GREEN KILLER (WANNABE) (TOM BAY)
I caught another one. Damn it! I knew I did before I even looked. The smell stings unmistakably. It’s so pungent it’s like prickle fuzzies in my sinuses. That’s why I don’t like using DeCon, because you can smell the decomposing little carcasses through the wall. If I’m forced to kill a mouse—because it comes into my home and shits everywhere—I want to know where the body is and be able to get rid of it easily. And, I also want to be humane. There’s no need to make mice suffer to death. So, I go with the trusted snap trap.
It starts with a simple plank of pine, about the size of a playing card. A wound spring is attached to the wood, and a thick metal wire shaped like a rectangular clamp—call it the hammer—is attached to the spring. A straight, metal hold-down bar keeps the spring-loaded hammer down in its open position, when it’s hooked under a tiny piece of metal called the catch. I pack cheese around the catch. When the mouse bumps the ball of cheese, with the catch in the middle, the hammer snaps closed in thirty-eight thousandths of a second with enough force to crush the rodent’s spine and ribs.
Most of the time, I find the little nibbler clipped right behind its head, around the shoulder-blade area, and splayed flat on its belly. The mouse’s size determines how close it needs to get to the catch to eat the bait. The smaller mice get clipped in the middle of their backs. The aftermath of the catch isn’t that gruesome. There’s no blood. No splatter of any fluid. It doesn’t take long for the body to stiffen up, either, so it don’t flop around when I pick up the trap. I buy the Victor’s traps; two for $1.79 at the hardware store. Not very expensive at face value. But, once the temperature drops below freezing at night, I start catching a mouse every day. Two bucks isn’t much, but it adds up.
The traps are so clean after the kills that I feel wasteful throwing them out. So, I look into getting the dead mouse out to reuse the trap. I always use gloves when handling a caught mouse, even though I only touch the trap, just to put a barrier between me and any diseases that might transfer from the body. For my first attempt, I pry open the stiff trap and discover that the mouse is stuck to the hammer! The hammer drove itself so severely into the critter’s flesh and bones that the body is stuck onto it. The metal bites through the gloves and in to my fingers the longer I hold it open, so I put the trapped dead mouse down to think about what to do. For my second attempt, I open the trap and shake it vigorously in order to dislodge the carcass. But, it holds fast. There is no third attempt. I just throw it out. The ninety cents I’ll spend replacing it is totally worth not having to peel dead, mutilated mouse remains off a spring-loaded wire clamp. I mean, what if I pull the body apart? That’s a gross mess I’ll have to afford not to deal with.