Quiet As A What?

So, we’ve discovered we have a mouse living on the second floor of our house.

Our first hint was odd sounds in the middle of the night.  The first time we heard the noise–a very faint pit-pat-pit-pat–I made a 3 a.m. tour of the house with a baseball bat in hand, and when I saw the dog was sound asleep on the first floor (since developing hip dysplasia, Abbey has rightly determined, to her disappointment, that she can’t make it up the stairs), I decided that we had likely opened up our house somewhere to a mouse.

We’ve seen him a few times since then; he’s a little grey thing, only about as large as your thumb, and we’ve decided that as long as he doesn’t make a nuisance of himself (or decide to raise a family), we’ll let him be.  We’ve found a few of his hot spots, and we have to admit he’s very clever in a  MacGuyveresque sort of way.  In the corner of a desk drawer, for example, he had arranged a bed from a mortarboard tassle he had dragged out of an open box of knick-knacks, then surrounded it with three Hershey kisses he’d dug out of a bin. I’m all but certain he’s whizzing around the house in a toy car in a Runaway Ralph manner when we’re not home.

He also seems to have figured out that we’re willing to indulge his presence, because he’s getting more and more brazen.  At night, once the house is dark and things have settled down, we’ll hear him bounding around fearlessly, scrambling down the hall then back into our room, where the quiet of the house, and the old wooden floors, make his little steps sound like a horse galloping around the place.

The other night, Barb had left three Nature Valley peanut bars stacked on the long table in our bedroom that we use as a coffee station.  Those proved to be irresistible to our little friend (who we’ve taken to calling Jinx the Mouse).  Starting at 3:30 a.m., we heard wrappers crinkling and a great deal of commotion from the direction of the coffee station.  We flicked on the light — he was gone in a flash — and saw that he had pushed the stack down and had attempted to drag one of the bars away.  I stacked them back up and turned out the light, but in the morning, they were pushed aside again.  He’s a headstrong fellow.

I know, I know — you’re probably shuddering, wondering how we can allow something that’s technically vermin to have free run of our top floor.  But he’s just too interesting to dispose of.  We’ll keep him around for a while.