Of Rats and Me

So, we’ve known the rats have been back for some time. I was too busy/didn’t have the right equipment to take care of them before I went home, so I assumed the worst had happened while I was gone: rats had taken over my home. Luckily, my assumptions were far (ish) from the truth. There was definite evidence that they’d made themselves at home in my home, despite my absence, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it could have been.

Once back and better equipped, I was ready to take these little f**ckers on, head on, or rather, neck-on. As I prepared the traps, I noticed one had broken and when I went to fix it, the whole thing exploded on my pointer finger. It didn’t break, but the trap did, and if it hadn’t when it spontaneously combusted, then I’ll bet it did when I chucked it out the window in an angry fit. Why oh why, I wondered, doesn’t the Peace Corps equip us with ice packs? I spent the day without being able to use the finger and noticed some blood under the fingernail. (For some reason it’s an injury I see all the time among volunteers here. Are there really that many exploding rat traps out there?)

I’ve set the trap out now for a few nights and so far caught just one. I was on the phone with a friend when the trap snapped. “What was that?” he asked me. I went into the other room to see what had happened, cautioning Lina to stay away. The poor little guy looked nothing like the rats I had caught the last time. They’d been big, dark grey and dirty. This one, at least from how it was positioned in the trap, looked smaller, fluffy white and brown, and rather helpless. Still, I decided, I would not take pity on these things that chew through everything in my house and leave their droppings around to let me know just how much track they’ve covered. They were the enemy, my enemy.

It didn’t make it any better when a few nights later I caught another, well, almost. The trap snapped, and I heard the squealing. I figured the squealing would stop and I’d be able to release the dead body in the back yard the next day. But it didn’t stop. Even when I put on the light to peer into the corner where the dying rat lay, it continued to squeal, and thrash about, banging the trap into the wall, a rather disturbing sound for someone trying to go to bed. I decided to cash in on my offer to yell for help from my neighbor, having decided that I can handle the rats when they’re dead, but not when they’re dying. Almost one year I made it without having to call him to kill a mouse, rat, cockroach, snake or tarantula. (That was mostly because I didn’t have too many of those animals stop by the house, that I knew of, but the ones that did I was able to take care of.) Freddy came over and went to the corner where the trap lay, empty. “I guess he escaped,” he told me. So the thrashing had all been an attempt to release itself from the trap, and not a last dying call for mercy.

Even as I write this, I can hear them having a dance party above me, scraping their claws over the between the “ceiling” and the tin roof, and thumping their tails all over as they move.