Hattie is just about ten months old. She’s the junior member of the family menagerie. She’s pretty quiet today, spent most of the day sleeping on our bed. I think I know why. Yesterday I found the field mouse she’d gifted us with behind the chair in one corner of the bedroom. Both Rigor and Mortis had set in. Poor mouse. He had a handsome tail.

I think he must’ve put up a helluva fight, because of the way Hattie’s behaving today. He might’ve been the mouse equivalent of the Quarry brothers, San Francisco fighters from more than a few years ago—Jerry and Mike—who also put up a helluva fight before, invariably, losing. Jerry, the heavyweight. lost to Muhammad Ali, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

I think that Mike, a middleweight, lived in San Luis Obispo for a time.

Fortunately, unlike the Quarrys, this mouse did not shed copious amounts of blood. Hattie must have killed him outside and brought him in for us—I looked but could not find a recipe for bacon-wrapped mousies—and then she kind of forgot. I’d already moved him when she went looking behind the chair, emerging with a slightly puzzled look.

Hattie is an uncommonly beautiful cat—I love cats, especially black cats—but it’s really hard for me to compartmentalize the “Hello-Sweetheart” with the “Predator-Killer.” Elizabeth rescued what she thought was a hummingbird from her last week. It turned out to be a huge moth. Thank goodness. The bell collar has helped a little, but not before we discovered, behind the same chair, enough bird feathers for a Lakota chief’s war bonnet.

I was, of course, reminded of this classic Kliban cartoon:

The poor little fellow, wrapped inside a paper towel and buried in the trash to go out tomorrow, reminded me of the Notorious Gregory Mouse Story.

When the boys were little human-type fellows, we hit on the misguided idea of going to the pet store in Los Osos to buy them some mousies. “They’re males,” the clerk assured us. He was in error.

Within a short period of time—it seemed like about thirty minutes—our mousie cage in the kitchen of our home was alive with little, little, LITTLE mousies. They were adorable, true, but their numbers were alarming. As you know, Elizabeth and I love Irish Setters, and their litters are often around nine or ten puppies. Or more. Romy, in the photo below, became a Mommy to fifteen in Coventry, England.

Mousies demonstrate the same reproductive talent, but their litters arrive about every—oh, for the sake of argument–about every thirty minutes.

The plot thickened. Sometimes we’d turn on the back porch light and would be charmed at a little raiding party of raccoons, family units, who finally made us realize that we had to bring the dog kibble inside the house and not leave it in the garage. They look like little burglars, with their raccoon masks.

What we did not plan on were the wild field mice that were out there in the Los Osos Wilderness along with the raccoons, possums, skunks and the occasional Wildebeest.

The wild field mice—at least the Frat Brothers among them—somehow found their way into the kitchen and began Making Whoopee with our far more sedate domesticated pets. So our mouse family grew, but with a difference: the new generation, half-wild, had the most incredible leaping ability. Sometimes we’d wake at night and here soft little bonks.

Bonk.

Bonk.

Bonk.

Bonkbonkbonk.

We finally realized—if you’re sensing a certain denseness here, we were not expert rodent people–that the bonks were the sounds of their little skulls hitting the top of the mouse cage as they jumped up and down, with all the joy but not nearly the grace of dancing young Masai warriors.

There are some problems that won’t go away, and Elizabeth informed me, pointedly, that this was one of them. I’m a little ashamed because this is what I decided to do.

I took the bonk-bonk cage across South Bay Boulevard to a lovely vacant lot near Los Osos Middle School–cypress, sweet-smelling sage and sand. I do not remember how I did it, exactly, because it’s darned hard to hide a cage full of adrenalized half-wild mice. Maybe I had a big overcoat, I don’t know.

But I found a pleasant spot—a dell, you might call it—and opened the cage.

The mousies began to dart out like little furry punctuation marks. The less daring among them waited. Then there was a little furry river of mousies, Yearning to be Free.

And then, of course, I was even more shameless. As our mousies disappeared into the vastness of the Los Osos Savannah, I sang the theme to the film Born Free.

I am not making this up.

Hattie, of course, would have been overwhelmed. There’s only so much prey one little predator can handle, after all, all by herself. I feel badly for the gift she brought us, but, as cold as it might sound, one dead mouse is preferable to two dozen lively little bonk-bonks.

Oops. Make that two dead mousies. Elizabeth just found another.

For those of you keeping score at home, here’s the theme from Born Free (1966), a marvelous little film about Elsa the Lioness.