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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Continuing rat saga is
turning into a blockbusterTo Catch A Rat, Episode Two: The Rat Man Cometh In Episode One we learned that a rat had taken up residence in Hale Memminger. The size of a Shetland pony, the rat, dubbed "Mr. Biggs," had taken over the household, eating everything in sight, monopolizing the television remote control and leaving cigarette butts and empty beer cans strewn around the living room. Mr. Biggs apparently decided to become a house rat after consuming all of the available food outside, including an entire mango tree, most of the shrubbery and the neighbor's dog, Tashi.
We tried everything to get Mr. Biggs to leave the house, canceling our cable TV service, telling him his National Guard unit had been called to duty in Baghdad and refusing to buy any more Doritos.
Well, that's the Hollywood version, anyway. The truth is that I only got a glimpse of Mr. Biggs once, behind the washing machine, and while he wasn't as big as a pony, he looked plenty big in the rat department. I mean, I wouldn't have gone one-on-one with him without a whip and a chair.
I was so amazed to finally see the bugger that had been nibbling at raw baking potatoes and gnawing on year-old ears of ornamental corn that I didn't think to run for my pellet pistol. Besides, I was still suffering from the misguided humanitarian fantasy of catching him alive and releasing him somewhere far from my house, like Kauai.
Hah. Not only did he avoid the live wire traps, he made sport of all the traps that promise to dish out rodent capital punishment. He ignored the snap traps, treated the sticky traps like a minor annoyance, and I thought I heard him giving a hearty laugh at the $40 electric zapper trap a friend had lent me.
When we locked up anything vaguely edible, he gnawed at the cabinet doors, leaving shreds of wood to sweep up in the morning. I finally had to admit that his big old rat brain had outsmarted my little old human brain. It was time to call a professional rat assassin.
Art Olinger, alias the Rat Man, from Diversified Exterminators, stopped by and examined the property. You know, you think you are running a nice, tight clean ship until someone like Art comes along with a flashlight and shows you your ship is full of holes. There were only about 1,473 places a Mr. Biggs could be getting into our 50-year-old house. Worse, Mr. Biggs could be Mrs. Biggs and ready to give birth to a whole bunch of little Biggses.
Biggs likely was a common roof rat that came in the house when the hot days of summer dried up all his favorite foods outside. The reason my traps weren't catching him was because -- if you are eating, skip this part -- he urinates wherever he has close calls with traps, and a certain smell in the urine tells him not to go back to that spot for a while. Biggs and his buddies can't see well, so they race along the baseboards and smell their way around the house. I was putting traps where Mr. Biggs had no intention of going back to. While I was putting dry dog food in a trap, he'd already moved on to pasta.
Art showed me some pictures of other houses he's worked on, probably just so I wouldn't feel my place was a pigsty. My house is like a sterile operating theater compared with these dumps.
Pumped up with Art's suggestions, we are ready to begin "To Catch a Rat, Episode Three: Good-bye, Mr. Biggs, and Gimme Back My Remote." Stay tuned.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
