Page 95 - ECOlogic Book

Mouse Ghosts
(Summer, 1995)

Two mallards watch me from across the pond as I fill the bird feeders.
Normally they’d fly away at the sight of me. But there’s something they
need to know, so they stay.

“Is she violent?” they wonder. “Will she try to harm us or the ducklings if
we nest here? Will she try to get us to conform to some idea she has of
what we should be doing?”

I pretend I don’t see them. Then, when I’m finished, on the way to the pole
barn, I stop and look straight at them. I talk to them mentally. “No, I won’t
harm you. Not intentionally. Not for fun. Trust me.”

In the pole barn, I check the mouse traps, set the day before. I’d waited too
long to do it; by now the mice probably have families. I hadn’t wanted to do
it. I’d thought maybe we could co-habit the pole barn. But they were using
my stuff for their nest: the stuffing from my son’s stored couch, material
from the car-seat of the young man who rents the pole barn for his old car,
my green feather boa – I’d laughed out loud when I’d found what was left of
it festooned full-length from the rafters, stripped of all but a few green
feathers.

I’d ruled out d-con, knowing that it’s a persistent toxin and that the poison
could be passed on to a dog or a cat or an owl considering a mouse-meal. It
was OK in the house, I’d thought, having used it for the mice that kept me
awake last winter in the walls next to my bed. Or was it? Nobody’d told me
about the ghosts of mice that would haunt me in the silence when they were
gone. Mouse ghosts had not been mentioned in the directions on the d-con
box.

In the pole barn, I see one trap, not sprung, but with the bait gone. The
other trap is nowhere to be found among the flotsam and jetsam of my life
piled up beneath the ledge on which I’d carefully placed the trap the day
before. I imagine the horrific scene: a mouse trap catapulting through the
air by the force of the snap, with the hapless mouse, its back broken,
gasping out its last pitiful cries as it sails through the air. How far might it
have flown? Where could it have landed? Here, in my old straw gardening
hat? There, on the lamp with the dented shade? Over here, amid the
scrambled tubes of oil paints and dried brushes? There, under the dish
drainer? Could it have flown that far?

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