War: The Epilogue

In the time since the rat trap was set off and blood was drawn from the rat, there has been no conclusive evidence of its presence.  All has been quite apart from the occasional sound, which could be easily explained as things other than rats.

Until tonight.

After chatting with Sparky, who is back in town (yay!), I sat down to unwind watching a somewhat boring sitcom that I am oddly attached to despite only laughing on occasion.  Suddenly, there was a large bang.  My first thought was "bloody hell, did a huge branch just fall on my roof?"  Mind you, I have a metal roof and many trees above it, so this is not unreasonable.

My second thought was "crap, is the rat back?" so I checked the trap behind my rat barricade, which was still set.  Then I checked the other trap in the ducts, and found the culprit.

A young rat or an adult mouse was caught in the good old fashioned wooden trap, with its hip more or less crushed.  Gruesome detail, which I would normally omit, but for the fact that despite this rather serious damage, the rodent was still alive.  Not only alive, but struggling.  You would assume that it was struggling to get away, but you would be wrong.  It was squirming in an effort to (and succeeding in) get to the bait and eat it.  In fact, the only time it panicked was when the cat began investigating and sniffing around the vent.

So I closed the cat out of the bathroom, went out to the studio, got my gloves, grabbed my knife (and camera as you can see), and went back to the bathroom vent.  The camera was mainly for later identification of the rodent if I was unable to determine from examination wether it was a rat baby or a mouse, but Indy was persistent so he got to be photographed.  When I'd taken the trap out and set it down, he even began trying to reach it from under the door.

At this point, I stopped to consider what I should do.  My first instinct was to use the knife as I intended and kill it quickly.  But the more I thought about it, the more I considered something somewhat cruel, but with a reason behind it and annoyance at sleep disruption to back it up.  So really, if you haven't gotten the point about don't f*** with my sleep, take this as proof enough.

I took the trap, rodent, and cat out to the porch, and let the cat investigate, much to his delight.  Don't worry, he did no real harm to it, none at all even apart from nipping at its ear lightly and to no effect.  My reason for this was to let him see what it was, get the smell, and know that I approve of him "playing" with it, and even of him considering killing it.  However, trapped as it was he became fed up with it.

I took the thing out to the studio and used the knife to finish it off.  Upon examining it more closely, I found that it was an adult male mouse.  If you don't already get how I determined all of that, just think about it a bit.

So I went to toss it over the fence where nobody goes and the dog cannot reach, but I ended up dropping it.  I found it again with the help of a flashlight and a curious dog.  Thankfully, he was less sure it was food than the cat, and he just sniffed at it.  So I went and tossed it over the fence, and almost had to drag the dog back with me as he had decided that since he couldn't have it it must be something wonderful.

I got back in and realized that my sweat pants (I was all set up for a night in; big flannel shirt, comfy undershirt, baggy sweat pants) were covered with the really nasty prickers, the ones that hurt like hell when they get stuck in your skin and are hard to get off.  So I sat down, put the sitcom back on, and started pulling the stickers off and dropping them on a plate.

Then the cat walked by.

Of course, being a cat, his tail was straight up and wrapping around the edges of everything.  Including the plate.  So about a dozen of the things got stuck to him, but fell of quickly... leaving them for me to find by painful searching (and a few times stepping on wearing nothing but socks on my feet by now.

Eventually, I got them all (I hope) up and off, including one last one on the way to the garbage can that got me in the big toe.  55 in total.  Plus the cat is still a bit upset with me for getting rid of his toy.  Really threw a fit when I returned without it.  Checked out the dog, chasing him down to do so, then came, checked me out, and stalked off to moodily groom himself and throw me evil glares.  But the prickers did not bother him at all.  Go figure.

So much for unwinding though.  Think I'm going to have to watch something else now just to relax from all of this commotion.

Oddly, the last of this ended after midnight.  So the name of the blog is actually appropriate for once.  Go figure.