Moby Mouse

I paid no attention when my cat, Lace, suddenly darted off my lap. Cats have a habit of realizing they are late for an appointment and darting away. But when I saw her staring intently under the oven, I realized she had a mouse in her sights. My hopes soared as I dropped to my knees beside her to peer under, maybe it was that little albino bastard.

Last April I bought a mouse to feed my daughter’s snake, only he went on hunger strike. I quickly tired of dropping this mouse into the tank every few days and then getting bitten—by the mouse, not the snake—taking it back out to the food ‘holding tank’. It was quick, clever, aggressive, wild—the mouse, not the snake—and while I don’t usually take any pleasure in feeding the snake, I was making a definite exception in this case. Only the snake still wasn’t eating, and I was getting worried; two months passed. Thinking the snake may have developed a similar aversion to this particular rodent, I reluctantly got him a young rat. Gone like a shot.

Okay, now he was eating again. I waited, continuing to feed him rats, while caring for the nasty white mouse, hoping to slip him in between rats, hoping the snake would strike before noticing. It never worked. I had had the mouse for at least 4 months now. And then he escaped. Quick as a wink when I was changing his cage. The next night my daughter caught him, but he escaped again.

No problem. My back porch, and quite often my living room, is littered with the remains of Lace’s favorite pastime. I’ve never had a cat that hunts as assiduously. Rabbits, mice, birds, shrews, you name it. Hear a squirrel cussing a blue streak? You can bet that Lace is on the roof with evil intent. My daughter reported frequent sightings of the white mouse in her room; Lace spent her nights prowling in there. But the mouse survived. Over the next few months, I could hear it at night, gnawing, taunting me. Every time I thought Lace must have got it at last, it made a foray into someone’s bedroom.

Then a few weeks ago, it strolled across the living room floor while we were watching a movie. I pulled a muscle jumping up, yelling incoherently. It went behind the computer desk. We played hide and seek the rest of the evening until I was a foot away from it, ready to slam an empty cottage cheese container over it, just an inch closer…just an inch closer…then Lace came up to me and did the figure 8 thing around my leg, oblivious, as the mouse disappeared from sight.  Damn! The thing that irritated me the most was that I could see it was starting to suffer from old age.

So here I was sprawled on my kitchen floor, next to my cat, mumbling about “that little white fucker”. I pulled the drawer out there it was, sitting among my baking pans. Then it was gone, I pulled the pans out. The drawer was empty. I pulled the drawer completely out. Lace was quivering with hunting fever. I stuffed her under the oven, screeching, “get it, get it, get it” like a mad woman. Nobody tells Lace what to do, but in this case, she was willing to overlook it, close as we both knew she was to the kill.

The clock ticked. Lace stuck her head out, confused. I shoved her back under. She stuck her head out. And then she locked on target. Behind me. I turned and saw a white nose and whiskers between the cups of a muffin tin that was sitting on a cookie sheet. The mouse was sandwiched between. Not squished between but running freely along the underside of the muffin tin, in and out of the spaces between the cups. Lace was quickly on one side and I was on the other as the nose peeked out here, then there, in a homemade whack-a-mole game I was simply NOT going to lose this time.

I called my daughter to get a plastic grocery bag and scooped the whole thing into the bag, shook the tins and caught my great white nemesis. Its hair was thinning, and it even seemed to have a little palsy. I ran with it up the stairs and bunged it into the snake cage, cackling and doing a victory dance. The snake was hungry.

Lace hasn't spoken to me since.

If I need to legitimize telling this story in a food blog: it is about food and it does take place in a kitchen. If you want more, consider it introduction to this recipe for rodents in the Lincoln Heritage Trail Cookbook by Marian French, 1971.

Rabbit and Squirrel

Soak overnight in salted water or 1 part vinegar to 1 part water. Stew or fry in the same manner as chicken.

That's it, that's all it says.It's followed by a recipe for Chicken and Dumplings that I assume you could use with your squirrel.

Stewed Chicken and Dumplings

Use a 5 or 6 pound chicken (or big ass squirrel) (whole or cut into parts), cover with water and boil slowly in covered pot until tender. Add salt, pepper, butter as seasoning. Remove chicken to platter, drop dumpling dough (or baked biscuits) into liquid, cover and cook ten minutes, serve hot.

Yeah, all kinds of wrong with that recipe. No where in the book does it give a recipe for dumplings. Now I know in the south a dumpling is a wide egg noodle and in the north its a biscuit, and there is a recipe for noodles but it isn't tagged as a 'dumpling'. There's no recipe for biscuits in here. Not to mention that biscuit dumplings aren't baked first and then dropped in the water, they are dropped in raw and steamed to cook them. Nor does this recipe mention thickening the liquid in any way, or that the chicken be returned to the pot. Or maybe the dumplings and liquid are supposed to be poured over the chicken afterwards? Meh, I doubt this author ever made chicken and dumplings. Or squirrel.