No match for a mouse

TheLastStraw: A loophole in Darwinian theory, I've always thought, is evolution's continuing failure to produce an aggressive mouse. After all, despite their reputation for pusillanimity, mice have a proven ability to make humans stand on chairs and scream.

At the very least, their noiseless darting about unsettles us. You'd think that, as a species, they would have noticed this and evolved to take advantage.

Maybe they have done. A recent news report, "Mouse Burns Down House in Revenge", told what happened when 81-year-old Luciano Mares caught a live mouse in his New Mexico home and threw it on a pile of burning leaves. The rodent caught fire. Then, in an apparent suicide mission, it ran back into the wooden house and hid under curtains. The subsequent efforts of 13 firemen proved futile and Mares "is now living in a motel".

I note this because, at time of writing, there is a mouse loose in my home, and I think he may be dangerous. He certainly seems a lot tougher than any of his predecessors, which - in contrast to the way they do things in New Mexico - we have usually been able to get rid of without violence.

One day last year, for example, I got a phone-call at work from my wife seeking advice about a mouse cornered in the kitchen. It sounded like a dramatic scene. Our son Patrick (then aged five) was standing guard, on a chair, with a floor brush while his sister held the kitchen door shut to cut off any escape (by the mouse, or Patrick - I'm not sure which). I advised opening the back door and shooing it out. But amazingly enough, the mouse was terrified, and ran past the opening several times before staggering through.

Although Patrick eventually crumpled under the pressure of protecting the women - there were tears and he later admitted "I wasn't brave" - we awarded him an honorary Victoria Cross for his role in the action.

Obviously, word of our softness got out. Because after averaging one mouse per winter previously, this year we've had three. We succumbed to using a plastic version of the traditional spring-loaded trap, which did for the first two.

Then one morning recently, I noticed the trap - set in a corner near the kitchen table the night before - was missing. Odd, I thought, before sitting down to read the papers, and forgetting about it.

I should mention here - in an apparently irrelevant aside that is in fact a literary device known as "foreshadowing" - how, like many men, I have a habit of discarding items of clothing in the nearest available corner. Sometime earlier, I had discarded a shirt in this corner of the kitchen. It was no ordinary shirt, either. It was a Valentino shirt - bought in a moment of weakness. But forget that for now.

Anyway, later that day, I get a call from my horrified wife to report that the mouse was lurching around the kitchen, dragging the trap, which was attached to one of its legs, after it! Eek! Worse, it was trying to get into a mouse-sized hole in the skirting board, where the radiator pipe goes, but the trap was too big to fit. Eek again!

So I advised her to get a hammer from under the sink and, in as non-violent a manner as possible, to hit the mouse with it. It would be the merciful thing, I said. His suffering would soon be over and he might be reincarnated as a cat, unless he'd been a bad mouse, in which case, he'd probably come back as a journalist.

Before she could steel herself to do this, however, the mouse somehow escaped. I checked the trap that night, half fearing it might have a chewed-off leg in it. And although it didn't, I thought better of resetting it, assuring my wife that because of her weak-kneed pacifism, the mouse was now expiring slowly somewhere from a combination of leg injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Au contraire! The next day, a mouse answering to the same name ("you little b******!") was spotted darting into the pipe-hole.

Meanwhile, the shirt I mentioned earlier was retrieved from its corner and found to contain a large shredded area. Shredded by tiny teeth! Did designer shirts have anaesthetic properties, we wondered? Or did the mouse just need something to bite on, to avoid giving his position away that morning, as I was having breakfast nearby? Either way: Eek!

I reset the trap.

Since then we've found it upturned again, yards away from where it was placed. The mouse remains at large. He has a full set of legs, he has already destroyed my best shirt, and he's angry. I'm hiding the matches as a precaution.