Earl Had To Die

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the mouse that has been living in our apartment for the past two months... let me enlighten you. About two months ago, I noticed some "droppings" of some sort and a stinky smell in the cabinet underneath our sink. We keep all of Clancy's food, belongings, etc. and our cleaning supplies in this cabinet, so it is frequently accessed. Not being a rodent specialist, I thought that maybe the little black pieces were from a roach or something (we had previously spotted a couple of roaches). As a few days went by, a hole developed in Clancy's bag of dog food and the little black pieces and the smell started to increase at an exceptionally fast rate. We soon realized that we had something bigger than a roach on our hands! One day, as I arrived home from work to meet Lacey at our apartment, I started to get Clancy's food out to feed him... and that little mouse ran out of Clancy's bag, onto our kitchen floor, and into a little hole beside a different cabinet. Although Clancy tried to save my life by chasing the little critter, I almost had a heart attack, literally. I blocked off the entrance that the mouse had run in to and left the cabinet doors shut until George got home with a mousetrap. He set it (actually 3 of them) up so that if the mouse tried to enter the cabinet again, he would surely be captured.

We checked everyday to see if the mouse had been trapped; but not only had he not been trapped, there was no sign of him anywhere… no droppings, smell, anything. We thought we had lost him but still kept the mousetraps in place for precaution. Several weeks passed that our mouse, which we had since nicknamed Earl, never even crossed our minds.

Earl was dead to us… until today. I opened up the cabinet to find a couple of the once familiar droppings and smell. Except the smell was a little different. I shut the doors as fast as I could and yelled for George to come check out the situation. He found Earl, dead in one of our traps. What I had once thought would be the happiest of endings, turned out to be kind of sad too. I looked inside the slightly transparent trap and all I could think about was the Disney/Pixar movie, Ratatouille, and that poor little Earl had only wanted some food. I’m not saying that I want a mouse back in our apartment, but the ending was a lot better when I just thought Earl had moved to a different home.

The scary cabinet... home to Earl.

My Fearless Mouse-Killer, George.

The deadly mousetrap, with Earl inside.