So I've had my suspicions growing & growing these last few weeks about the nibbling and occasional strange sounds out near the car. And I was talking about it with the folks at home & mentioned the mice--apparently Dad's had mice in the deer-stand with him so I guess this is a good year for rodents to move in with people.
Typically I put off dealing with it until the other night at the desk I got to thinking--maybe I should go take a look; maybe there really are mice in there. So when I opened the trunk I saw a cloud of feathers rolling out from where they got into a sleeping-bag to get the lining, and then saw a very fuzzy and very cute brown-gray flash of fur zip-zipping under the carpeting of the trunk down to where the spare tire and the breakdown tools are. Things went from
Oh look, a mouse, to
This car is infested with mice and they seem to like it here very quickly.
So basically this happened. I don't drive very much and I have a very, very old Toyota sedan. All the car I really need--it's mostly for emergencies. It stays parked in a hedgerow most of the time & gets run maybe once or twice a week, tops, not very fast and for no more than maybe 5 or 10 miles. The last good road trip was a month ago and that was a hop over to Rhode Island.
I guess they hitchhike when I have the car running but when it's parked, these wild mice have set up a mouse neighborhood behind the back seat, in the trunk, under the cushions. I'm not sure how many there are, but there are lots. They've been hiding in the car and stashing their food in shoes and whatnot, living in an old coffee cup, sleeping on the front seat and pulling the feathers out of an old sleeping-bag and having a good time in general. They seem to be fairly cultured mice with a definite taste for the works of Dickens, but they have not yet dug into Agatha Christie.
They've started to become civilized and set up a mousey Survivor Island in there. They're living on and under the seats, inside the hollow parts of the body panels, and anywhere they can find a place. (I'm pretty sure someone gave birth in a coffee cup.) Anyway there are little collections of fluff all over the place where they built weird little featherbed-looking nests & seed hoards & all that.
They are not very social, but they love pipe-tobacco, old books, beans & lentils, camping out, keeping busy and relentlessly procreating. They remind me of a very certain "type" of homeschooling church family--good company if a trifle odd, but increasingly out of place in modern society. (If things were as they should be, I wouldn't have a problem with the mice--because the auto would be completely unnecessary.)
They have been in my books not only readers but also as critics.
As much as I love adorable woodland creatures I still had to put traps out, and I'm making the car as inhospitably boring as it can be--taking out all the nice things to hide in, all the boxes to make nests of and all the books & paper to nibble. I'll be putting out camphor and spearmint oil in case they are eco-friendly types & prefer natural solutions. The ones that escape the mousetraps are going to have to pack up & leave.
"
And on a night like this!--"
Fortunately for the car and everything in it, unfortunately for the mice, three of them got caught in Victor mouse-traps. They died as they lived--dry, warm, with full bellies, in the act of destroying a secondhand automobile.
I don't like killing mice and I don't like making animals go to waste so I ended up taking the dead mice & putting them over the side of the hill. I'd seen a red fox in the neighborhood the night before, and they're very good scavengers (In addition to being cute.) He looked like the snow-plow had scared him but other than that he was doing fine running through everyone's backyard and generally being a cool fox. So I put the casualties out on the back slope. Nature will ensure that nothing is wasted. As soon as I can evict or trap all the mice I will mouseproof the car completely.
