Mouse tales

I read that a dear friend had had her personal space invaded by a mouse. What to do she asked of her Facebook friends. The obvious answer was to get a cat but that is not allowed in her accommodation.
It put me in mind of some of my mousey experiences. Just a few days after our  marriage we moved from our city upbringing place to our first home together - in the country. The floorboards had no coverings and so on the first night we were aware of the patter of little feet (and no our first child didn't arrive till 4 years later).
My glory box bits and pieces did not include a mousetrap  although we had startled some friends by asking for mundane things such as a broom for wedding presents. That good old SABCO broom is still used to sweep the floor.
So when we met the Methodist minister in the bakery the next day, as well as signing  David up to be a lay preacher (not me, I was and still am a woman) he heard about our mouse problem, and delivered a mouse trap to our house. I had never seen such a thing - a hexagonal shaped thing capable of letting 4 little mouse heads at a time enter and be trapped. So what joy to lie in bed and hear one trap go off and then another and wonder if there would be a number 3 and 4.
Some years later when we had our own house in Laura there was a mouse plague. Although we didn't have mice in the bed as some did, I was bemused to find that they ate their way through plastic to get to the contents of containers and could disappear into the tiniest crevices in the wall. We had a cat but he soon grew tired of the diet of mice or even the fun of catching them. We had the plain ordinary type wooden mousetraps of the day - just a few as there were none to be had in the local store. Later when they restocked we bought up big and had a good line up of traps on hand should they ever be needed again.
I was an at home Mum at the time and so when the traps went off, as they did with monotonous regularity, I had to deal with them. I believe you can get disposable traps now so you just discard the whole thing but this was 30 years or more ago. My easy disposal system was to hurl the trap and mouse into the chook yard and come back later for the emptied trap. Some people claim their eggs began to taste mousey.
Nowadays again living in the country we get the odd mouse or two. We figured that was why the current cat sat and looked so intently at the compost heap. All good. We were away for a few days recently and on coming home I was glad to see all was as it should be. Until I walked abourn the side of the dining room table and saw what I took to be a piece of grass on the floor. (The squeamish should not read on). I reached down to pick it up and it had a slightly rubbery feel and alongside it was one small foot.  Mouse tails indeed...