult mice and youngsters alike were shy at first. A goldfinch taking off would send them darting for cover.

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In short order, however, the mice were chasing the birds off what they considered their seed. Then they moved indoors. Leaving droppings, dried urine, and chewed-up food packages as evidence. Then I saw the culprits themselves, streaking across the floor, brown blurs with tails. Peaches and Maggie, unfamiliar with mice, screamed every time they saw one. Ours wasn’t the only home being invaded. A neighbor picked up what she thought was the string from the previous night’s tea bag. She found herself holding the tail of a mouse that had fallen head-first into her cup and drowned. One day, I was indignant to discover a mouse in Peaches’ cage, gnawing on a piece of bird kibble. Peaches and Maggie were in the kitchen, eating corn, so they missed my clever capture. I stuffed a rolled-up bird magazine into the cage door and taped an empty mayonnaise jar to the end. A couple of bangs on the cage scared the mouse down the tunnel and into the container. After screwing on the lid, I gave myself a couple of attagirls, left the jar by the front door, and went to put on my shoes to escort the mouse out. When I returned, the mouse had knocked the jar over and was rolling it across the floor like a gerbil in a plastic ball. Peaches and Maggie had never seen anything like it. Judging from their shrieks and the speed at which they flew past me to hide behind the chair in the bedroom, they never wanted to again.

They were not so fortunate. It was obvious that the mice had moved in for the duration. I had to figure out how to deal with them.

My first line of defense was to make my house inaccessible. On a Saturday morning, I examined the exterior, nearly exhausting a tube of caulk on the many small gaps that my thirty-year-old mobile home had acquired. Inside, I applied the remainder of the caulk around the water, drain, propane, and exhaust fan pipes where they passed through the walls and floor.

The Sunday edition of the Santa Fe New Mexican carried an article about the burgeoning rodent population. A biologist contributed the fact that a mouse could squeeze through a space

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a quarter of an inch wide. What were the chances I had located and sealed every single gap? They seemed slim—a quarter of an inch slim.

Next option: make my home uninviting. I secured all my packaged food in glass or plastic containers. The parrots were notoriously messy eaters, so I cleaned their cage trays and the surroundings of leftover kibble, fruits, and vegetables every evening. The problem was that the birds munched throughout the day. I could put their food away only at night. That meant delicious scents wafting to little rodent noses during all the sunlit hours.

Hoping to find out how to make my house unappealing to mice, I scoured the Internet. All kinds of home-made, scent-based repellants turned up. Most used peppermint oil as a base, which made me immediately skeptical. Several years before, we had had a single mouse in the house every night, jonesing for the bottle of peppermint extract I kept on the kitchen counter, along with the spices. In apparent ecstasy, he (she?) would lift the bottle and pound it against his face and chest until he dropped it. Then he would pick it up and repeat, over and over. It was impossible to sleep through his noisy ritual.

Forming a barrier around the skirting of the house with peppermint, chili powder, mothballs, and a host of other odiferous substances proved ineffective. Poisoning the mice indoors was obviously out of the question because of the parrots. Poisoning them outside could add link after link to the chain of death. What if a roaming house cat, hawk, or coyote ate one, then was eaten by something else? Where would it end? Spring traps weren’t an option, either. Peaches and Maggie wouldn’t hesitate to walk right onto those deathtraps, either out of curiosity or to eat the bait. The birds had always slept where they wished, usually on top of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. One option was to lock them in their cages at night before setting out traps. The too-vivid picture of what might happen if I missed a trap when I picked them up in the morning put an end to that plan.

At the local hardware store, I examined one-way-door

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traps that captured mice alive. They were pricier than spring traps, especially because they could not be emptied and re-used. The mice would die of starvation and dehydration, presumably after cannibalizing one another. Way too grisly for me. And if Peaches or Maggie got in there . . . My options were dwindling. Even glue traps posed a risk. The parrots wouldn’t hesitate to go after the bait and get their scaly reptilian feet and exquisite green feathers stuck. They would struggle until they were exhausted. I would probably find them before they died, but even so, they’d be traumatized. So would I. I posed the problem to my boyfriend. Joe was the clever soul who had designed and built a custom brace out of box steel, hinges, and garage door springs, so I could ride the lifts at Santa Fe and Pajarito Mountain and snowboard with my bum knee. Joe, having no pets, had defaulted to traditional spring traps. He rubbed his chin as I described my dilemma. The next time he came over, he brought half a dozen cylindrical oatmeal cartons. He taped the lids on, sliced the cartons in half lengthwise, and cut mouse-sized openings too small for the parrots. By nightfall, these contraptions squatted like colorful Quonset huts over glue traps in every room.

The nice thing about glue traps, from my soft-hearted point of view, was that I could take the mice out to the arroyo behind the house and dribble vegetable oil on the stuck parts. They would pull themselves free and scamper away. I figured the glue-trap-and-vegetable-oil treatment would be traumatic enough to discourage them from returning. Thunderfoot proved me wrong. Maybe he’d become a veggie oil junkie. He apparently relished leading me in a merry chase around the house, scaling one piece of furniture and leaping to another, landing with a whump all out of proportion to his size. Eventually, he would dash into a Quaker Oats Quonset hut and get stuck on a glue trap. At the peak of the Infestation, I was taking him out to the arroyo five or six times a day.

I supposed I should have been as willing to throw the occupied glue traps into the trash and ignore the suffering of

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the mice. Most people did. After all, the rodents showed less regard for my health than I did for theirs. Thunderfoot and his kind were, potentially, the Mice of Doom. They might carry disease-transmitting fleas that accounted for a common local bumper sticker: “Welcome to New Mexico, the Plague State.” The Centers for Disease Control website had lots to say about Thunderfoot, et al., and their associated diseases. Plague came in three distinct flavors: • bubonic: swollen lymph nodes, fever, chills, prostration; • septicemic: fever, chills, prostration, abdominal pain, shock, bleeding into the skin and other organs; and • pneumonic: fever, chills, cough, difficulty breathing, shock, death if not treated early. Then there was hantavirus, spread by infected mice via urine and feces, that caused fever, chills, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, acute respiratory distress, low blood pressure, and high mortality rate. I’d pooh-poohed the risk until a friend’s daughter-in-law had died of it earlier that spring. Plague and hantavirus notwithstanding, Walt Whitman’s line about the mouse being miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels came to mind often. The little critters delighted me with their adorable round ears, bright eyes, and active whiskers. I had thought that all mice looked alike. Now, because I was observing them up close, I knew that each one was distinct. Thunderfoot, for example, was unusually small and pale, with a dark, raccoon-like mask, the only one I saw with such a marking. Once I experienced him as an individual, I was like a soldier who suddenly saw the enemy as a human being. I would have allowed the mice to keep popping up on the pile of books on my desk and snatching the odd crumb I’d missed on the kitchen counter had they followed a few simple instructions for my safety, theirs, and that of my parrots. To get some amusement out of the Infestation, I posted this on my refrigerator:

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MOUSY RULES

1. Eat only what I put out for you. You’ll eat organic and be the healthiest mice in Santa Fe County. 2. Don’t fight the parrots for their food. One of you bit Peaches on the thigh while he was defending his kibble. Unacceptable! 3. Allow yourselves to be flea dipped. This is for your good as well as mine. 4. Go outside to relieve yourselves. I wouldn’t mind if you used the toilet, but I keep the lid down to prevent the birds from falling in, getting waterlogged, and drowning. You could suffer a similar fate. Maybe the mice couldn’t read or were anarchists who rebelled against rules. Or maybe, as Joe suggested, I wasn’t speaking to them in a language they understood.

Eventually, I found something that did speak to the mice: an electronic rodent repeller. The last time I saw Thunderfoot was out by the arroyo the day UPS delivered the device. I dribbled vegetable oil on him. He pulled loose from the glue trap and scampered away. As I walked back to the house, he paused and looked over his shoulder. I imagined him calling, “See you soon!” That was not to be. As advertised, the rodent repeller didn’t bother Peaches or Maggie. They walked right up and nibbled on its metal housing and plastic knobs while it was running. It did, however, send mice retreating from the house by the dozen. I left the repeller running 24/7 until an early October freeze closed the book on the Great Mouse Infestation of 1997. At last, I could expect to write in peace. Peaches and Maggie could expect to groom each other and converse with the wild birds without alarming at brown blurs dashing along the wall beneath them. We never saw Thunderfoot again. I missed him and wished him a long and prosperous mousy life somewhere else.

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