While we were on holiday recently, our home became the venue for an unsanctioned party. It probably started with one or two acquaintances, a few nibbles. But word got around, as it does. The first we knew of the ensuing orgy was the smell in the kitchen, the ureic perma-damp stink I associate with concrete-floored public toilets.
Our house is highly permeable to small mammals. On moving in we found dozens of bank vole skeletons in the loft. Two shrews once drowned in a nappy bucket and another morning we found a baby rabbit camped under a bookcase. Sometimes bats appear in the kitchen.
But the usual visitors, as in this case, are wood mice. Three weeks later, we’re already up to 14 evictions, using humane Longworth traps. Today’s must, surely, be one of the last.
Photograph: CreativeNature_nl/Getty/iStockphoto
We release wood mice a long way away, as they are known to home over half a mile. Neighbourly etiquette precludes dumping them near another house, and compassion compels me to avoid roads or ecologically impoverished areas. So, on this morning’s damp dog walk, I’m looking for a place that feels … wood mousy.
A thicket of hawthorn with low-swooping branches and a prodigious crop of scarlet fruit fits the bill, and while the dog pursues important smells further along the track I quickly crouch and dismantle the trap.
The inmate retreats to the bottom of the box, then turns to face the opening, his whiskers vibrating to the thrill of fresh air. He’s clean, as healthy ones always are. His coat is nutmeggy on the back, old gold on the flanks, smoked white on the chest. His hind feet are huge, like those of a tiny kangaroo. Elderberry eyes reflect my silhouette against the sky and for a moment we are individually present to one another.
Then he breaks, and he’s too fast. The streak he becomes, while unambiguously alive, is somehow generic. Time for me is not what it is for him. I hear three bounds land in the mulch of last year’s leaves and in my mind’s eye I see him pause, waiting for me to leave before fast tracking on with his life.
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