Nut Job

I bought a “humane” mouse trap a couple of weeks ago, a metal box with holes on either side and a handle.  You slide the top open to put food in.   The mouse goes in and triggers a mechanism that traps him.  For each of the three days prior to my purchase three baby mice visited.  I trapped each of them in a shoe box and let them loose in the woods.  Years ago I trapped a mouse on a glue trap.  He was on there bleeding, squeaking — I cried all day, swearing never to kill another mouse.  The next one who came I fed.

After that third baby mouse a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to get the trap, I didn’t see any more.  The contraption made me  nervous.  I feared hearing the clacking noise caused by the mouse getting trapped inside.  I checked, peering into the holes every day — or I’d kick it.  Days went by and and no mice.

Last night at 4am I heard skittering, clacking, scraping.  It was a mouse in the box.  It frantically scratched, scraped and clacked, desperately trying to get out.  I let it go on.  I wasn’t going to the woods at 4am to let it out.  It disturbed me emotionally so when I slept, I dreamed of holding the mousetrap, a larger version, with a dog inside, frantically butting at the top of the box.  I could see its head.  I was on the train taking it somewhere to release it.   There was another dream with two mice and some other kind of creature in the box.

I woke up preparing to free the mouse.  I sank inside, thinking of it in that small space with the bits of bread with peanut butter I had put in there.  (I tear up typing this part.)  He was hungry, so it was a logical place for him to be.  He had no idea he’d be trapped.  I shook the box lightly to make sure he was in there.  He poked his nose into one of the holes.  He was in there.

Across the street I placed the metal box on the dirt, turned the box sideways and slid the top off.  After a couple of seconds, I  told it to go, go, be free, run.  Finally it scampered up the hill through the dirt, its tail trailing behind.  I breathed out and headed back, thinking that the trap was not humane at all as the thing is in there terrified.

Should I just let the little bastards run around here until they die in the walls or find their way to another apartment?  After work I came home and looked out the window at the woods.  Where is the mouse now, I wondered.  What is he eating?