Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:07 pm
Great story telling Biggy. I enjoyed your commentary style.
I mentioned in my last post that I was going to investigate how Baldy had managed to circumvent my quagmire of mouse traps to end up outside the cabinets and dead on my kitchen floor.
Baldy outwits me even in death.
So I came home later that night, and immediately went to work trying to figure how he had gotten out of the cabinets and into the kitchen area. I checked the cabinets - they were still sealed shut from the weight I had placed against them. I checked the edges of the cabinets where he had previously been gnawing, and they still weren't big enough for him to even get an arm through. (FYI - a common house mouse can squeeze through a hole the size of a nickel, Baldy probably needed a hole the size of a half dollar - he's huge). Similarly, there was none of the tell-tale saw dust on the floor that was always there when he attempted to saw his way out.
Curious.
The drawer was also shut well. So I opened the cabinets, and not a one of the traps was touched, nor were the glue traps beneath his emerging hole tampered with in the least.
There was always a second hole behind the oven that I knew about. I never gave it much heed, because Baldy was so relentlessly and uselessly trying to get through the cabinets day after day - I just assumed that if the hole actually did lead outside, Baldy didn't know about it. Just to be safe I stuffed a towel in there. I knew it wouldn't stop Baldy, but I knew that if he or one of his friends was using that hole I would be able to tell when the towel was disturbed.
So I checked this hole next - the towel hadn't been moved at all. I was perplexed. I have a very small kitchen and there's only so many places holes could be.
Flashback: the night before Baldy was killed. I had just setup my myriad of traps, and was in my bathroom taking a shower, would I heard a LOUD rustling sound coming from the kitchen. I had never heard him make so much noise before, and I could only assume that he was caught in the sea of glue traps under the cabinet. When I went into the kitchen, I heard the familiar hollow tumbling of him escaping by a pipe. I opened the cabinet doors, and there was nothing on the glue traps, not a bit of fur or anything. I checked the hole with the towel - nothing.
Then I looked down at my feet, where there was a canned good with it's wrapper shredded over the ground. The canned good was near the kitchen cabinets, and it was within rat-arm's length of the doors, so I assumed he had reached through the crack in the cabinet and went for the can.
Flashforward - so with that enigmatic event in mind, I tried to figure out how Baldy could have possibly gotten through my first line of defense.
Then I saw it, a hole in the back of my oven. It was at the bottom, under the pilot light - which was turned off - there was a small 2ftx3inx3in tunnel that was part of the oven. And inside, a host of rat crap and trash. Baldy's nest. Baldy had been in my oven, no doubt watching me spend 30 minutes setting up traps under the cabinets.
I have since pieced together to the best of my ability the sequence of events.
At some point Baldy gave up coming through the kitchen cabinets, and found that oven wall hole - but if I figure it right, he came through only hours before I put the towel in the oven wall - and my guess is that I was there in the room when ran through. I think he had been staying off and on in that hole for some time after I left, and it was only after the failed glue trap experiment when he finally went outside.
