B and I have declared unrestricted warfare on mice. All mice, wherever they are, but particularly here in our little red house.

Before our declaration was submitted to the order rodentia, we were trying to expunge only the mice from our house by live-trapping them, then releasing them into the wild, where they could rejoin the circle of life. This was all B’s idea. She was opposed to killing them because, I guess, it would make her feel guilty, or she thought that karma would come around to get her, or something. I don’t feel all that much guilt about killing mice, and when I released the ones we caught in the house, it was always in the hope that they would quickly become breakfast for a snake. But I’m all about keeping B happy, so I went along with the no-kill traps, for as long as that lasted.

The best live traps, I love to point out, are little grey plastic boxes with a hatch that closes behind the mouse after it’s lured inside by a dab of jelly or peanut butter or whatever you stick in there. I say they’re the best only because I trapped one hell of a lot of mice with them. They’re also the absolutely worst kind of trap, because right after the mouse realizes it can’t get out, it almost immediately pisses itself, then shits all over, then scrabbles around in the shitty puddle of piss until it’s fur is a pasty, matted coat of shit and piss. And then, if you’re a husband who’s trying to keep her gentle soul of a wife happy, you have to deal with a shit-covered mouse that reeks of scared piss. Yuck.

But that time has passed, now that we do not live-trap mice. The moral shift occurred when B was cleaning out her gardening shed at the end of the season and learned that about forty-two gojillion mice had made their collective home in there. The one moment in particular that turned her to the Dark Side was when she pulled a roll of chicken wire down off a shelf and not only did dozens of mice scatter into the corners, raising a cloud of the mouse shit that had been deposited on the shelf over the course of the summer, but a couple dozen more mice leaped out of the roll of chicken wire and ran for cover, scaring her half to death. As B usually live-blogs most of her gardening, she immediately updated her Facebook status to, “I officially hate mice now.”

After that, she wanted me to kill ALL the mice I could catch. Inside or outside, it didn’t matter. If I had told her that I could speak a secret word that would cause all the mice in the world to drop dead, I think she would have begged me to utter it. Since that day she has never quite as bloodthirsty about killing mice, but she still wants me to get rid of them by whatever means necessary, and to that end I have laid traps all over the basement. Two or three times a week, I tramp up the stairs and out the front door with the corner of a trap pinched between two fingers to drop the tiny carcass in the garbage can. If B is anywhere within eyeshot of my path, she makes an ewww face, but she also asks what the score is now. I keep a running tally on the blackboard in the stairway. We’re up to seven since the tenth of the month.

And Boo is still doing her part. She will sit at the base of the stairs every night after lights out and wait there until a mouse skitters past, then give chase. Unfortunately, when she manages to catch one she’ll bring it upstairs to play with it, and if it’s an especially fun mouse with lots of get up and go, she’ll bring it to our bed, apparently so we can share in the fun. This usually happens at about three or four o’clock in the morning. If I could teach her just one thing, it would be that she’s welcome to catch all the mice she wants, but to keep them in the basement, or at the very least out of our bed, thank you very much.

So no mouse this morning, or yesterday morning, or Wednesday morning. One mouse Tuesday morning, none Monday. I guess the mouse problem in the basement is not nearly as bad as I thought it was. Either that, or I caught all the dumb ones, and the smart ones have figured out how to take the bait without springing the only traps that have, up until now, always caught the mice. Wait, I’m gonna go check …

I’m trying to find the best way to dispose of mice. We have what seems to be an entire legion of mice in our basement. I forget how many Roman centurions that is; let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s a hundred. I have no trouble at all believing there are a hundred mice in our basement. Their turds are everywhere. I see them scurrying along the edges of the rooms. I put out four mousetraps just before the lunch hour this morning, and when I went down to my basement lair in the early afternoon, I noticed that two of the traps were sprung. So in just five or six hours, I caught two mice without hardly trying.

By the way, don’t waste your time buying those old-fashioned mouse traps with the blocky wooden base and the spring-loaded wire that snaps your thumbs at least once while you’re trying to set it. Likewise, don’t bother with the modern update that you squeeze open like a spring-loaded clothespin. I tried those and they’re not mousetraps; they’re mouse feeders. I bought a couple of each kind of mouse trap, just to see which ones would work best, and slathered the triggers with peanut butter. Mice love peanut butter. They can’t get enough of it. Our mice licked the triggers clean on all those traps without tripping them. Houdini would be proud of them.

But there’s one kind of trap that’s like a gray plastic box open at one end with a little hood that drops down over the opening when a mouse goes in. I’ve caught more mice with those traps and I would recommend them over anything else I’ve tried, except for one thing: When a mouse gets caught in them, the first thing the little bastard does is piss himself. Then he shits all over the inside of the box and pisses some more. It’s like he’s trying to make the biggest, most disgusting mess he can possibly manage, and he does a pretty good job for such a tiny little mammal. If I didn’t have to clean up that mess every time I caught a mouse, I would whole-heartedly recommend them to anybody who asked. Not that anybody has ever asked.

Anyway, back to the problem of disposal: These are live traps. Forget about suggesting poison. I’m not using poison. It’s not that I’m opposed to killing mice. I would have used the spring-loaded traps that snap them in two but, as I’ve already pointed out, they’re shit at catching mice. But poison isn’t an option. We have two cats. And besides, I just plain don’t like poison. I don’t like handling it, I don’t like it laying around, I don’t even like the smell of it, but most of all, I don’t like the thought of dozens of little rodent corpses decaying in the farthest corners of our basement. Yuck.

So until somebody comes up with a killing trap that our mice won’t visit like a smorgasbord, waddling away fat and happy after stuffing themselves with peanut butter, I’m using live traps, which means I have to dispose of live mice. Right now, what I’m doing is taking them down to the marsh and setting them loose, where they’ll make a nice meal for a snake or a salamander or something. But that’s not something I want to keep on doing. The marsh is a ways down the road and besides, sometimes I just don’t wanna. Doubly don’t wanna after the snow flies.

My Darling B suggested that I leave them in an open container in the yard for the neighborhood cats to finish off, but it turns out that mice are seriously athletic. You would not believe how surprisingly high a tiny little mouse can jump. An open container would have to be at least three feet deep, maybe deeper, I’m just guessing here, to hold them for more than a minute or two. So that idea, as good as it is, is out until we can find an aquarium half as tall as I am.

I wonder if a pet store would take them, to feed to the snakes or whatever else eats mice?