The Great Mouse Adventure.

12-14-08

There were mice in my room. I cannot be sure how many lived there at any given time, nor can I be particularly sure where they lived within my abode at any particular moment, but I knew they were there. On a few occasions I heard the pitter patter of little feet scrambling through the boards that line my room near the roof. On considerably more occasions, I swept up a few gifts that they had left me in various nooks and corners of my room. But on the most memorable occasion, I returned from a compulsory visit to the big town of Battambang and began to put some clothes away when one brave little mouse jumped from my clothes back onto the wall and scurried away. It was this occasion (plus the holes in one of my favorite shirts) that compelled me to act.
So my family brought me a little can of yellow goo, which we in turn spread onto a plate-like circle of plastic with a juicy selection of fish heads in the middle (my grandmother’s choice, not mine – I would rather tempt them with some more clothing, perhaps a piece of the same fruit that I saw a seed of in my room). And we put our 2 ‘pizzas,’ as my family so quaintly put it, into my freshly cleaned room. Coincidentally, I found the living quarters of the little rodents: in one of my tennis shoes that has lain untouched for the joy of flip-flops. I am fairly certain that they enjoyed my shoelaces as their pillows, because they tore them to pieces and piled them with the scraps of some of my other clothing.
It should be mentioned that the day that I cleaned my room so well was also the day that I hung up my lucky find from Battambang: brightly colored flashing Christmas lights. I mention this because as I sat and gazed at them in the sheer joy of the holidays, my grandmother came in and warned me that the mice wouldn’t come out if they were on all night. She is always looking out for me, in true yiey (grandmother) fashion. She is also a surprising source of hilarity: During one lunch during the very eventful mouse adventure week, as I was lamenting about the mice biting on my clothes and shoes, etc, etc, my yiey began talking about the biting of ears. At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about… no, yiey, the mice didn’t eat my ears! … Oohhh, the mice could have eaten my ears? … Holly-ield? Eye-son? … What about fighting? … You mean Mike Tyson? Evander Holyfield? I could not control my laughter. I am continually amazed about the bits of information that the people here has access to – and the times that they choose to reveal such knowledge.
But on with the previous topic. I woke up the morning after I placed the fish ‘pizzas’ strategically on my floor, with a very restless night fraught with mice whimpering and a strange fear of what was happening under my bed, to find not one, not two, but four mice struggling for freedom in their respective sticky circles. And what followed might have been one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen. I don’t consider myself a squeamish person, but watching my host mother peel the mice off of the disc with a stick and pound their heads against a rock until they stopped moving, and then throw the pile of carcasses into the nearby pond as fish food… well, it was a little much for 6 in the morning. Over the next two days, two more mice were caught in the gummy trap and suffered the same fate – I found it a bit ironic that we used fish for bait and then fed the dead back to the fish, but I suppose the circle of life is a bit different in this hemisphere. Why wouldn’t it be when so many other things are…