Ratones

Last night we encountered one of the small beady-eyed friends that has been nibbling my batatas – sweet potatoes - and peanut bars. These are not mean, Nueva York, trash eating street rats. These are wholesome corn fed country rats, gray and quite fluffy. Nonetheless they carry diseases and eat my stuff, I suppose, regardless of cuteness. These rats are a difficult thing for me to deal with. I do not like to kill things, or see things die generally, and especially not mammals in a cruel manner. My brother and best friend, generally feels similar (the only one in my community who doesn’t kill insects on sight) except when you’re talking about rats and praying mantises, I have no idea what anyone could have against a praying mantis, but whatever. So he was on a mission to kill this rat. I was thinking to myself, “Really? This rat is running around in the rafters and he’s going to chase it around the house? What a waste of time, you don’t catch rats. You have to set traps. Never in a million years could I catch a rat running after it.” I told him I didn’t want any part of the rat hunt, both because I didn’t want to kill it and because I didn’t think there was any way it was going to work. He proceeded by telling me that if I was really serious about not killing it than he would leave it, but did I think that this rat was a pet? Had I heard of Leptospirosis? Did I know that with Leptospirosis we were talking about a month in the hospital? “Do you want to get sick? Huh?” I reply in a small squeaky voice, trying to get out of rat killing duty, “…no…” “Okay,” he said, “Grab that mop.” So I tapped the side of the oven a couple times before my allergy to god-knows-what that I’ve been battling with lately flared up. The rat popped out of the oven and I ran for the pantry. He tells the story as between fits of broom handle swinging he looks back, expecting his fearless partner standing strong and angry with mop handle… seeing nobody he pauses to hear uncontrollable sneezing coming from inside the pantry. From the pantry, in between my fits of uncontrollable sneezing I heard broom handle swinging and dishes flying. The chase continued up a wall. And this is where I poked my beady eyes out of the pantry to see what was going on. The cement walls in my house don’t touch the tin roof so he proceeded to scale one and perch himself atop it. Out of nowhere the campo warrior in the war on disease grabbed a piece of loose concrete and drew it back behind his shoulder. Two seconds later the rat appeared atop another wall across the house and he threw the concrete, connecting with amazing accuracy, and falling the rat into an adjacent bedroom. “It’s still alive!” he said, “But not that alive! Call the cats!” he yelled to me. I took a couple steps to the back door and called, instead of kitty kitty kitty, “Meeshee, meeshee, meeshee.” One of the three resident mini panthers comes, a little skeptical about all the racket so late in the evening, is perfectly elated by the juicy find! And in the wake of the tragic death of this relatively small mammal, I couldn’t help but reflect on the impressive hunting skills of this young man, crouched atop a concrete wall with a broom handle in one hand and a chunk of concrete in the other. Mission impossible accomplished. We’ll leave the other rat to my roommate.