Wednesday, March 21, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The Greenhouse
Mouse
I have been at war with
rodents for most of my life.
I am presently doing battle
with a particularly clever
mouse in the greenhouse,
who has, in full disclosure,
managed to outwit my con-
siderable efforts to end his
life early and with extreme
prejudice.
This lifelong, low-inten-
sity fight for dignity against
rodents has resulted in vari-
ous demonstrations of comic
folly, such as the time I cor-
nered a Norwegian rat while
cleaning out our garage in
Solvang, California. I chased
him into a corner in the raf-
ters and zapped him with an
entire can of bear spray, only
to have him leap wildly onto
my chest and knock me off
roommates do.
I was lucky not to have
missed and hit the five-gallon
propane tank he was perched
on when I shot him. It was
truly an indefensible act of
stupidity, but had I missed
the resulting explosion would
have created quite a conun-
drum for an arson investiga-
tor as he struggled to explain
how a buckaroo in the middle
of nowhere blew up his own
bunkhouse. A really good
arson investigator would
solve the riddle, but probably
no one would believe him.
Those were really great
days, by the way.
My first paying job was
trapping gophers. The local
ranchers paid two dollars a
tail back then, and if I didn’t
blow it all in on comic books
and baseball cards I could
save up enough money to
buy a new pair of Levis to
wear to the county fair, which
seemed important at the time.
There is a certain weak-
ness in my anti-rodent philos-
ophy because, as Napoleon
noted, it’s important to win
the moral fight before step-
ping on the battlefield. But
my crusade against rodents
exists in something of an
ethical and ecological gray
area because I know that in
the grander design mice, rats,
moles, gophers, etc., play
an important role in the big
environmental equation.
But I simply cannot
bring myself to any level of
tolerance.
I really do hate mice, in
particular, with an unrea-
sonable passion, but unlike
Vladimir Putin and Bashar
Al-Assad I don’t use poison
on my enemies. If I can’t trap
them, drown them, or stab
them with a ski pole, they get
to savor a temporary victory.
We have employed one
strategic über-weapon,
a vicious bobtailed barn
cat named Nikita who has
unleashed her own Soviet
style of hell in the barn,
where the life expectancy of
a mouse is about the same as
that of a Russian expat living
in London.
In the Marine Corps,
which continues to sacrifice
luxury accommodations in
favor of actual warfighting
skills, my platoon lived in
a World War II-era flattop
barracks. It was routine to
return from the field to find
our wall lockers inundated
with nesting mice. But in the
on-going effort to improvise,
adapt, and overcome, we put
our small-unit tactics to use
by building bucket traps and
killing dozens of them —
and I really do mean dozens
— and then depositing the
corpses in a disgusting pile
in the Lieutenants’ hooch.
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Before
It was an infantile pro-
test really, something like
Ensign Pulver tossing
Captain Morton’s cherished
palm tree over the side of the
USS Reluctant in Thomas
Heggen’s tragically under-
read novel “Mr. Roberts.”
But it made us feel much,
much better.
Historically, inunda-
tions of mice and rats played
havoc with early explorers of
the West too. The American
Fur Company posted Francis
Chardon to Fort Clark on
the upper Missouri in 1834.
By 1836 he was keep-
ing a monthly tally of rats
killed around the post,
and the numbers are truly
staggering.
Chardon’s own fight for
dignity had clearly developed
into a kind of obsession, way
out there on the lonely fron-
tier, which is always a dan-
ger for those of us looking
to avoid the kind of rodent-
driven mental condition that
created Bill Murray’s charac-
ter in “Caddyshack. “
As of this writing I have
PID — military jargon for
positive identification — on
at least one insurgent mouse
in the garage. But the green-
house mouse is my top prior-
ity because I am not a good
loser and also because I
refuse to share my food with
the cheeky bastard.
INC
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
the ladder where I landed,
humiliated, in the pile of dis-
organized detritus below.
That actually happened
twice in the same evening
while my wife was away at
a dinner party. Up the ladder
with a can of bear spray and a
ski-pole — he was in a deep
corner and my plan was to
stun and then stab him. That
was followed by a full-fron-
tal bumrush and then me in a
wildly gyrating and cartoon-
ishly slow fall from the lad-
der into a pile of junk.
The bear spray had no
visible effect on the rat at
all, other than to turn him
bright orange and to fill the
garage with a choking cloud
of capsicum.
Fortunately, I have been
gassed so many times by
various agencies of govern-
ment my tolerance for chemi-
cal distractions is fairly high,
and the only real damage was
to my pride as I tried, later, to
explain my deranged condi-
tion to my wife.
I once shot a packrat
inside my bunkhouse in
Duck Flat, Nevada, in the
middle of the night, with a
flashlight and a lever-action
Winchester .22. He had come
inside, somehow, while I was
out chasing cows around the
rimrock, and found his way
into my breadsafe, which
is not the sort of thing good
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