Of Mice and Me

photo by Steve Jurvetson

I'm tired and my eyes are itchy. Damn cats.

Yesterday a friend came over to play with photos and as we were hanging up the film to dry I noticed the orange one was growling at the white one and holding a mouse in his mouth. The mouse looked dead, so as long as the cats didn't damage each other fighting over it I wasn't too worried. But when the orange one dropped the mouse it suddenly looked a lot less dead. I have a lot of junk in the basement and a lot of low furniture. It is NOT a good place for a cat to play with his food.

Our indoor cats are not such fabulous mousers. I'm a better mouser than they are - I found it at least twice as often as they did. Whenever we got them to notice the mouse they kept chasing it somewhere they couldn't get to it, then going back to the last place they found it to check if it had magically reappeared there. Eventually I got tired of moving furniture and left them to it, hoping they would somehow figure it out on their own.

Just before bed I chased the white one upstairs, but I couldn't find the orange one. I don't like letting them get outside, but I didn't want him trapped out their either so I left one window open. About 1am I heard the clatter of him coming into the house, so I turned on the light to grab him and take him upstairs - and he had another mouse in his mouth. It didn't stay there for long. He didn't keep track of this one either.

By 1:30 I was again tired of moving furniture, so I shut the windows (bah! I love my night breezes) and left him to dispose of them properly. I doubt he did, but it made for an exciting night with him jumping up at me, purring, and me checking whether I had a mouse corpse on my pillow. And I'm still having an allergic thing with the cat rubbing himself on my face at night.