...And Then There Were Two

Just after the Memorial Day Weekend I spied a small mouse who had taken up residence inside the cabin, or who was at least "just visiting."

I checked with my dog, Vinko, and we both decided that small as it was, there just wasn't room here for a third resident. Although, unlike lizards, Vinko ignored it, I thought it best not to tempt fate and bought a trap to capture the rodent.

I've killed countless mice and rats during my life, easily over a hundred all told, and even shot one with a .22 inside a place I was renting, but the desert is a harsh enough environment without me adding to some poor creature's struggles. This time, I got one of those "catch 'em live" traps, baited it with peanut butter instead of their recommended (and pricey) special attraction formula stuff, and spent the next few days passively hunting.

It worked.

Once I confirmed that I had, in fact, a mouse stuck inside the black plastic box, I had to decide where to release it. When I lived in Los Angeles, I'd occasionally catch a live mouse and there it was an easy decision: near that restaurant I didn't much care for.

Up here, however, there was no such place nearby.

The easiest thing to do, of course, is to just take it a ways off in any direction and let it go, so I ruled that out immediately. With my luck, I figured it would find it's way back here and I wanted none of that, but there honestly isn't much nearby except desert and homes.

I don't know any of my neighbors well enough to dislike them enough to foist a plague of varmints upon them and I rather like the post office and the service it provides, but, fortunately for me, there is a third option.

World renowned for its psychic and spiritual cleansing and healing powers, the Integratron would obviously make a fine home for a mouse. I have no idea if they have any food there, but it's surrounded with the same desert plants that surround everything else up here, and any desert mouse who's worthy of the name should be able to find something to its liking around the Integratron itself or even in the adjacent buildings.

So, about a week ago, I set it off to live at the Integratron.

It didn't take me long, maybe even during the drive home, for a couple things to occur to me. The first, and most immediate, is that I'd set a creature to live on its own in an unknown place. Even if it could find or make a home and find food, I'd doomed it to a sad, stressful. and lonely existence. Even if it could survive in the shadow of the mighty Integratron or could find a way inside, it would die lonely and unloved, its life a mockery of all that we hold valuable.

The good news is, I was also sure that I had not, in fact, caught the only existing mouse in the cabin. I've never heard of them living a solitary existence and, if there's one mouse, there's gotta be more. I hoped to capture another one and let it loose, also near the Integratron, so the two could frolic, swap tales and tasty seeds, and maybe even set up home and flourish and thrive in the natural vortex of cosmic energy.

If they were lucky, I'd even get one of each gender so they could mate and raise a family of Integramice.

And, yesterday, I trapped a second one, and after taking it to my now designated mouse freedom zone, it scurried off into the same bush where I'd freed the first one. Maybe they'll meet up, maybe they won't. All I can do is my part.

And worry about where the hell they're going to find water.