Oh Snap! What was that?

By Josh Salm/Piscataquis Observer Staff Writer
It was 6:15 a.m. Wednesday morning. The alarm clock rang already once minutes earlier, and was poised to start blaring that obnoxious buzzing yet again in another five minutes. I was in the midst of catching those few minutes of glorious sleep between alarms that my wife has got me hooked to when she shot up out of bed with the sound of disgust and annoyance in her voice.
“The mouse is in our room,” she said.
The signs became evident that we had a new roommate the day before when items like chocolate and graham crackers were nibbled into. My wife swore the other day she saw a small, dark object dart across our kitchen floor.
At that point she was in denial. She didn’t actually see the mouse, so there was no mouse. “Out of sight, out of mind” I guess is the line that comes to mind. I did my best to pick up what food was laying around the house and figured I’d deal with the problem later.
Well “later” came that morning. I laid there in bed, one eye opened and tried to listen for the something that would make me think the pest was in our bedroom. The house seemed to be as silent as that fabled holiday story “The Night Before Christmas” suggests, but there, faintly, you could make out something.
Thin plastic was crinkling in the dark, and nails scratching on a wood floor.
My wife started looking in the heap of clothing and travel bags that littered our floor for movement of some kind. You could hear what sounded like a food wrapper move, a set of feet scamper, and then nothing. Through it all, my wife sat there, not so much fearful, but annoyed.
Unfortunately for her, I had no coffee in my system. So while the beast lurked in the dark corners of my bedroom, I did the only thing I could think of at that time: walk out of the room and go start the coffee pot.
After silence returned to the apartment, I pulled all the clothing out of the room to take to the laundromat since Lord knows what was touched by the varmint. There, under it all, was the bait that lured the mouse into our room: a granola bar.
Thus the hunt began.
It’s been a long time since I’ve hunted mouse, so I turned to my friends through the online resource Facebook to figure out some ways to capture this mouse besides the traditional methods of using a trap or buying a cat (because I can’t stand cats).
The ideas I got were laughable. One told me to call upon the services of the Pied Piper, but to actually pay the guy this time otherwise all the children would be taken. Another suggested harming the little bugger and sending him back to his pals with the message, “Don’t come back.”
The jist of another person’s message told me to jump into a time machine to go back in time and genetically engineer cats to make them smaller to fit into mouse holes. While that sounds like a swell idea, I’m not sure I can find the flux capacitor or the DeLorean to pull this project off.
After doing seven loads of laundry at the local laundromat that night, I did the next best thing: call the landlord and let him deal with the issue. He showed up that night with a set of traps and said to get in touch with him if anything happens.
It was 5:43 Thursday morning. The alarm clock was just about to go off when I heard a noise break through the silence of the house that made me smile as I fell back asleep.
SNAP!
So far, the scoreboard shows Traps 3. Mice 0. I guess there’s no need for the Pied Piper of the DeLorean after all.