The mouse in Frank McNally's house is dead.
After waging war against him for many months, during which he earned my respect and grudging affection, I finally carried his prone body from the house yesterday.
He died, as mice do, with his eyes open and they seemed to stare at me reproachfully throughout the funeral. But I buried him with full honours. As an added tribute, I have decided to retire the trap that finally caught him.
He was daring to the end. Sometime during what proved to be his last night on earth, he enjoyed a cheese supper at my expense, removed with all the finesse of a lock-picker from the trap in which it was placed.
I had begun to doubt whether mice really ate cheese, from the number of times the bait had been ignored. Yet when I checked the trap yesterday morning, it had been expertly cleaned out (incidentally adding credibility to the claims of a certain brand to be "the fillet of cheddar"), in a manner that left the spring undisturbed. Thinking it must be broken, I touched the trap lightly with the floor brush, and it snapped with a violence that made me jump.
Far from being dismayed by this latest example of the mouse's audacity, I was encouraged. Like a member of the Pinkerton detective agency who learns that a legendary bank robber has started entertaining the public during hold-ups, I could see in my short-term humiliation the seeds of medium-term success. The mouse was getting reckless. Soon the little desperado would make a mistake, I knew. And sure enough, his next visit to the trap was his last.
I can't be sure this was the same mouse we had had since Christmas. I just believe so, although at times I have suspected there were two of them, operating as a tag team. The suspicion strengthened one day earlier this year when, in his finest hour, the mouse escaped a previous trap with something bordering on heroism.
It was a light plastic trap, also since retired: an updated but inferior version of the spring-loaded wood-and-metal number. I still shudder to recall this, but on the morning in question I came down to breakfast and noticed the trap was not where it should be. The sequence only became clear afterwards. But I now know that as I ate breakfast that morning, the mouse was lying low a few feet away from me, hiding in a crumpled shirt that I had thrown on the floor, and considering his next move.
All his potential moves were problematic, because he had the trap attached to one of his legs. I know this because, later that morning, he put his desperate escape plan into effect in front of my horrified wife. I received a phone-call at work to say that the mouse had limped across the kitchen floor, dragging the trap after him, and was now trying to squeeze through the mouse-shaped hole in the skirting board that the builders thoughtfully provided when they built the extension.
The weakness in his plan was that while the hole was big enough for both him and the radiator pipe, it wasn't big enough for the trap. But before I could persuade my wife to end his suffering with a hammer, he somehow freed himself and fled to what we assumed would be a lingering death. So that when, a day later, a sprightly mouse with four working legs re-emerged from the hole, well, that's when I thought there was a tag team.
We had tried conventional violence. Now we decided to go ultrasonic. Ultrasound units are supposed to be the nuclear deterrent of man-mouse relations. I bought two of the most powerful units, for upstairs and downstairs, plus a smaller one for the kitchen. And sure enough, for a week or so, they seemed to work. The mouse disappeared so easily it felt like cheating. I had subdued my noble adversary without even giving him a sporting chance to make off with the bait and laugh at me.
But yet again, I had underestimated the little bugger. Soon he was back in action, skittering around the living room within yards of an ultrasound unit that was supposed to inflict terrible aural torture on every rodent that came within half a mile of it. Was he deaf, I wondered, or had the noise already driven him so crazy that he didn't care any more? And could it have been noise-induced insanity that finally propelled him to death when I supplemented the ultrasound with the old-fashioned trap and cheese? I don't know. I believe it was just another example of his supreme courage. The same resource he was able to draw on that morning while I was having my breakfast and he was a few feet away, chewing tiny holes in my shirt (this too I discovered afterwards) to dull the pain and prevent him betraying his position to the enemy.
It was a designer shirt, bought in a sale in Brown Thomas. But I was proud to lose it in the circumstances. Now as then, I salute the mouse's bravery.
He ran out of luck eventually and when he did, he died like a soldier. I wonder if Pixar would buy the film rights.