By Stephanie Abbajay

The other night, both kids were asleep, the husband was out of town on business and I had an hour or two to myself. I was watching a rerun of Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve seen that show three times, and each time it was the same episode, where Meredith undergoes surgery and has to decide between McDreamy and that guy who played Robin in the Batman movie with George Clooney. Anyway, I was zoned out, trying to figure out the odds of seeing the same and only episode three times when I heard a weird noise. It was a muffled squeaking and thrashing. It was faint and tiny. I turned off the TV and there it was, clearer but still faint. I stood up and followed the sound around the room until I located the source. It was a tiny little mouse, stuck fast and furious to a glue trap under one of our living room chairs.

I stood there, kind of horrified, as I watched it struggle against the insurmountable odds of freeing itself from its sticky grave. If you’ve ever touched one of those glue pads, you know the adhesion is commercial grade – nothing’s coming off it -- so the mouse struggled in vain. It wasn’t going anywhere.

We had been having a problem with mice lately and my husband had set out glue traps to catch the little devils who were enjoying a brazen run of our household, scampering not along the baseboards as shy mice should but right across the floor. We have two cats, Scott and Gary, but they are outside cats and Dave Stine would sooner riddle the floors with glue traps than have those two in the house. Though they used to be great hunters, bringing us the bodies, and body parts, of their prey, summer has made Scott and Gary lazy, and they don’t even bother to glance up at the purple martins who steal the Cat Chow from their food dish only inches from their sleepy heads.

So, there he (or she) was. A little mouse, absolutely doomed. I stood there contemplating his fate. Was he panicking? Would he die of starvation or a heart attack? How long would it take? Hours? A day? How on earth could I go to sleep knowing he was struggling for his life? And making creepy little squeaking sounds? Now here’s where most of you (starting with my in-laws) will probably think, “Oh grow up already. It’s a mouse for God’s sake.” But I was having a real problem at that moment. I just couldn’t let him suffer, at least not where I could hear him, so I picked up the glue trap and took it outside. I set it on the porch and then went up to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing and I concocted a fantastic scenario in my head: What if Scott or Gary tried to eat him off the glue trap and then they got stuck on the glue trap and a coyote heard them struggling and came and had a buffet of the mouse AND one of my cats?

I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs and grabbed a dishtowel. I decided I was going to free the mouse and let nature take its course. I went outside, picked up the glue trap and through the dishtowel (I wasn’t going to touch the mouse with my bare hands) held the mouse around his belly and tried to pull him of the trap. Nothing. He wasn’t budging. I kept trying but I was afraid to squeeze too hard because he felt like he could pop like a cherry tomato.

By now the dishtowel was stuck in the glue trap too and I had to pry it off. When I got it off, my fingers now completely stuck to each other and to the towel, the mouse’s face was buried in the thick ooze of the glue. In trying to save his life, or at least give him a sporting chance, I had signed his death sentence. I set the trap down and went inside, ashamed of myself, though I wasn’t sure for what.

I woke up the next morning and ran outside. The trap was there but the mouse was gone. There was no fur or prints stuck in the trap. There were no clues. Had he run off? Had something with more expert abilities pried him loose? Something had obviously taken care of business, much better than me. Still contemplating the mouse, I walked around the garage to let my chickens out and stopped dead in my tracks. The top was pried off their water pitcher and their feed was scattered. The door to their house was wide open, the two chicks were cowering in the corner and the mother hen was gone. A little pool of blood and one lone white feather was all the evidence left.

A raccoon had opened the latch and taken the mother. One of the chicks was missing a finger and the other had a broken leg and a broken wing. We think the raccoon had tried to pull them through the wire before he got in and made off with the mother hen. I was sad. I thought about how she must have fiercely protected her babies and fought the raccoon. I also thought about the fate of the mouse. Then I pushed my kids on the swings for an hour. I had had enough drama in Dow for one night.

Stephanie Abbajay is a columnist for the Jersey County Journal.

June 27, 2007