the mouse in our house...

for anyone wondering on the fate of the mouse in our house, i know i mentioned him to a few friends in emails home when we first arrived here at our bushcamp, and i thought i should give you an update.
for anyone who knew nothing about the mouse, then let this be a more light-hearted amusing aside than my recent, soul-searching blog entries.

when we got to chindeni i spent the first week being rudely awoken at ungodly hours through the night by persistent rustlings and chinkings. they would come at all hours, 1am, 2am, 3am, you get the idea. it was difficult to pinpoint the noise in the dark, and work out whether it was coming from the outside, or inside the tent. was something desperately trying to get in, or something desperately trying to get out? either way it was most disturbing, to my sleep and to my psyche. the husband learned to ignore it, but i would frequently end up out of bed at 4am in the morning, scrabbling around on my hands and knees, frantically pointing the torch this way and that trying to work out where the noise was coming from.

and then one morning we saw him.
the perpetrator of all the commotion.
a tiny little mouse, trapped in the corner of the tent behind a set of draws, panting furiously and desperately looking round as to a way to escape the torch beam. he had obviously made out tent his home during the rainy season when the camp was shut down, and no-one had told him about the new owners moving in.
he looked quite cute. my heart melted, and i forgave him all of the mid-night wake ups.

the husband is insistent he is a rat, although I prefer to refer to him as a mouse (so many bad connotations with the word ‘rat’). he is still a regular visitor to our tent, and now we have rather got used to him…. ‘I’ve grown accustomed to his face, accustomed to his smile, accustomed to his beady eyes and whiskers…’.

he entertains us with his obedience- whenever we catch him poking his little nose in through the gap in the zips we shout at him to leave, which he promptly does- and his persistence- he continues to poke his nose through almost daily, seemingly convinced that one time we will welcome him with open arms. he has massive eyes, they are so big he looks like he is being squeezed around the middle, and it is difficult to be angry at a little creature with such big dark eyes. he has stopped chewing my new flip flops, either because he is a considerate little beasty, or he got bored with the taste of havianas, or the more I wear them the less palatable they become…. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it was because he knew it upset me to see my new shoes ruined. so he doesn’t really cause us any trouble any more- now the mysterious rustling coming from the corners of our tent is no longer a mystery I’m quite happy for him to pop in to say hi every so often. I actually quite look forward to his visits.

but it seems the mouse has been taking liberties with other tents, where he is not so welcome. he also pays visits to our guide tents, and it seems that they are less charmed by his presence than we.

our room attendant asked the husband to order some ‘latex’ for the problem. he assumed that this was some sort of cunning way of sealing the holes in the tent, didn’t ponder too much that the mouse in our house uses the gaps in the zipped doors rather than any holes in the tent, and duly put it on our next order sheet. confused when it didn’t materialise, but according to the delivery sheet it had been sent, he went to ask the room attendant. he triumphantly waved a big bottle of ‘Rat-ex’ at the husband, a brand of rat poison, and everything suddenly slipped into place. the common habit of pronouncing ‘r’s as ‘l’s over here in Zambia had somewhat confused matters, and it seemed that the room attendant had no intention of mouse-proofing our tents, he just wanted to remove the problem with a rather more final solution.

i’m refusing to let the attendant put any ‘la-tex’ in our tent.
i don’t want his little death on my conscience.
the mouse can keep coming to visit me as often as he likes. when the sound of his scurrying gets irritating a quick bang on the canvas wall usually hurries him out on his way. as long as he doesn’t start eating my shoes again, or inviting any of his more unsavoury snaky friends over for a party, he can stay.
the husband is humouring me, but i think he is secretly quite fond of the mouse too.
the room attendant definitely thinks i’m mad.

as I type this now in our tent, the mouse is currently doing laps of the inside edge of our tent. i’ve told him that i’m writing about him.

i was always quite expecting to become a crazy old cat lady when i hit seventy… i wasn’t quite prepared to be a crazy rat lady at the age of (nearly) thirty.