In This Case, My Enemy is a Varmint.

When I was a little kid, my favorite animal was the mouse. I identified with their shy and secret ways. Their tiny pink hands and soft furry bodies were the embodiment of Cute. I had a stack of children's fiction about mice, and a sizeable collection of mouse toys and figurines. I even had a file of cute mouse pictures that my mom and I had cut out of magazines and greeting cards.

I remember an exhibit at the Honolulu Zoo that made a big impression on me: it was a glass-walled mouse burrow, and you could see them running from chamber to chamber, this one full of food, that one full of sleepy mouse babies. I could have watched it all day. My parents' house, still fairly new at the time, was free of any kind of pest, so I didn't have a lot of contact with real-life mice.

All of which makes the following so excruciatingly ironic:

I was at least never going to resort to sticky mousetraps. A traditional snap-trap does the job quickly, and is also so incredibly cheap that there's no shame in throwing it away after one use. But when, night after night, you put out the snap-traps and find them unsprung but licked clean the next morning... well, you might start to wonder who's baiting whom. And when you find poop in your dish cupboard, you might even take it as a declaration of war.

Believe me, if negotiation was an option, I'd negotiate. But my enemy is a varmint, and a varmint will never quit. Ever. So I've spent a lot of time in the last several days studying their ways, thinking about their habits, trying to figure out what they can and can't, will and won't do. For example, they tend not to crawl up flat vertical surfaces, but they will readily climb any sort of cord or string. They got to the dish cupboard by way of a long phone cord, which I now realize was like a little mouse-sized ladder with a sign saying "Fun Times This Way!"

But much of mouse behavior remains a mystery to me. I mean, what's the deal with my roommate/renter's room? There's no food in there, but for some reason it's their favorite hangout. We were both horrified to discover the quantities of mouse poop between her bed and the wall. (Bad, bad landlady!) She has been surprisingly stoic about all of this, but she's sleeping on the spare mattress in my room (on the second floor, where there's still no sign of mice) until I can assure her that she will have no more rodent visitors.

And yes, I am now using sticky traps, which are awful and inhumane and leave you to finish the job yourself, and I will spare you the details of that horror. But until the problem of mouse access has been resolved, they seem to be my best option. Live traps are impractical; wild mammals can find their way home over ridiculously long distances, and I'm not driving across town every day to release the night's catch in someone else's yard. Poison's no good; then you've got tiny corpses all over, and you have to go find them to get rid of the smell.

I'm kind of surprised at the number of people who have suggested (or even offered) a cat as a solution. While I like most cats, they bring their own complications, and I have several very good reasons for not wanting to live with one. The bottom line, though, is that a cat is not a solution to the mouse problem, any more than traps are. It is a mouse mitigating device, an abatement factor, if you will. Even if the cat kills all the mice on my entire property, there will always be more mice. The world has an effectively infinite supply of mice. Cats are, in fact, probably the reason that this house is still so mouse-permeable: they've dealt with the symptoms and allowed their owners to ignore the root of the problem.

The root of the problem, of course, is that mice can get inside at all. I live in a modern house. I do not have a thatched roof or log walls. Therefore, the number of entry points into my house is finite. And while sealing up the outside of my house may not be possible without re-siding, the number of entry points to the interior of my house is actually quite limited. When these are effectively sealed, then the mouse problem will be solved.

Mice can theoretically pass into the interior of my house through: a) that hole in the laundry room drywall where the fusebox used to be; b) gaps in the construction of the closets; c) possibly the dryer vent; d) heating vents. All of these entry points can be mouseproofed. Unfortunately, last night I observed a mouse using option (d), which is by far the most daunting to fix. I am seriously daunted every time I think about it.

My heating ducts run through a crawlspace below the house which teems with rodent and arachnid life, and which for some reason is partly covered with that really jaggedy porous red lava rock that you see in cheap landscaping. I look at it and my knees twitch reflexively. I can't even see half of the crawlspace from my small cellar area because of how the ducts are placed; who knows what marvels await me in that sunless realm. The ducts themselves are sloppily installed and draped half-heartedly with random scraps of insulation, which is surely the ancestral home of generations of rodents. Oh, and did I mention the asbestos? Thanks, Previous Residents.

But the ducts have to be sealed. Even if I could keep the mice from entering the part of the house I live in through the vents, the ducts would still be supplied daily with mouse poop and pee, which is subsequently atomized and blown through the house by my fancy high-efficiency furnace. That's not okay. Besides, I dropped a large chunk of cash on that furnace several years ago, and here I am wasting it on a duct system that's full of holes and barely insulated. Once I set things to rights down there, I expect that the savings on my heating bill next winter will more than pay for my time, not to mention the money I'll save on medical bills by not getting a hantavirus.

Some of my readers are now asking, "Surely you're not going to take this project on yourself, Lindsey?" But here's the thing: even if I had money to throw at it, I wouldn't trust any contractor I could afford to do it right. And here's the other thing: this is not a job for a Big Strong Man(tm). This is a job for a person who is good at getting into very small places, and I happen to be a lot better at that than the average adult.

But it will be a convoluted, multi-day project, and I am not embarking on it today, or even this week. I am preparing a list of supplies and safety equipment that I'll need. I am collecting information on duct repair (which is surprisingly hard to come by; the internet mostly wants me to call a Qualified Professional). I am sketching diagrams and thinking through strategies, and I am soliciting advice. And in the meantime I'm covering my heating vents with wire mesh, so my roommate can sleep in her own bed again.

I really hope it works.