Peanutbutter and Patience

            Last Monday morning, our house rang was filled with singing. The song on our lips was “Ding Dong, the Rat is Dead”. That’s right – we finally caught that Rat, Donald, bringing an end to this particular saga.

            How did we do it, though? How did we finally, after two and a half months, catch this elusive pest? With peanutbutter and patience.

            As you may recall from the previous episode in this saga, we left off with Donald regularly eating a mixture of poison and peanutbutter in our closet, observed with a recently installed camera. This part of the tale continues from there.

            After the second night of filming Donald, the rat had finished off his poison-peanutbutter concoction. Because he should have been long dead from a lethal dose of poison by now, we decided that, rather than mixing more, we’d put in straight-up poison pellets. That night, Donald came – and he ate his fill of the poison, alternating with sniffing around in search of the peanutbutter he had been eating every night for almost a month, obviously disappointed.

            Then he freaked out.

            After a frantic search of the closet, Donald hopped up on the pipes and started shredding his way through the expanding foam that blocked what used to be his entrance to the kitchen. For a full hour (he usually only stayed in the closet for 10-15 minutes) he worked at finding a way through, but his efforts were in vain.

            And now we knew his weakness.

            The electrocution trap was already in the closet, so we cleaned it up and re-baited it with peanutbutter on a cracker. Unfortunately, when we turned it on it wasn’t functioning properly. So, we handed it off to my father-in-law to fix and, in the meantime, put a black plastic snap-trap (also baited with peanutbutter) in its place.

            That night, Donald showed up. He sniffed around and came close to going for the peanutbutter in the trap, but he looked like he’d seen such a trap in action before. He left, having only eaten a couple pieces of poison.

            The next day, we reinstated the electrocution trap, moved the black snap trap to a place Donald had spent a lot of time, and added a traditional rat trap – baited with peanutbutter, of course. Surly, eventually, Donald’s ability to resist would fade. So we waited. And the dirty rat didn’t even show up.

            For three days and nights, we saw neither whisker nor tail of the troublesome rat. We started to think Donald was dead – that the poison had finally kicked in.

Then, on the fourth night... something went haywire with my computer, and it didn’t manage to save the video from overnight. But, as we looked at the live feed that only a quarter of was visible on my messed-up monitor, we noticed first the empty poison container that was in the wrong location. Then we noticed a tail. A very still tail.

            We rushed downstairs and looked in the closet. Sure enough, there, in the black snap trap, was Donald. The poison was scattered, the traditional trap had been sprung as well, and there was peanutbutter everywhere. So, now we’re left wondering, what happened in the closet that night? Without the video, we’ll never know.

            At any rate, here’s to Donald! May he rest in peace. He was a worthy opponent and a downright nuisance. What more could a rat hope to have said of him?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.