She Shoots, She SCORES!

So there I was, minding my own business, putting away clean laundry and Fox is staring at a spot underneath my dresser. The last time this happened, it was nothing - she'd been chasing dust bunnies or ghosts or something. But this time, instead of looking up at me guiltily and skulking off, she went back to paying rapt attention to the space beneath my dresser. I went and fetched a flashlight.

There was a mouse under my dresser. Huge ears, long tail, tiny little body. With the aid of the flashlight, Fox was able to zero in on the critter, chasing it off to a corner behind a bookcase. I'd never be able to move all the stuff off the bookcase and move the bookcase to get at the mouse. Luckily, we have a long unwound wire coathanger. Aoibheall is always saying how a Mexican can get anything done with a coathanger. I pretended to be Mexican and poked at the mouse, trying to get it to come back over under the dresser, which is an easer space to get at.

Instead, the mouse leapt up onto the bottom shelf, on top of some printer paper. It looked at me. Fox, two inches away from it, stared at it and sniffed. "Well, get it!" I urged. Fox did nothing. The mouse ducked back under the bookcase. Oswald came in to see what we were up to. He saw the mouse, saw Fox, saw me, and then wandered off. "Useless creatures!" I said.

Back to the wire. I did get the mouse to come back to the dresser. Fox shot after it, and then turned back to the bookcase. I looked around. There was no mouse under the dresser...oh wait, ew, there was a dead one that looked like it'd been mauled. But the living and leaping one was nowhere to be seen. Not under the dresser and not under the bookcase. I looked into the bathroom and turned on the light. There, on the tiles in front of the vanity, was the mouse. It darted behind the toilet.

This is a much better (or worse, for the mouse) arena. There are few crevices into which the mouse could hide, and all of them are accessible to the determined housecat. If only we had a determined housecat. Fox was not interested in pinning down the mouse in the bathroom.

I came out to the kitchen and asked Aoibheall if she thought I should just kill the critter or if I should give the doggies a chance. I was a little doubtful, but I figured I could get the mouse into the bathtub and close the shower doors and it'd be a tidy little arena. Aoibheall agreed. I went back into the bathroom and Fox had cornered the mouse in my shower caddy.

I opened the shower doors and Fox bolted -- I suppose she feared a bath. I fished some bath toys out of the tub and closed the stopper. Then I came back out to get the dogs. "Wake up doggies! Who wants to play? Huh? Come on, let's go get a critter! Who're my badass bitches?" A bit of stretching and they had their game faces on.

I carried them in to the bathroom, opened the shower door, and put the dogs in. Esme seemed more interested in the fact that she was on the other side of a glass wall from me, but Dagmar went straight for the mouse. She sniffed at it, it scurried a little, so she jumped on it, bit it, and went into the whole terrier shake-the-rat routine. Lots of praise. "Oh yes! Good girl Dagmar! Yes!" Esme looked at the mouse, looked at me, and put her paws up on the doors. Clearly, she had no interest in this critter.

Dagmar did her duty and killed the mouse. Those stuffed toy rats from IKEA seem to have been a great training aid. Time to get more of those, man!

Vermin: 2
Dogs: 2