Last summer, I was drinking coffee in the kitchen before dawn, marveling at the rural silence reported by my iPhone’s decibel measurement app (23.8dB or “the threshold of sound”) when a tiny black form squeezed out from under the dishwasher, checked me out, and scuttled back under.
We had mice.
It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. We already have weasels and bats in our attic. Bats are protected in France, by the way—not just a few special bats, but all 34 species. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out when we get around to renovating up there.
Anyway, between those animals; the moles and hedgehogs that tear up the garden; the countless lizards and snails; and the occasional terrifyingly large, black frog that’s (probably) harmless, mice seemed a harmonious addition.
But when Marilyne returned in October, she discovered the mice had gotten a little too comfortable. There was mouse poop everywhere and, although we’d thoroughly stowed all food items, they’d chewed up a set of silicon spatulas I’d purchased in a nesting splurge, which struck me as rude more than anything.
Both of us tend to be pretty pacifistic when it comes to killing rodents, so I bought a couple of no-kill traps. This wasn’t our first tango with mice and rats. A couple years ago, we had a rat issue in our house in California which we ignored until I walked into the kitchen one morning to find a half-eaten banana on the countertop. We fixed the problem by crawling under the house to seal all possible entrances and exits. We then captured them over the course of a month. I would set them free in local open spaces, although I’m not sure how humanitarian this was considering the first mouse I set free was scooped up by a hawk seconds after release.
Eventually, I settled for a park next to a retirement village, fantasizing that some visually-impaired octogenarian would mistake them for small tropical-fruit loving dogs and appreciate the companionship.
But our 200-year-old French farmhouse is hermetically challenging compared to our small Los Angeles beach pad, so sealing it off isn’t an option. Marilyne caught a half-dozen mice and, in my absence, sent Cooper to release them in fields where they were inevitably devoured by local buzzards. She then proposed another solution.
Stocking the house with mousers was always on our roadmap. Marilyne has owned cats most of her life, the last one being Mimi, an overweight orange tabby who would shake the whole house whenever he jumped off a table. I thought he was big because Marilyne overfed him, but when he died, we learned he had a bad heart, which inhibited aerobic activity. This meant he was zero threat to rodents, which is probably why they took over our kitchen on his watch. Still, he was a great cat who knew just when to sit on your head because you were feeling down and could really use a cat hat. We loved him.
I don’t believe Marilyne’s insistence on cats had much to do with the mice. After all, being stalked, tortured, and eaten by a cat is probably a far worse fate than a buzzard’s brisker method. We’d put off getting new pets until we got to France and I’ve never known a person who loves animals the way my wife does. This was more about filling the void left by Mimi’s death a year ago.
With the help of her sister, Marilyne adopted two eight-week-old feral kittens within hours of our conversation. It all happened so fast that one might think that the wheels were in motion long before I consented.
I know very little about cats, but Google tells me ours are probably at least part Domestic Shorthair. We named them Donut and Mandy in honor of two of our favorite places to ride bikes in Los Angeles. We sometimes call them Boy Cat and Girl Cat. For some reason, Donut occasionally goes by Nando or Mando.
Marilyne refers to them collectively as her chickens.
Their first few weeks were touch-and-go. Donut/Boy Cat/Nando/Mando reacted poorly to deworming medication and became really sick. I was still in California wrapping up business, so Marilyne nursed him back to health on her own, sending me a steady stream of cat videos in the process. By the time I met them, Mandy was twice Donut’s size. Something about the worm issue had left him stunted and tubby. He outgrew it—and outgrew his sister. He’s an impossibly friendly cat who insists on sleeping between us, often crawling under the covers. Mandy, who has longer hair, seems a little wilder. She wants to be in our vicinity, only on her terms.
They play incessantly. Our first floor and second floor are separated by wooden planks covered by a thin layer of either bad late-twentieth-century carpet or worse late-twentieth-century linoleum, so their feline galloping fills the house like a rolling thunder of Mimi counter jumps. Even when they only weighted a couple pounds, it sounded like one of them might crash through the ceiling at any moment.
Their toys consist mostly of walnuts and chestnuts from outside and the occasional wine cork, although Marilyne’s mom did give them a little stuffed mouse that works its way around the house. We use it as psychology prep for the day we find a real dead mouse in the middle of the living room floor or, even better, deposited in our gardening clogs.
We haven’t decided when to let them go outside yet. At this point, they’d be no match for a buzzard or fox. They might stand a chance against a mole.
We’re far more worried about cars. They don’t drive by often, but when they do, they go fast. The road to the side of our house has a 90kph (56mph) speed limit and a blind curve. The road in front of our house is private. People who use it have either been led astray by Waze, so they’re staring at their phones—or they’re assholes who know damn well they shouldn’t be there. Either way, they’re not focused on avoiding local pets.
Animal mortality seems much more accepted around here. Maybe it’s because we’re surrounded by thousands of cows, sheep, and chickens destined for slaughter. Every time I go for a run, I pass fields filled with cows who stop eating grass to stare at me blankly. I often stare back, contemplate their pending fate, and offer a consolatory “moo.”
I have yet to hear about anyone around here thousands of Euros to fight their dog’s cancer. If we’re lucky, we outlive our pets. It’s what we signed up for.
Marilyne’s sister Sophie goes so far as to name her cats in honor of how the previous cat died. Their current cat is Dinghy because the previous cat drowned. They had another cat, Carpet, named thus because previous cat was run over. Carpet vanished and is believed lost. Marilyne suggested they name the next cat Gipiesse in his honor.
Our neighbor’s big, black cat Izzy had its leg amputated a few weeks ago. No one is sure what happened, but he just showed up after several days off-grid with a nonfunctioning left rear leg. They took him to the vet for x-rays. The bones were completely shattered.
There were no open wounds, so Marilyne’s theory is that a cow stepped on him. This doesn’t seem probable to me.
We went to visit him shortly after surgery. He lay on his side, the black fur on his backside all shaved. The muscles around the five-inch incision pulsed and twitched, I suppose trying to figure out why the signals they sent were going nowhere. His cone didn’t seem to bother him at all, but he was certainly not his usual spray self.
Our neighbors were concerned he might suffer from depression, but in a few weeks, he was back to jumping on the coffee table and spreading out on the tiles in the middle of our Rummikub game like nothing happened. When life takes a bad turn, it’s easy to wallow in the “why” of it all. Lord knows I dwell on my misfortune, but Izzy wasn’t going to sit around and be bummed about his missing leg. He just got on with living.
This morning, Donut and Mandy decided we needed to play before I was allowed to start my morning meditation—the ritual I do to keep my wallowing in check. As Donut batted at my toe—protected by a thick wool Australian army sock older than my daughter—and Mandy observed, I thought about letting them outside pretty soon.
Our mouse problem has vanished. I’m guessing the constant scrambling of two high-energy kittens is a lot more intimidating than Mimi’s slow plodding, but there’s still a big world for our chickens to explore. The cats around here have huge territories. When we’re driving, we often see lone cats crouched in the middle of a field, stalking all manner of rodent and reptile while deftly avoiding cow hooves.
If the worst thing that happens is Mandy or Donut losing a leg, I’ll be pretty happy.
Well that was fun!