The Long Road to Freedom

As conflicted as I may at times be about what the nature of this blog should or will be, one thing I know is that I truly do not want it to become a blog about mice and cats. Truly.

Nevertheless.

Last night while I was trying to get sleepy so that I could wake up at five, the neighbor's cat brought in another living mouse. I was in bed by this point, reading and still far from asleep. When he sped by me silently instead of making his usual series of importunate moans, I was suspicious and looked over at him. He had one.

Being in bed, I wasn't quick enough to nab the thing straightaway when he put it down, but since it was still in fit condition a chase ensued. And for once, thank God, the chase wound down in the entryway, where the mouse could hide safely behind the ugly tool storage and recuperate until the cat forgot his evil plan.

The cat did not, apparently, forget, since he was still sitting in the entryway when I woke to go to the meal program, curled up menacingly and staring intently at the shelves. I had given myself an extra fifteen minutes of sleep this morning so, a bit short on time, I removed the cat from his predatory perch, locked him away from the mouse (he could either be outside, or in the bedroom, since I can't block his entry into that room from the outdoors), and went to the church.

When I got back and opened the doors, the cat went straight to where the mouse still was, which I took to mean he was still alive. So once again I locked the cat out, and once more, as with the other night, tried all sorts of stupid tricks to get the rodent to do as I wished. I also tried to push him into a box with a thick washcloth. But mice are as skinny as they want to be, and that didn't work, because he kept slipping between a lipped box and a stair. Once he scaled the storage rack, the fact that it is composed of a grid worked in his favor and against mine. On the upside, it gave me plenty of opportunity to marvel at what cute little hands and feet he had.

We struggled for quite some time, and sometimes he would jump down the six feet from the top, head toward the door, only to return to some snug cubby further inside. I thought of standing outside with the door open, rather than menacing him further: surely he had sufficiently poor associations with my house and its two occupants that he'd want to return to what he knew, to the safety of the streets. As soon as I had got out of view of the door and thus the mouse, the cat came bounding over the fence, wanting to be let back in to finish his work.

I locked him in the bedroom again and prayed he would not jump down from the balcony just when the mouse was escaping. If he ever did escape. But finally, after scaling to the top of the storage, then across the shoulders of the spring-weight overcoat hanging on the wall, he perched at the top of the door, considering his options and weighing the threat of the wide open against the threat of further cats and washcloths inside, and chose the first option, leaping down and speeding down the sidewalk.

I failed to catch his triumphant march to freedom, which for once would have been good video, but here is him looking cute on the storage. Notice his tiny little hands: so cute. And now he can use them to eat more tiny little mouse food. Ignore the unsightly hacksaw in the shot; he did.

The problem with all this is that as much as I love the cat now, by default, I never wanted a cat. But in most cases if someone were to have a cat, whether through deliberate or unwitting choice, the presumption would be that at least there would be a reduction in the rodent population as a consequence. Now I not only have the accidental cat, I have a rotating population of live mice and dead birds that I neither anticipated nor wanted, both of which are unpleasant and difficult to deal with in their differing ways. Every new mouse is a new further hundredfold increase above the former rodent population of my home! And as much as I like mice as little creatures, I prefer to enjoy that enjoyment in the abstract, or at least from a great distance, most particularly when the mice in question are members of a loosely-associated feral urban demimonde with little sense of decorum or hygiene.