Retrospective: Pippin and the Great Mouse Invasion

Before I moved out into the house I live in now, I lived in my parents' house in the basement room. Pippin lived there too, for what was actually the larger portion of his life, although it seems like he lived for the longer part of it here in my house with just me.

One year when Pippin was a fairly young cat, but still an adult--so maybe five or six or seven years old, we had a mouse incursion. Now I don't have any pictures of this, so I will be scattering random Pippin pictures through the post just because I want to.

May 2006: Pippin's goofy when he sleeps

The Mouse Invasion started out very small. Literally. Mom came into the den one day while I was at work, and saw what she thought was a kitty toy on the floor. You know those tiny furred mice that you can get in packs of twenty at the petstore? They look very realistic, like baby mice. Mom thought I'd gotten Pippin one of those. She was going to pick it up and give it to him, or toss it downstairs to the basement where it would eventually get into my room with other kitty toys ... but the closer she got to it, the more she doubted it was just a kitty toy. It looked far too realistic.

Closer, and she realized with a jump that it looked realistic because it was really and truly a baby mouse! EEK! But it was dead. Completely unharmed. No marks, not even ruffled hair. But the baby mouse wasn't alive. This was strange. Our previous kitties, when they played with mice, there was definite evidence on the mouse that it had been played with. If Pippin was responsible for this mouse being dead, how in the world had he done it without visibly harming the mouse? We were most puzzled.

Dec 2007: Getting settled in his hammock
takes some doing, considering the relative
sizes (it's theoretically too small but
since when did cats pay attention to physics?)

Well, my mom got an old newspaper to use to scoop the baby mouse up and toss it out into the backyard to join the circle of life, so to speak. She didn't realize that Pippin was watching her. At least, that's what we figure happened.

Because that's the only thing that makes sense out of what happened with the second and third mouse that year.

The second mouse: I was sitting at my computer desk in my room downstairs. It was a big room, and so had one half as my "bedroom" and the other half as my "everything else" room (I used the communal kitchen and bathrooms that were upstairs. Do you know how challenging it is to have to climb stairs in the middle of the night when you have to use the bathroom but you're still half asleep? Anyway, back to the story).

Pippin comes in and wants to show me something. He trills and purls at me, little funny noises that Maine Coons use to talk to their people. Doesn't want petted (although the offer is accepted briefly). Finally I got up and told him to show me what he wanted. He walked out into the basement past his litterbox (okay, that's clean then) and past his food and water (so he doesn't need more of either). He walked all the way to the base of the stairs where the washer and dryer stood on either side of the corner the stairs start from. Next to the dryer is a tall endtable that has a lower level that you could put like a plant or something on it. It's empty.

My cat who really wasn't a dog, swear it, does everything but point at the end table, at the base of it. He was so insistent that I got down on my hands and knees and peered under it. I mean, normally he retrieves his own kitty toys after he "puts them away" under furniture, so I wasn't used to him asking me to look under things for him.

And there I found the second mouse. This time it was a grownup mouse, a grey oblong field mouse. Once again, there was not a mark on it, but it was not alive. Okay, this is strange. The first one was a baby and babies can have birth defects and stuff like that where, while it would be unusual for one to drop dead on its way across the den floor, it wasn't out of the question. And Pippin had been nowhere to be seen.

But this mouse ... Pippin obviously had something to do with it, otherwise how would he know where it was? And why show it to me? Ah, but think. If he saw Mom take the baby mouse outside, and then this one shows up inside--obviously "outside" is a magical place. His toy ran down and wouldn't go anymore. Mom takes it outside, and then it shows up back inside, ready to play again.

Still ... how is he making them dead? The second mouse, just like the first, doesn't look played with. At least, not by a cat. So I got myself rolled up newspaper to scoop the mouse up with and took it outside. Pippin followed at my heels, stopping at the door and watching me take the mouse out, with apparent approval. So, obviously I was doing what I was supposed to do with it.

January 2008: Pippin loved that box.
Again, ignoring the laws of physics that says
he was too big for it.

The third mouse: Pippin had obviously decided that when these fun toys run down, it is our job to take them outside and repair them. When he found and played with a third mouse, I must not have been receptive to his entreaties to follow him to it. (I never would have found the other one if he hadn't showed me). So he took matters into his own paws and put the mouse where we would have to find it.

Only, um, we didn't. You see, I did my own laundry. My parents' laundry baskets were in the upstairs bathroom closet, whose door was often left open. The white laundry basket (a tall trash can with a lid) usually had the lid in the "up" position since it made life easier all around (you have white laundry every day, but not always do you have dark laundry). Mom, who is a routine fanatic just like me, did the white laundry every monday. 

From what we can figure out, Pippin put the mouse in the white laundry sometime Sunday night. I remembered smelling something off in the bathroom on Sunday, but I just figured it was, well, what normally causes a bathroom to smell bad. Pippin knew Mom always emptied the laundry on Monday morning. He just didn't realize that she emptied it by turning it upside down over the top-loading laundry machine. She didn't empty it by looking and reaching in it.

(The position of the shelving, the laundry lid, and the laundry basket made it highly unlikely the mouse simply fell in. As unlikely as it seems, Pippin must have put it in the basket. He was certainly tall enough to stand on his back legs and drop it in.)

When I got home from work that Monday, I was greeted by a highly indignant mother, who said "Do you know what your cat did?!" Um, no, what? "I washed a mouse!"

You what?! 

"I WASHED a mouse! In the laundry!"

Me: EEWWW!

Her: Precisely!

The mouse, luckily for the ew factor, didn't like, um, come apart in the washing machine. It just lost all its hair. Mom washed the laundry load twice without the mouse afterwards! Not that I blamed her for the "excess" washing. I might have run it through the laundry three times. With bleach.

July 2008: See, he does fit quite nicely

The last mouse was different. First, this is the mouse where we found out how Pippin was killing them. Second, this was not a field mouse, but a different mouse species. And third, this time the mouse survived.

I'm downstairs at the computer again. Being boring. Mom and Daddy are upstairs in the living room, reading and watching tv with headphones (respectively). Also being boring. So, to Pippin, two boring people were better than one boring person, so he was upstairs playing. This is where he found the last mouse. 

As he was a rather social cat (when he was completely at home and comfortable) he wanted to play with his toy in the living room with Mom and Daddy, so he picked it up by the nape of the neck, walked into the living room from the den, put the mouse down and starting rolling it back and forth between his paws.

Mom was curious as to which toy he had; got close enough to see, and then (so she tells me) she did a perfect imitation of the stereotypical farmer's wife where she jumped onto the coffee table and screeched for Daddy to kill it, kill it! (I imagine there was not much actual volume involved in the screech, or high-pitch in the voice, as that is not my mother's way, but let's not spoil the fun now). Daddy rolls up a newspaper and grimly goes about his duty.

Pippin is astonished and taken aback. If you people don't appreciate me, I will take my toy downstairs and play with it there! So he picks up his mouse by the neck again and trots downstairs where he sets up camp right outside my (open) door and starts rolling the mouse back and forth between his paws again.

The first I know of any of this is when I hear Daddy in the hallway, saying "Josie come get your cat!" (Notice how he was always "your cat" when things went south, but just Pippin otherwise! It was like having a child!) I came out of my room, nearly tripped over Pippin because I hadn't expected him to be right there and managed to regain my balance with the aid of the door frame.

"What's he done now?" I asked, not seeing the mouse as it was under Pippin's head where his paws were, and I was standing almost on top of him. (Pippin never even bothered to notice I nearly tripped over him. He trusted me not to, and that was that as far as he was concerned.)

Daddy explained the situation. I needed to get Pippin so he could get the mouse. 

This was complicated by the garage door which was right next to the whole setup in the hallway. The gloves that would fit Daddy were out in the garage, but if he went out to get the gloves, the mouse might take the opportunity to escape the lethal cat and run into the garage, and then we'd never find it. And mice, although I do think they are cute, are also deadly to humans in that they chew wires in the walls, cause shorts, which then cause house fires. So, no mouse colonies in my house thank you very much.

Mom happened to have left some small gloves in the basement. I can fit into her gloves but Daddy never could in a million years. Unlike cats, we have to obey physics, and his hands are too big for her gloves. So I said I'd get the mouse if he tossed the gloves to me. 

I caught the gloves (much to my surprise), knelt down next to Pippin, and told him, "Okay, playtime's over, I need the mouse now."

Would you believe he backed right off? I was amazed even as I was mostly focused on catching the mouse. I figured by this time the mouse was going to be bloody and probably not very intact, and I was cringing inside at the thought of touching it, even with gloves on.

The mouse was perfectly unharmed. I also think it was used to people, because it wasn't a field mouse. It was fat and round and brown, with ears that were like circles pinched on one side to fit into the head. It had a little tail and didn't try to get away from me at all. 

And it wasn't the least bit alarmed at having been played with by a cat for the last half hour, or being carried around by one. It sat in my fist and washed its ears and looked around with bright black button eyes. I was trying not to harm it any further, and if it had tried to get away from me, it would have succeeded, because I wasn't holding it at all tightly.

Well, now what? I wasn't about to kill it. But I thought that no matter how unfazed it seemed, it probably wouldn't come back into the house if I took it outside, not after knowing that there was a playful cat inside the house.

So I took it upstairs and out the back door. Pippin followed as far as the door and watched with interest. I put the mouse down, accidentally on my shoe instead of the ground because it clung to my glove and didn't want to be put down. And then I had to urge it gently off my shoe, because it didn't want to leave. But it didn't act like it was in shock or anything.

Later it finally occurred to me that it was probably someone's pet mouse and had grown up with a cat. I wished I would have kept it, gotten a rodent house with a ball like you get for gerbils or hamsters. It was such an adorable mouse, and I don't think it was used to surviving in the wild, so it probably was lunch for something out there very quickly. The poor thing seemed to be very used to people, and cats, and wasn't inclined to run away from Pippin.

Because you see, that's how Pippin killed the previous mice. He wasn't harming them directly. When he batted them between his paws, it was very gentle and he didn't have his claws out at all. He just rolled the mouse back and forth like a toy ball. The mice kept running away from him and he'd retrieve them, and finally they just ran themselves to death. This mouse survived because it didn't run away from him, just let him roll it around. I do wish I'd kept it!

My mother is probably quietly grateful that I didn't.

Dec 2008: Inquisitive Pippin