Of Mice and Men

So in an early journal entry, I have mentioned a bit about my interaction with the local fauna over here in my corner of our wide world. I talked about how I hated my training village dogs, had fights with spiders the size of frisbees, and tried to barter with my father so I could purchase the life of my insomniac family rooster.

As a continuation, I am pleased to announce that now at my permanent site I have established an understanding (or at least a cease-fire) with the majority of the non-human inhabitants. For one, we have water buffalo out here. So awesome. If you have never seen one, they are impressive animals, reminding me of smaller rhinos with their tough hide and heavily muscled frames. They are rich grey in color with wide curving horns and are built like scaled-down tanks, and to be honest I really enjoy just watching them move about their lives… As I pass them on my runs they eye me over with a look that could best be described as “abject boredom and disinterest”. They clearly don’t see me as much of anything, as long as I’m not swinging a stick at them. Its hilarious though because I saw two of these immense creatures being herded by a 14 year old boy on a bike the other day… almost comical in that they could have crushed him in a heartbeat, but clearly aren’t the brightest bulbs in God’s bulb-box. I hope they don’t decide I am a threat at some point. I still have three dogs, and while I am often tempted to feed them some of the Raid coils we were given to repel mosquitoes when they bark at 3 am for some god-awful reason, I am also grudgingly fond of them. They often go running with me in the rice patties in the morning or welcome me back to the house when I return, and have even followed me into the school yard on my way to class, flanking me in a way that have caused my co-teachers to ask if they are my body guards. The bugs here are horrendous at times (depending on the rain/wind situation), and you would hardly believe the way I used to save struggling beetles out of swimming pools with the way I murder creatures with six or more legs here. I seem to be one of the few people bothered by being walked on constantly, and plucking tenacious weevil-like insects out of my hair. But my family is far more clever than I am at avoiding the brunt of them by eating earlier in the evening, using decoy lamps, etc so it could be worse. And last but CERTAINLY not least, my house is placed on higher stilts than my training house was, and my aforementioned feathered nemesis here at permanent site does his crowing near the back rather than directly under my head.

However, there is one creature here which I do not have any semblance of a peace with. In fact, our struggle has lasted many weeks and has reached a point that it bears recording for those generations yet to come. As the title (which I just couldn’t resist) would suggest, it is a mouse. But do not be fooled by the word “mouse”. I think it is entirely possible that some sort of ancient and clever evil has taken up residence in this small furry body. I can’t be sure of the nature of the being, and there is no exorcist handy… but no mere mouse is he.

It all started probably two or three weeks into site visit. My room is a great little space for me, and despite the war with the bugs (my mosquito net has proved to be a terrible X-factor for them, and the insecticide in it claims many lives some nights) I had nothing to complain about. In fact, my arm hair seems to be a perfectly evolved bug-snagger. Then one morning as I was getting dressed I noticed my socks had the remains of a beetle on them. Along with some mouse droppings.

I was not concerned in the least. After all, it was clearly mice, not a rat (an animal which many of you know the delightful characteristics of, perhaps thanks in part to my occasional nerdy ranting) and I had lived with mice during training with little incident. Heck, even in the States my dear feline friend Flash had the habit of catching mice and then releasing them into the house to create some sort of permanent gaming preserve for herself. So whatever, I had mice.

Over the course of the next week I found more beetle remains, and droppings. I also found a lot of fur on one sock that suggested they were using it as a bed. I just shook things off (quite literally. I didn’t want mouse junk on my clothes) and moved about my business. One day one of my students offered me a papaya-mango, an amazing fruit which is basically a mango the size of a small football. It was awesome though I needed to let it ripen two days. On the morning of the second day I arose looking forward to the awesome breakfast to find that my four-legged friends had decided it was ripe a few hours before I did: a third of my fruit had been gnawed away. I was definitely perturbed, but I just cut away the bitten area and finished the rest myself. Frankly I’m surprised I even bothered to cut away the gnawed portion, haha. But a trend had started, and there was no going back. They found the ziplock bag I kept my peanut butter in and promptly gnawed several holes in that though thankfully they were confounded by the jars themselves. I also had some candy in a bag they attacked in a similar way. The fact that my miniature roommates were starting to show interest in my peanut butter and the squeaking at night were certainly worrisome signs, but still, live and let live.

Then it happened. I went away for the weekend to use the bank and such in town, and returned to find two extremely telling, and disturbing, new developments.

The first was that half of my bar of soap had been eaten. Naturally, this was highly bothersome in that if I didn’t have soap in this country it could well cause an international incident. I told my host family, and my mom immediately glared at the cat and called it lazy. The cat seemed unconcerned. But on a deeper level, to me this was an extremely symbolic motion. It said to me several things. One was my mice were displeased that I had been so affronting as to keep what was obviously peanut-flavored mouse food inside thick, ungnawable jars. The second message this sent was that the conflict was being escalated. Besides the fact that some soap is made with animal fat, soap is not food. It is not human food. It is not mouse food. This was a calculated action done out of spite, and out of challenge. I had just had a paw backhand me across the face. And the third level to this action was based on the fact that this was the last bar of my American soap. So now we had an act of intolerance to the spirit of multinational cooperation. It was blatant xenophobia. They said “we ate half of your Stars and Stripes: now get out of our country before we take it all.”

The second new development was that on one of my socks (obviously their clothing of choice) I found half of a mouse skull. Could my soap have poisoned one? No, impossible, Irish Spring wouldn’t hurt a fly. With a chill, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t dealing with a group of guerilla mammals. What I had on my hand was a single adversary, a fascist rodent who would stand for no opposition from even his own people, and he possessed considerable wit and power. And he was a CANNIBAL.

That night, a noise startled me out of sleep around 3 am. It was a full moon, and a cool breeze whistled over the patties on a strangely quiet night. What in the stillness has woken me? Then I saw him. In the middle of my window sill, backlight with the full moons rays, he stood at his full height of at least 2 inches, stretching his formidable mouse muscles and surveying “his” domain. Our gazes met. I said (quite possibly out loud, it was 3 am and I’m not known to be at my finest at such moments) “enjoy these last fleeting moments of existence, my whiskered friend. The time for our reckoning is almost nigh. And it is I that will stand in the moonlight. Alone.”

I tried to peg whose spirit this remarkable animal embodied. Was it Hector? No, clearly I had yet to drag his body around the school yard behind my bike in triumph. Achilles? I don’t even know if mice really have heels. I couldn’t decide, but he was formidable.

So it was that my friend Fiona (a volunteer from New Zealand working in Svay Rieng) going to Phnom Penh, I asked her to bring me back a mouse trap. What she brought me back to me could best be described as a bear trap. It was monstrous and serrated and… perfectly suited for my foe. So I grudgingly set it with the precious peanut butter he craved, and went into town to use the bank again (so this must have been about a month so far… but I can’t be sure of that. In the heat of battle, I had managed to lose track of moments, hours, even days at a time. Dust, sweat, blood, squeaks, smoke, fur… it’s all a haze…). When I returned to site, I expected my biggest problem was going to be that it was awkward that a dead mouse probably the size of a small dog was going to have been dead in my room for several days.

My naïveté astounds me.

What I found instead was that he had eaten all the peanut butter off the trap without setting it off. To drive his triumph home, he victoriously ate half of my remaining bar of soap.

This was ridiculous. I text-messaged my friend Chris about what to do about the epic struggle I was in the throes of. He said “it’s only epic when you become a tragically fallen hero. That will happen when you realize the mouse is smarter than you. Then you’ll go mad.” I’m well on my way, I told him. It was when I told him about the mouse’s cheating of death that we finally settled on a name…

Lazarus.

In the space of a month and a half, Lazarus has eaten:
• 1/3 of a papaya-mango
• Peanut butter off my bear trap, twice.
• Half a Cambodian potato and then more peanut butter (twice) off the second trap my brothers helped me buy.
• About 8365324632 beetles, click bugs, flying ants, and the like. He generously left all the wings for me. Not unlike tribes where they put the skulls of their enemies on stakes as a warning to others.
• Several ziplock bags.
• At least one other mouse almost in its entirety.
• Part of my toothpaste tube, which I didn’t know until I squeezed a little too zealously one morning.
• Several water purification tablets. This was an attempt to poison him since supposedly Aquatabs are fatal to humans if ingested. Didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t be certain, but I think I heard a sinister, high-pitched, condescending laugh during the night…
• Possibly some of the students that have stopped coming to my English classes.
• Several chunks out of a few socks and a shirt. Clearly to show me that he had the power to leave me naked, but chose not to for his own amusement.
• The armpit of one of my shirts (which frankly should have killed him, as well.)
• Part of my soul.

NOTE: Some might argue that all that he has consumed has been “returned” to me in the form of mouse droppings. This is hardly a consolation.

I wish I could say there was a happy ending, a satisfying resolution, or a “dénouement” (which is French for “when we finish off the super villain”), but alas there isn’t. He has still foiled me at every turn, and I am starting to be jolted out of sleep by nightmares that upon waking I am unable to recall. I just know I am suddenly sitting bold upright drenched in sweat gasping... but but receiving cold silence as the only response. I am now in town for our Safety and Security meeting with the Cambodian Country Director and I fully expect on my return he will have eaten all of my shower products, my chair, most of my mattress, and the rest of my will to resist him.

Who would have thought my white whale would be a brown mouse?