So, we have a mouse (or mice?) in the house. It is annoying, because it leaves poop on our kitchen counter; click on the picture at the right if you want to see them. It also likes to eat Emily’s bananas (driving her bananas in the process). We’ve even seen it scurry up the wall a time or two in the late evenings, so I figured I’d pop into town and get a trap. This proved difficult for several reasons, the first of which is that “mouse” in the local dialect is tx’ow, which is kindof hard to pronounce correctly. Secondly, they do not have mouse traps as we know them in Guatemala. I went to three different hardware stores, and they all tried to sell me this thing that cost 80q and was essentially a beaver trap- you know, with the huge metal spring you step on to open it, and you set it with a stick. I didn’t buy one, not just because such a trap would cut the mouse clean in half and spray my walls with entrails, but also because it would take an animal the size of a beaver to step on the trigger hard enough to set it off.

In the end, I settled for poison. It looks like red gerbil food, so i left some on the kitchen table. No luck; the mouse still left some poop for me the next morning, but didn’t take any poison in trade. Since they like the bananas so much, the next night I pushed the tiny red nuggets of death into an overripe bannana, left it on the table, and waited. The next day they were all gobbled up.

Thinking my work done, i continued life as usual. A few days later while Emily was doing the dishes, Mr. Mouse fell through a hole in the ceiling and landed >plop< right in front of her, then scurried away. There was screaming, of course. He has either a GREAT constitution or some siblings. So, i invented a trap of my own. The design is a hybrid of the figure-4 survival trap my dad taught me in Boy Scouts, and a clever snare I was shown by a native in the Iguazu jungle in South America last year. So far, all my trap has done is cause a great stir among the local kids… still no mouse.