As that legendary horticulturist-baker John Yanowicz once stated, “If you have a barn, you have mice. You can’t stop them.”
Cobb Manor has a classic two-car, two-story barn chock full of discards from a dozen different people. It is frequently visited by mice. You can hear them, but you can’t see them. We have a nonaggression pact. If they stay out there, they are welcome to chew on the tents, old clothing and the wood pile.
Last week, they invaded the kitchen like the Germans went into Poland. This is disgusting, but they infested what I call the “silverware drawer,” though there is little if no silver in the pile. It looked like a small tribe invaded and stayed long enough to deposit their leavings on every knife, fork and spoon in the drawer.
War.
The battle escalated immediately, and I went off to Rankin’s hardware store for a nuclear weapon: d-Con. Blue Eyes is an animal rights fanatic, and she pled for peppermint or electronic beeping devices to keep them out. No. The time had passed for peppermint. This was a fight to the death.
My forks!
The hardware staff advised that d-Con had undergone a transformation to save dogs and little children. No longer do you just open a box and let the little creeps have their lethal picnic. No. Now, you get a plastic case and four 1-inch square “cakes” of poison. Once you figure out how to open the small case — I had the hammer in my hand — you slide a cake inside and close it again.
The mice then have to crawl in one of two tunnels in the case to get a bite at the “cake.” When that is gone, you add another.
The loaded, nuclear device was placed carefully — with gloves — under the bottom drawer. After 24 hours the cake in the case hadn’t been touched. But there were more mice “hellos” under the sink.
It was time for carpet bombing. I took one of the cakes and dropped it under the sink. Maybe the case was too complicated for the mice. The assumption was that the poison was safe from any dogs or children. Normally, they don’t go under my sink.
The next morning, the death checks were made. The cake was gone! The little (expletives) had carried it away!
The next night another cake was left under the sink. The next morning, the death checks revealed the second cake had disappeared, too!
These were Stephen King mice. They were organized — and smarter than I was. What the hell did I have living in my house? I once had a weasel living in the cellar. I wonder if he had returned with his entire family. But a weasel never could have fit into the “silverware” drawer. Could he?
I had one cake left. I dropped it on a befouled rag under the sink. The next morning it was gone, too.
They like d-Con!
That night, I was kept awake by noises in the walls, either real or imaginary. I contemplated leaving the house to them and moving into my tent.
Each morning, I would check under the sink and the kitchen drawers for tiny corpses. Nothing. I would usually find them on the cellar floor in previous military attacks. Nothing.
In the cellar, I found a dozen empty d-Con packages left from previous mice battles. Empty. Maybe I had used so much in the past that they have become impervious to the poison. Maybe they think it is picnic food.
I am at wit’s end, which has become a short trip, indeed. The only thing I can think of, other than napalm, is to revert to a better mouse trap.
I never liked those traps. You would hear them snap, then you would find the crippled little body. I don’t mind killing the little (expletives), but I don’t want to actually see the corpses. I like it better when they die, quietly, in the Cobb Manor walls.
What would Stephen King do?
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News in Rockland for 30 years.