Mouse in the Night

When it's warm out, but not hot enough to run the airconditioner, we keep our window in our bedroom open at bit during the night. Our window's screen is detached at the bottom corner and the cats have figured that out, so they can come and go as they please.

I was woken up at 1am to one of the cats 'playing' with a mouse she had brought in. She had dropped it and it had gone behind the dresserdrawer. The cat would wait at one side. When the mouse came along the wall, she would swat it and then run, claws tearing the carpet, to the other side where she would wait. It was the claws-on-carpet that woke me up.

I grabbed a shoebox. Tugged, scotted, pushed, heaved the dresserdrawer out a bit from the wall (solid wood, stuffed with clothes, is very heavy to move, esspecially in the middle of the night.) The cat was still swatting at the mouse, so I had to "tear from one side to the other" with the cat a few times before catching the terrified mouse. I took it out back and let it go on the deck. (Jeremy slept through all this.)

I climbed back into bed. The cat went back out the window. After about 15 minutes, I was just drifting back to sleep, when the cat jumped back in the window. Guess what?! She took the mouse right back over to the dresserdrawer, which I had shoved back into place, and released it for another rousing game of "swat the mouse" aka "tear up the carpet".

Back out of bed. Got the shoebox again. Pulled the dresserdrawer back out from the wall - again. Chased the little mouse and caught it - again. This time I flung it off the backdeck (our deck is on the second story, so the mouse went sooring.) Poor little mouse probably didn't survive the fall, though he may have welcomed an end to the torture. I was confident that even if the mouse did survive the fall, the cat would spend the rest of the night trying to locate him. Back to bed. (Jeremy was still asleep - hadn't even shifted positions.)

Next morning, I said, synical that Jeremy was really sleeping through all this, "thanks for helping with the mouse." He said "what mouse." He really had slept through it and had no idea what happened. But he did find it rather hilarious though.