We’ve been away for a week & when we got back, I opened a kitchen cupboard & found mouse droppings. Grrr. Itinerant mice are pretty common in Edinburgh tenements & multiple occupancy buildings but we haven’t seen hide or hair of rodents since we got Jake.
I started to empty the cupboard, which is the one full of olive oil & balsamic vinegar (obviously a mouse with Mediterranean tastes). Towards the back, when there was nothing to clear except a couple of glass jars of rice & a well-gnawed pack of burritos, I came face to face with the mouse.
Jake has only ever caught two things in his life: a water rat and a rabbit. When he caught the water rat, he became selectively deaf & trotted along just out of my reach, the busiest & most important dog in the world. Then he let it go. He also once caught a rabbit and let it go. He’d be rubbish as a working lurcher (and maybe that’s why he ended up in the dogs’ home).
So there was a stand-off in the kitchen – mouse vs inept lurcher & two soft-hearted humans. The three domestic mammals staring into the cupboard, and the mouse staring back at us. I must admit I considered Jake’s track record & decided that I’d catch the mouse in a large glass jar rather than risk Jake chase it somewhere else in the kitchen.
Then the mouse darted back into the packet of burritos. Easy! I scooped the packet up & into the waste bin, and took the mouse down to the wheelie bin for the ultimate last supper.
Jake now keeps going to stick his head right into the cleaned cupboard as if he can’t quite credit it.
(How did the mouse get in? It dropped through a gap between the back of the oven and the top of the cupboard, & obviously had no incentive to climb out of the land of plenty).
(And no, there are no other signs of mice anywhere else in the flat. But our local pest control officer is back on the beat).
