It may be the “Year of the Dragon” in China, but 2024 is the “Year of the Mouse” at the Peyton House. It seems we have been inundated with mice. I blame our youngest cat. She had something in her mouth and when I went to look, she dropped it and a mouse took off into the pantry and was gone. We did subsequently catch the little rat with a trap. I first put peanut butter on the trap because when I was working for Chadron State College’s mammalogist we used peanut butter to catch all kinds of rodents. Cindy told me to use cheese, but I told her that only works in cartoons.

After a week of no luck, I put a piece of cheese on the trap and that night caught the little bugger…the little female bugger! Yep, you guessed it, we didn’t get them all.

The mouse I’m talking about is a house mouse, scientific name Mus musculus. The house mouse is one of those creatures that flourish around humans. In the field book I keep close by the desk it notes that the house mouse “…eats anything edible…breeds year round” and lives “wherever there are concentrations of people.”

However, this mouse is not native to Nebraska.

It is not native to the United States, or in fact, to the entire Western Hemisphere. The house mouse, like the Norway rat and black rat, came to the New World from Europe; however, none of the three originated there either. All three are native to Asia with the Norway rat (obviously misnamed) coming from China and Mongolia, the black rat coming from tropical southeast Asia, and the house mouse coming from India. All were byproducts of the spice trade that flourished after Vasco da Gama discovered a shipping route around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa to the Far East.

All three “rats” are well adapted to being around humans and they made their way throughout the rest of the world as stowaways on ships. In fact, the rats (and I suspect mice) were so thick on the Mayflower that the other Pilgrims would smear a naked, mentally handicapped man with molasses and lock him in the storage hole each night so that the infestation of the rodents would be drawn to him and leave the other passengers alone so they could sleep. In his Journal, William Bradford wrote: “With but a knife duller than his wits would the idiot set himself against toothe and claw in the lightless hold,” The man didn’t like it but they would bodily throw him in each night anyway.

Bradford drew a sketch in his Journal of a cross-eyed man in a dunce cap holding up two dead rats by their tails. I don’t think that Bradford was a very nice man!

Mice and rats are responsible for literally millions of dollars in damage each and every year, and they can be the carriers of a variety of diseases, the most famous being the bubonic plague (which is actually carried by a flea common to rodents of all kinds).

These past few weeks I’ve killed three mice in the house by slapping them with my hand or stomping on them but it all came to a “head” when I heard Cindy yell as she was turning off the kitchen light for the night. A mouse was there on the counter. We tried to catch it but the darn thing escaped down the burner of the stove! Out came the traps again, baited with cheese this time, because I do learn from my mistakes. This morning I was gratified to find a small mouse killed by the trap. Was it the “stove mouse”? I don’t know so the traps will be reset tonight and put back out because I’m not getting naked and covering myself with molasses!