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It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?”
“It was a package of pads to remove eye makeup,” I reply, reaching under the sink for a scrub brush. “Throw it away.”
He looks thoughtful. “They probably want it for a nest. Maybe I should leave it—”
I married St. Francis. “Only if you give them little birth control pills,” I say.
“They’re not tribbles,” he retorts, citing a Star Trek critter that multiplies in seconds. I raise an eyebrow and, when he walks away, consult AI. Female mice reach sexual maturity in about two months and can produce as many as ten litters a year, five or six babies per litter. You can wind up with a thousand mice in no time.
I wave my phone at Andrew, who nods absentmindedly. He is busy adding soft towels to a little ventilated carrying case. What, people travel with their hamsters? At least he found something workable. When I went to Rural King for cruelty-free traps, they were buried around the corner from twelve shelves of final solutions. Lethal spring traps, vicious sticky pads, all manner of kills.
I shuddered. The night before, I had mentioned The Mice to a friend. She said she once found a mouse in the oven of the guy she now lives with. His solution was to turn on the oven and burn it to death. I went home, hugged my husband hard, and told him he could build them their own wing if he wanted.
Instead, he keeps baiting the little tunnels, smearing one end with big globs of peanut butter. When the mice venture inside to nibble, the tunnel tips up and the door shuts, keeping them inside with their snack until the next patrol. Soon he is ferrying the seventeenth mouse to the park. (Seventeenth? You will read this and refuse our dinner invitations.)
Number eighteen is the tiniest, frail and bemused. She seems new to life, probably begotten by all that unprotected sex inside our walls. And now that the polar vortex has brought us snow, ice, and an arctic chill, she will be with us several days. Andrew puts water in pill-bottle lids and offers crunchy kibble and little balls of soft bread. I suggest cheese, but then I read up: “Contrary to popular belief, mice do not have a strong preference for cheese. They prefer nutrient-dense foods rich in carbohydrates.” Like peanut butter. Also, chocolate.
Our common tastes are softening my heart. Mice are adaptable and “extremely curious and intelligent,” I read. “Highly social animals living in communities with intricate social structures.”
Good thing her sociable pals cannot see her now: she has a spiky hairdo, courtesy of dried urine from her time in solitary. Andrew sponges her off and cleans her case. She seems a little shell-shocked by the proceedings, so he tries a saucer of milk—all babies like milk, right?
Actually, only from the mouse mother’s breast. Otherwise it can upset her tummy, and mice can neither burp nor vomit. The distress can therefore be severe. We hurriedly switch the milk for a little plain yogurt that is meant to help.
She ignores the yogurt. She wants chocolate. As for me, I have returned to atavistic horror: under duress, I have just read, mice can become cannibalistic.
But what the hell, so can we.
I call out the list of what not to feed a mouse. No rhubarb. No raisins or onions, no fizzy bubbles, no caffeine. Definitely no booze. Which is a shame, because I bet she would be even cuter tipsy.
She needs a name—“mousie” has turned cloying—so I christen her Niblet. So tiny, she is, and so expressive. “When experiencing pleasure, a mouse’s ears move forward and fold at the back toward the body,” and the nose moves down toward the mouth. When a mouse is scared or uneasy, the ears go back, flattening against the head, and the whiskers are pulled back tightly against the face. With contentment, the whiskers relax and extend slightly forward. When a mouse is curious or alert, the ears wiggle or vibrate rapidly.
Niblet has other ways to communicate, too. Mice squeak (in excitement or fear) and chirp (to warn others), and male mice sing special songs to court females. Often at ultrasonic frequencies, which is why we cannot hear them singing and never knew how romantic they are.
“She’s like you,” I tell the dog, reading on. “When she’s feeling confident, she holds her tail high; when she’s scared, she lowers or tucks her tail. And if it’s twitching rapidly, she might be warning other mice that we will take them captive.”
Has she done that already? Since Niblet arrived, we have heard zero scritching, found no droppings. Did her compatriots hear her ultrasonic screams and flee? This method of mouse control never occurred to me. But then, I knew nothing of the mouse psyche.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology are working on that. They have linked five emotional states to the facial expressions of mice: pleasure, disgust, nausea, pain, and fear. When thirsty mice lick a sugar solution, their faces show far more joy than the faces of mice who were not thirsty. When they taste something slightly salty, they have a look of satisfaction; if the chef has a heavy hand, their expression changes to disgust.
Because the institute now has an automated facial recognition system, the neurobiologists can measure what a mouse is feeling, and how strongly, on a timescale of milliseconds. When they compared facial expressions to brain activity, they were amazed to see individual neurons in the insular cortex reacting with exactly the same strength, at exactly the same time, as the emotion reflected on the mouse’s face. This suggests that there are “emotion neurons” in the cortex, each tied to a specific sensation.
Now the mouse models are letting researchers investigate how we process emotions, especially anxiety and depression.
Is Niblet depressed? She is clearly anxious. I wait in vain for the slow blinking that would signal relaxed contentment. Instead, she burrows under the toweling, and if we flip the light on and startle her, she looks up with glassy dark eyes and hyperventilates. One morning, I go into the darkened loo, cozy with a space heater. Something white is taking up space inside her case. Still bleary with sleep, I peer in and see that Andrew has fashioned her a house from the top of a milk bottle, cutting out a little door and smoothing the edges. Because of the bottleneck, it looks like it has a little chimney. Through the door, I see her nestled inside.
We all need shelter from prying eyes.
When I congratulate my husband on his architecture, he says ruefully. “This was not meant to be a bed & breakfast. But if I release her now, she’ll freeze to death before she can burrow.”
And so we wait, all of us, for sunshine. Life is already adversarial enough.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
