Last night, after one of the more awful journeys back from
Kigali (taking four rather than two hours), and whilst feeling very sorry for
myself as I have a pretty heavy head cold and the heat is making it feel even
more uncomfortable – I was sitting in my lounge watching a tv programme. A movement caught my eye and I most definitely saw something running along
by the wall near the back door.
Something had come in under the back door, scurried along the wall
around the dining room, into the lounge and then down the corridor. Feeling slightly disgusted by this, I felt I
needed to go and investigate. So I
bravely turned on all the lights in the two spare rooms and the bathroom and
took my headtorch to search under furniture.
I couldn’t see it anywhere. I
shook out things and prodded and poked, but nothing.
I was convinced that this was more than my usual paranoia,
so I went to look out the trap that Stella had shown me she had bought for such
occasions. I went out to see Justin to
see if he knew how it worked. Of course
he did. There followed an entertaining
20minutes whilst Justin and I set a feast for a rat/mouse. We started with bread, but then he explained
they really liked nuts. I had nuts, so I
went and got some. He attached them to
the trap and proceeded to burn them with a lighter so that they were a bit roasted. At this point I did have to laugh about this
carefully prepared feast for the rat/mouse.
With the feast prepared, we left the trap in the corridor,
and turned off the lights and closed the door.
Sure enough, a few hours later, when I was lying awake on my summer cold
death bed, I heard the sound of the trap in action. I decided to leave it to the morning to see
if it had worked, or if the rodent had escaped it’s fate. I slowly opened the door to the corridor this
morning, almost anticipating a tide of rats running out across my feet or
perhaps I would see a load of rats feasting on whatever lay in the
trap...there was most definitely a rat in the trap. It was definitely dead. It was no time for squeamishness, the rat
corpse had to be removed, so I found the dustpan and brush and shoved the trap
with rat into it and carried it outside.
I donned my gardening gloves and set to opening the trap over the
rubbish heap so that the rat could fall onto it without me needing to touch it. All the while shuddering with disgust, of course.
I suspect this will not be my only encounter with a dead rat
in my trap. Maybe next time I’ll even
take some photos to share with you all.
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