At the start of this year, I wrote a Driftless Thursday post called “Of Mice and Cats.” In it, I told the story of this not-from-the-country gal’s first encounter with having mice in the house. We’d just moved in. Not long after solving the initial problem, we got shelter cats.

Jenga (a girl) and Twister (a boy) are siblings. In January’s post, I wrote this:

Honestly, the boy could probably only catch a mouse if it ran into his mouth when he yawned, but the girl is a bona fide huntress. 

This assessment was based on the fact that Jenga chases everything and Twister barely leaves the porch when we go outside for supervised play. I’ve come to think of Twister as a lover, not a fighter. However, in the six years since we picked up Jenga and Twister, we never had another mouse in the house.

Until this week, when the fall weather really started settling in.

I owe Twister an apology.

I woke up at 3am to the sound of the cats running around the living room. There was something strange about the noise that made me get up and look. I turned on the living room can lights, and our two cats were smack dab in the middle of the carpet. They both looked up at me with innocent expressions that said “What? Nothing to see here.”

Except Twister had a thin, three-inch tail sticking out of his mouth.

I may not have mentioned this before, but Twister has dental issues, which I’ve come to learn is common in ginger cats. The poor kid has suffered from teeth being resorbed, cracking, falling out, etc. He has eight teeth left at six years old. He still has his canines though and was able to grab the mouse. However, said mouse was still very much alive.

Benny Hill-style hilarity ensued as Twister dropped the mouse and the whole house gave chase. No one could catch the thing and we lost it in my closet.

“I’m going back to bed,” my husband said. “Let’s deal with this in the morning.”

But… it was in MY CLOSET. OFF THE MASTER BEDROOM. WHERE WE SLEEP.

When I was in middle school, I had my own bedroom in the basement. One year, for some reason, ugly black crickets were getting in the basement. The family cat would hunt them and bring them up on my bed as a present. All I could think of was Jenga or Twister doing the same with this mouse.

Luckily, we still had supplies from six years ago, including an ancient jar of sugary peanut butter and some mousetraps. I scrounged up two cardboard boxes and sealed a set mousetrap inside each with a mouse-sized hole for entry. (This setup is to prevent a cat from hurting themselves.) I set one against the wall just inside my closet and the other in the kitchen.

Sure enough, just before 6AM I woke to Jenga hopping off the bed and freezing in point towards the closet.

Twister was already there and trying to get into the box.

I’m sorry I doubted you, buddy.

We’ve since patrolled the outside looking for new entry points. Everything seemed as we left it six years ago, but I did notice a small gap around the dryer’s exit vent, which is quite low to the ground. I don’t know if a mouse could get into the house that way, but I stuffed steel wool into the gap anyway.

The next night, Twister alerted me to scratching sounds in the wall near the door to the garage. We have catch-and-release traps ordered but until then I’ll be using my old supply.

And Twister.

Jenga, meanwhile, has gotten a lecture from my husband about stepping up. She was supposed to be the huntress!