The Battle is Joined

This is truly heart-breaking. Yes, we find it extremely difficult. How to explain to yourself the need to eradicate something living from your environment? It just cannot be right. It is a minor tragedy that we have come to this pass. Something that nature has pressed upon us. Unhappily we discuss our options. But there really are none, save to opt for the status quo.

And is that a truly agreeable option? Things do have a way of getting out of hand. Ignore pressing matters for long enough and they become ever more difficult to deal with. Humankind is not really meant to share its intimate living quarters with other denizens of this earth. Nevertheless, other creatures do venture into our close sphere in their innocent search for survival.

We manipulate our surroundings in a way not given to other creatures. We manufacture for ourselves artificial environments which support and enclose and protect us from the elements. Far more difficult for other mammals to achieve anything remotely similar in their self-defence. They creep unbidden, unwanted into ours.

For some of these creatures we harbour ill will and feel no compunction in eradicating them. Take, for example, those primitive creatures that haunt urban living spaces, like cockroaches and rats. Take them do, for we don't want them. We've had our own experiences with them, living in climates where both commonly invade homes.

On the other hand, take mice, sweet innocent-appearing, tiny bits of fluff with large, appealing eyes. Who could harbour ill feelings toward these tender creatures? We love to see them in their natural surroundings. Not so crazy about spotting them where they clearly don't belong, according to our interpretation of the fitness of things.

So here we are, what a dilemma. Setting heartless traps of wood and wire. Small enticing blots of peanut butter will do it. And they're there, up there in the attic for we can see a series of tunnels running about here and there through the fibreglass insulation. So, one trap here and another there, several feet distant of one another.

We knew they were there, heard them scrabbling and scraping and scribbling and scratching about overhead. Right over the bath in our bathroom. Directly over our bed in our bedroom. Unsettling. Don't know what's more upsetting, the thought that they're there and the spores from their feces are circulating in the air we breathe, or the fact that we've got to do something about them.

This morning. The ladder put in place. A look about up there. The retrieval of one still, tiny body. Bagged, it's tormentingly sad. The other trap nowhere to be seen.