Honolulu Lite
EITHER an alien life form or a rat the size of a Volkswagon has taken up residence in our garage. How rodents spend
summer vacationI caught a blurred glimpse of the creature as it fled along a wooden beam, causing the entire garage to shake and the lights to rattle.
We keep a good tight lid on our garbage cans so I'm not sure what the rat eats. Judging from its size, I suspect it eats anything it wants: nails, screw drivers ... the occasional chain saw.
The rat revelation came on the heels of the discovery that a mouse had taken up residence under the kitchen stove. In an old house and at this time of year, these things happen. I'm not sure why. Wildlife just gets a hankering to move indoors. Maybe they're on vacation. If so, it's a vacation that inevitably ends violently. You'd think that at Mouse Central, they'd figure out that mice who go into homes for a vacation, instead of to the beach, never come back.
One year, a mouse confused about the difference between food and electrical wiring, bit into a hot wire in the back of our clothes dryer. We found the little guy hanging by his teeth several days later after he had become, how do you say, slightly odoriferous.
For our current visitor, we picked up two types of mouse traps: the run-of-the-mill snap trap and the sinister "large piece of sticky paper trap."
I put a dollop of peanut butter in the middle of the sticky paper trap and then stuck it under the oven. The mouse apparently had a close brush with death but managed to wrangle his way to safety. It looked like the little fellow had quite a time of it, dragging the sticky paper all over the place, splattering peanut butter everywhere and leaving a little tuft of hair behind in the process.
I hoped that would be the end of him, that he'd run home and share his harrowing tale with his friends. ("I was ON the sticky paper, man!")
But he didn't. So I cleaned up the mess and stuck the little snap trap under the oven. It was about that time I noticed the rat in the garage so I put a second little snapper trap on the garage beam.
PEOPLE are always talking about building a better mouse trap but they never do. The house mouse was able to eat all the peanut butter without tripping the trap. The garage rat apparently ate the peanut butter, snapped the trap just for fun, used the metal arm as a tooth pick and then chucked thing on the floor.
I then bought an official snap-type rat trap which is an enormous slat of wood with a heavy gauge spring-loaded metal arm that takes three people to pull back and set. It sat on a table for hours untouched until my wife asked why I hadn't set it yet.
"Are you crazy? That thing could take your arm off," I said.
I finally got up the guts to set it and slipped it up on the garage beam. The next morning it was gone. Completely gone. I don't know what to make of that. There was no sign of blood or guts. Either the ratus giganticus was caught in the trap but managed to drag it away from the house, or he deliberately took it and plans to leave it on my pillow one night while I'm sleeping as a warning not to mess with him anymore.
I'm a reasonable guy. If King Rat wants to rule the garage, that's fine with me, as long as he doesn't eat my dog or anything.
Now, the little house mouse is another matter. It's beaten the snap trap twice, while, I, on the other hand, have snapped my fingers five times setting the damn thing. He's got to go. And as soon as my fingers get better, his vacation is over.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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