Gray: Out-gunned rodent loses battle of wills

I killed Gus Gus. Who’s that? Apparently the mouse from “Cinderella.” By the way, did you know that’s not really her name — Cinderella? We’ll get to that later.

First I need to come clean about the rodent homicide. No. I didn’t kill the actual cartoon mouse from the Disney classic, but I might as well have the way my friends are treating me.

Every fall, when the weather turns cold, I get a mouse in the house. Sometimes two. Now, I think mice are cute as long as they’re in a cage running on a little wheel. Running around my house while I’m asleep? Not so much. This year has been particularly bad because, after killing a couple of mice with the little poison pellets, a third one dropped by like an unwanted in-law intent on staying the whole winter.

Unlike his predecessors, he was smarter than the average mouse. I put the poison trays out and I watched him come out of his hole, smell it and scurry away. Understand, this was not a mouse who’d only show his beady little eyes in the cover of darkness, he came out during game four of the World Series to watch A-Rod smack a base hit to left field. He would literally run out into the middle of the room, watch a pitch and then run back. At one point, I hid behind the TV with a golf club hoping to swat him. It turns out, I’m as good at hitting a mouse as I am a golf ball, so Gus Gus was more than safe.

It wasn’t my idea to call him that by the way, but a good friend found my mouse musings amusing and kept telling me to “leave little Gus Gus alone.”

Since the poison wasn’t working, I went to my local True Value hardware store to bring in the big guns — a mouse trap. My friends kept telling me to be humane and buy a trap that doesn’t hurt him, then quote “release him into the wild.” What is this? A sparrow with a broken wing? No.

Mice are dirty varmints and, with my luck, he’d just turn around and come right back in. I thought about catching him and taking him for a long drive to the country, but that felt like an episode of “The Sopranos.”

They have a lovely selection of traps capable of sending Gus Gus to that big wheel of cheese in the sky. One was literally the size of a Volkswagen, but the man at the store told me that was for full-size rats and, unless Gus was packing an AK47, it might be overkill. So I purchased the tiniest trap, baited it with peanut butter and waited.

I sat on the couch with my flashlight, watching the trap, and Gus appeared. He smelled the trap, then walked away. I knew I should have gotten the Skippy peanut butter. Unsuccessful, I went to bed. The next morning, the peanut butter was gone but the trap never sprang.

He had licked it clean. I picked it up and it snapped in my hand, scaring me half to death. I’d swear I could hear Gus Gus laughing somewhere behind the wall.

The next night, I set it again, making sure it was on a hair-trigger release.

Unfortunately, when I went to place it down, it snapped, sending peanut butter into my hair. I didn’t feel like showering, but then I imagined waking up and finding a mouse gnawing on my head. After I toweled off, I reset it and went to bed.

I never heard the snap, but Gus Gus is no more. You’d think I’d feel guilty killing him, but when I saw his dirty little claws and black eyes — nope. I thought about burying him in a Yankees World Series commemorative jersey but, to my surprise, they don’t sell them in XXXXXXsmall. It was a nice ceremony though, attended by a local squirrel and chipmunk. Afterwards, we gathered near the trash can for peanut butter and crackers. I think Gus would have liked that.

I mentioned at the top that Cinderella’s name isn’t really Cinderella. Truth is, her name is Ella, but after falling asleep near the fireplace one night she woke up covered in cinders and ash. Her evil stepsisters teased her by calling her Cinder-Ella. Jerks!

Hmm, I wonder if they like peanut butter. I could lend Ella my mouse traps.
Source saratogian.com/