The Saga Of The Great Mouse Hunt, part 1.
Once upon a time, back in the olden days, I lived in Carrum Downs, a new suburb of outer south-east Melbourne. It was built on reclaimed swamp, and in winter, acted like it. It was an isolated suburb, with few services beyond utilities, a Maternal and Baby Health Centre, a milk bar, and one phone box that was usually vandalised. A lot of young families lived in the area, as the land was cheap.
Picture a small brown 3 bedroom house at the end of a long court. 20 Honeyeater Place. I grew to love that wee house, and tried my best to make a home of it. I lived with the Ex-husband there. At the time, he was Fiance.
Now, I didn’t drive at this time. And I worked permanent part time hours at a Woolworths’ variety store in Bentleigh. It meant a lot of walking to public transport, and then a long trip on said public transport to get to and from work.
EH used to get up long before me to get to work in the city(70 minute trip on the train either way). I would half wake when he did, then go back to sleep.
One morning, I heard him cry out, and then start crashing around in the kitchen. I staggered out to see what the problem was.
“There’s a mouse!” EH cried with horror.
He had the kitchen bin lid in his hand and the soup ladle. I blinked at him.
“There’s nothing we can do about it right now. Go to work. I’ll pick up a mousetrap at the variety store later today.”
Mollified, EH went to work, and I went to work later that day, and lo, there were no little wooden and metal mouse traps. There were dirty big wooden and metal rat traps however. So I bought one, and when I arrived home it was already dark.
I knew EH was home. His car was in the driveway. However, all the houselights were off. There was torchlight moving from room to room. Holy shit! Burglars who had EH tied up? Not impossible. Carrum Downs was not the greatest area for house and personal safety. The local drug drop place was only 15 minutes up Ballarto Road.
I crept into the house and whispered “Ex husband?”
He appeared in a doorway, shining the torchlight unflatteringly up into his face.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m trying to catch the mouse,” he said. He had thoroughly gone through each room with a torch and a blanket. His plan: shine the torch on the mouse and stun it into immobility, then throw the blanket over it.
I was already used EH’s ways, or resigned to them, so I just turned some lights on, baited the rat trap with cheese and put it in the bottom of the pantry, where the mouse had last been seen.
Now, rat traps are calibrated for the heavier weight of rats, so thrice the mouse ate the cheese and didn’t set of the trap. In fact, acrobat mouse climbed the pantry walls and started nibbling the top off a cling-filmed cake I had in there.
So, I bought some RatSak, and put out a bottle top of it. Nope. Smart mouse.
The weekend came. I was done with this bloody cake eating, wall scaling, cheese stealing bugger. I baited the rat trap with cake dipped in RatSak.
EH and I went and did the weekly grocery shopping. When we came back, the trap was sprung, the cake was gone, but the mouse was nowhere in sight.
I could see EH was at boiling point over this mouse, so I suggested we go for a walk. I reset the trap, and off we went. When we came back – mouse in trap.
EH: “It knew it had been poisoned, so it suicided”.
Uh huh.
Anyway, poor mousie was definitely dead. The impact the rat trap’s Snap was so great that its little eyes had flown out of its head.
Guess who got to find them?
Anyway, EH would not take the mouse out of the trap, and took the whole thing to the undeveloped reserve behind our house and buried the lot so it ‘could go back to nature’.
To this day, there is likely the metal remains of a rat trap in the depths of the reserve in Botany Park, Carrum Downs.
So endeth part one of the Saga Of The Mouse Hunt.
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