I caught Ralph.
I didn’t catch him on purpose.
I was in the kitchen and heard that familiar crunch crunch crunch noise coming from the pantry.
I said to myself, “Now Ralph. I thought we had an understanding that you would stay out of the pantry as long as I paid you off with peanut butter and chocolate in my office.” And I went to investigate.
The crunching was coming from behind the pantry door, where we put the cardboard boxes for recycling. I opened the door, and the crunching continued. I picked up a box, and the crunching stopped. But I didn’t hear any scurrying.
There were only two boxes left, both Cheerios boxes. “He couldn’t be in one of those with me so close. He would be long gone by now,” I thought.
I looked inside the first Cheerios box. Nothing.
I looked inside the second Cheerios box. This one still had the wax paper bag inside.
“Could he be inside the bag?” I thought. I pulled the bag out of the box, and there, calmly looking out at me from inside the bag, was Ralph. Didn’t seem at all upset.
I showed him to Arleen, and we agreed that I should take him for a little drive and release him somewhere away from houses.
So I took Ralph out to a little clearing by a pond in the middle of a woods about a half mile from here. He scurried off into the tall grass, and I went home, feeling saddened by the fact that I had lost my business partner and companion.
Then I went on the Internet to find out what Ralph is. He has a short tail, long thin body and pointy nose. And he’s little. I thought he might be a vole/field mouse because of the short tail, but I found that they’re a lot bigger than Ralph and don’t have pointy noses.
I think he’s just a house mouse with a short tail.
Anyway, I read about what voles, mice and the like eat in the wild. That made me feel a lot better. They eat almost everything. So I don’t have to worry that Ralph will starve out there. On the other hand, I also found that almost everything eats Ralph. Be careful, Ralph!
I decided not to dismantle the workstation where Ralph cleaned out the insides of almost empty peanut butter jars and sampled chocolates, in case there were more mice in the house. That would be a good way to find out.
Sure enough, right on schedule, around 11 P.M. another Ralph showed up and took over where the original Ralph left off, cleaning out the almost empty peanut butter jar.
I guess I’ll have to go to WalMart and get some of those Mouse Cube humane traps Cranberry told me about.