by Tena Starr
If you happen to run across a shoe, a rat, and a corkscrew, all stuck together in a glue trap, get in touch with me. They’re all mine. Well, maybe not the rat.
And don’t get feeling too bad for the rat, because it had been living the high life, dining on chocolate, Saltines and anti-anxiety drugs in a warm house.
This story probably started a couple of years ago when a good and clever neighbor built a woodshed attached to a small room in the back of my house. It was a wonderful thing to not have to haul firewood up the steep cellar stairs, and the “shed” itself is no shed but a lovely little building.
It was all upside until this fall when the weather stayed fairly warm, and I broke my ankle (no connection). Which meant that other kind people fetched me firewood and accidentally left the door between the woodshed and the utility room open, which they probably wouldn’t have done if it had been snowing. I didn’t notice because I was on crutches and not hauling wood myself.
There was a night when the electric heat ran all night, even though it wasn’t particularly cold. My plan was to call the fellow who installed the heater next morning and yell at him about this faulty device.
There are times when, by luck, you manage to avoid making a fool of yourself, and that was one of those times. Instead of putting in a furious call, I hobbled to the utility room and noticed that the door to the woodshed was wide open, and likely had been for a couple of days.
I shut it, but that night I started hearing some rustling around. Mice, I thought. They do start appearing indoors in the fall. Not unusual. So, I set mouse traps baited with peanut butter.
Nothing happened. For some reason, these mice had no interest in peanut butter. I tried cheese. Nope, they didn’t like that either.
I started losing sleep. Because of the aforementioned broken ankle, I was sleeping downstairs between the two rooms this creature most inhabited. And it was one noisy little sucker. And clumsy.
It kept falling off the kitchen counter with a thud, a louder thud than a mouse should make, and it carried on about it, chattering and squeaking and fussing.
“Shut up!” I yelled in the middle of the night. “It’s no one’s fault but your own if you can’t manage to walk across a three-foot counter without falling off. Do you need guardrails?”
One night it fell into a stash of paper grocery bags and spent a noisy hour (okay, it only felt like an hour) trying to scrabble its way out. The expression ‘can’t find his way out of a paper bag’ came to mind. I was not about to crutch around in the dark trying to help it extricate itself.
It made off with a bag of soy nuts. I don’t mean it ate some soy nuts; I mean the nuts, bag and all, vanished. I still haven’t found it.
At that point I decided a demented, and delighted, chipmunk had got in through the woodshed door one of those nights when it was open. In 40 years, I have never seen a rat here, not even when I had goats and horses and grain in the barn, so I didn’t consider that particular rodent. Also, one of my sisters had been helping me since that broken ankle, and she is a formidable cleaner, the kind who vacuums walls.
I enlisted a neighbor’s help. He brought down two rat traps, which looked like seventeenth-century torture devices. We baited them with apples.
Nothing. My housemate ignored the apples.
But one morning I found an empty sleeve of Saltine crackers and a chunk of butter with big teeth marks in it. So, we baited the traps with butter and carbs.
Nothing.
We tried sunflower seeds, peanut butter, cheese, bread, almonds, walnuts, turkey, and chocolate. (We knew it liked chocolate since it had chewed the head off an old chocolate Easter bunny.)
Nothing.
Then there was a night of blessed silence. I thought maybe we’d got him, and I’d get some sleep.
Until I noticed in the morning that a bottle of Lorazepam had been spilled, and several of the pills had been chewed or eaten entirely.
Lorazepam is a prescription anti-anxiety drug. I take it just before I get injections in my eyeballs for macular degeneration. If you can avoid getting shots in your eyeballs, I recommend you do. If you can’t, yeah, take drugs.
I looked at the spilled bottle, the half-chewed pills and had hope. Maybe the little bugger had accidentally overdosed and died a blissful death. I’d been strictly warned not to take more than one pill, and this critter, less than the size of my hand, had obviously ignored doctor’s instructions.
But who knows what the effect would be? I’m pretty sure I’ve never run across a rodent on anti-anxiety medication.
For two days, happy silence. I told my neighbor, my companion in this epic endeavor, that I thought the critter had OD’d.
The next day it was back.
I had to go to the Retina Center for an eye injection and got home to some glue traps tacked to the door, which I assumed were from my fellow trapper.
I’d never heard of glue traps, but promptly set them out. And went to bed because a day at the Retina Center is not one you want to have, or at least I don’t. The “best” days are when they inject pink dye into your veins for some kind of test, and for a while all you see is pink — pink trees, pink sky, pink everything. I find it kind of exhausting to have to look at the entire world in pink.
It was about 4 a.m. when I woke to screeching and thumps and thuds.
Yup. The glue trap had caught what appeared to be a rat rather than a chipmunk, and it had wriggled its way to the floor. It had dragged a corkscrew off the counter with it, and it had all landed on top of one of my expensive orthopedic shoes.
I tried to pry the shoe out at least, but nothing doing. That’s some glue.
Finally, I said, you know little housemate, I’ve had about enough of you. You are going to spend the night outside. I swept the whole mess — trap, shoe, rat, and corkscrew — onto the porch, and thought, I’ll deal with you when it’s light.
But come light they were gone. No sign of any of it. My neighbor looked, Steve looked. Just gone.
I’d like to find the shoe at least, since those shoes cost about $150 a pair, and I kind of doubt I can buy just one.
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