The following story took place quite some time ago now, a few years, to be precise. I remember it as though it were yesterday and even now its still funny and I find myself chuckling away softly to myself so as not to disturb my colleagues who already think I am completely off my rocker.
My sisters and my mom and I were happily sitting in the sitting room knitting and listening to story tapes or reading when all of a sudden then was this little scrabbling noise and a medium sized mouse ran out from under one of the couches and across the room. This caused more than a little stir amongst us and before long we had cardboard boxes and all manner of things to try and catch the mouse.
We were trying to keep him from getting into any other part of the house but this attempt failed miserably when he put his little fuzzy head down, squeaked and ran as fast as his little tiny legs could carry him to the piece of cardboard my sister (older) was holding in front of the door. She, in turn, squeaked and jumped out the way and consequently the mouse made a bold and completely unchecked dash into her bedroom.
Now we had a problem because the room was very cluttered, the were loads of places to hide and how on earth were we ever going to get him out of there?? Never fear, we're a family of many bright talents and careful plans...we just trashed the room to find the mouse, and find the mouse we did...eventually. However, before this discovery occurred we did try two other options. We first let both cats into the room. The Siamese took a quick stroll and sniff around the room and assured us there wasn't anything to be afraid of and could he now please go and get something to eat?! Whilst my little tabby nearly had heart failure when said mouse ran right over her and into the cupboard. She was a complete quivering heap of fur and was quite embarrassed when I carried her out the room and discovered that she had had a little accident on the carpet. Poor little thing, she has never liked mice and rats and I don't blame her!
Then we tried the dogs but they weren't interested in the least and were in quite a hurry to get out the room and continue playing on their jungle gym. So much for that idea then. This left us with choice number three which was to trash the room in search of the little tyrant. So we did. And a struggle of life and death ensued.
After an hour we were in the winning position. Our places in the room were as follows: Me on the bed with all the drawers from the chest of drawers and various other articles, younger sister on the floor with a pillowcase in which the unfortunate mouse was captured, and older sister in the windowsill behind the curtain crying that we mustn't 'kill the poor thing!!!'. Uh huh....well, we weren't planning on killing it, we weren't murderers! However, fate took a hand and I slipped on the bed and consequently all the drawers took a tumble to the floor and landed on the pillowcase, on top of the mouse. Well there you go then, we were quite sure he was dead. I mean, what sort of a mouse could survive that load falling on him? What mouse indeed!
We took all the things off the pillowcase, held it up and there was the little blighter still doing a little war dance of disdain because we had failed in all our miserable efforts to kill him, or so he thought. Like I said before, we weren't ever planning to kill him, just get him out the house!
We took him out to one of the fields where we let him go and he hopped off into the long grass, no doubt to go and tell his mouse family what a bunch of suckers we were and also to have a drink to calm his rattled nerves after his close escape.
The end...
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Not quite. A week later he was back...this time with his family!!! It took considerably longer to evict them this time and afterwards my dad put out mouse traps. This seemed to scare them off a bit and kept them all at bay for a few months.
