Pondering Mickeycide

I am a heartless woman. Why, just this afternoon I was sitting at the mechanic's hoping he'd suck a mouse into his vaccuum cleaner. (Some friends of mine actually did that with mouse babies once. They didn't recommend the experience. That's why I was hoping it would be the mechanic's vaccuum cleaner, so it would never be mine.)

A mouse seems to be living in my car's heating system, decorating. It's a busy mouse, Pete the mechanic says, one of the Many Very Energetic Mice (who) Jumped Slowly Under Neath Peter when I was trying to remember the planets back in grade school, back when there was still a Pluto.

My car smells like an untended hamster cage and the heater fan sounds like a jet engine eating a streetlight. I've been in twice to have Pete vaccuum out clumps of mouse architecture, and the fan sounds normal for a day or two before it sucks more m.a. into itself. No idea whether the mouse is still making his/her (their? oh lord) way back to the nest, or whether this is all the handiwork of autumn. (Or maybe of summer, since it seems to me the fan was slightly noisier than usual in August.)

I'm going to have to get mousetraps, and place them in the engine, and then hope to hell I remember to take them out before driving away. (What are the chances of that?)

I know, I know, I could get a have-a-heart trap. We've used them in the house, catching the critters and releasing them a fair distance away in the woods. Surely, we thought, they'd be distracted or eaten on their way back. Then Rob started to see a strong family resemblance in the mice we caught, so he painted the current one's tail red. Sure enough, the next mouse in the trap had a red tail.

I suppose we could drive them off in the car and dump them far, far away. (That's assuming I remember to take the trap out of the engine.) But the next question is whether a have-a-heart will even fit in the engine anywhere.

I suspect that Mickeycide might be easier, if less pleasant.

Don't suggest the cat. She's an indoor cat, because of all the coyotes and hawks out there. I know, it's nature's great plan--she rids my car of mice, a coyote exacts revenge. But if we send her to her death, who will scratch the woodwork for us? And it's no less Mickeycide if you let the cat do it. (Sort of like extraditing the mouse to another country for less humane treatment, to introduce a somber note.)

Lessee. Cheese or peanut butter? If you were a mouse, which would you prefer?