From the upcoming novel Murrstake: Three Years I’ll Never Get Back
Excerpt of Chapter 7: The Small Five – Hunting Household Pests for Fun and Profit
***
We catch the sight of our quarry on the third day. He is alone, moving without hurry in that peculiar insolence of the wild things which register man not as philosophers or poets or builders of great civilization but only as an occasional hazard. Upwind we wait. He shows no particular concern at our presence, smelling as he does the discolored puddle gathering beneath the water fountain nearest the territorial homeland of the sophomores.
Our foe is not a remarkable specimen in any regard. He is not large for his breed, nor is he uncommonly marked or set apart in temperament. We have known of him for some weeks now, spotting him now and again, and of late bandied around the novelty of collecting him with the shop-vac and, once captive, devising a means of weaponizing the common field mouse. We have allowed great sums of time in this, as shenanigans compare favorably to stockmaking.
He is a fixture, our mouse. A remanant of a kinder and simpler time when, on a whim, some of our number bid our chief instructor a fine a productive summer by way of filling the lowest drawer of his workbench with several hundred unused condiment packets. Presuming this was a means of revolt does us too much credit. The drab truth remains that gunsmithing students display a remarkable ambivalence towards those seeking to impose law and order, that in the waning days of our freshman semester we found ourselves possessed of a dozen-odd pounds of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and possibly relish, and that – aside from one classmates soon to be gone, anyway – there was but one suitable target for our destructively anti-social tendencies.
That we should come to this was inevitable, really.
So a drawer full of condiments it was, stuffed to the brim and left in solitude those long summer months in a building moderately climate-controlled and a room largely ignored, and on the day of our promotion from first-year scum, lo did we discover we had a mouse.
We learned this in due course of opening said drawer, now spread with packets largely empty and one fat and insolent occupant, and as was befitting a class of enlightened scholars, combat veterans, and otherwise reasonably mature adult males, we dropped any semblance of productivity, armed ourselves for battle with knives and hammers and all manner of stock-shaping paraphernalia, and did surge to the scene of the insult in preparation for glorious blood sport.
Of course our quarry escaped, perhaps sensing the dangers inherent in bearded idiots waving sharpened tools. A clever one, he was.
Clever, but the same sort of fool as us, mostly, and the temptation proved too great and in short order he was returning regularly to his ersatz nest, which we had carefully lined with every contrivance of his destruction save perhaps glitter and acetone, the former being regarded as a form of disease and the latter carefully rationed less we be called erase the cave paintings which decorated the walls of our classroom in those days or to settle insults by single combat.
In truth we may have tolerated him had not be developed a taste for the sort of snacks stored nearabout his nest, those snacks belonging to one of ours who required all the calories he could get, as our cafeteria tried without cease to poison us all and moreover a skinny kid in America being a terrible thing to see. Further, our friend soon enough showed a taste for walnut, and with our grades (and to a lesser extent, our rifle stocks) dependent thereon it was decreed something must be done. Plainly, any animal that may gain a taste for stock material is a menace and must be stopped.
And perhaps our instructors tired of finding mouse pellets in places were mouse pellets ought not appear, perhaps in place a mouse could not conceivably reach, but this was a secondary concern. Nevertheless, twice-insulted by the vermin and insulted once more by the faculty we set about our mission with all the zeal of students whose futures depend on being engaged otherwise and thereafter the stage was set.
Untold hours we spent in monitoring his whereabouts. When spotted he was observed with great care – again, this taking considerable precedence over any semblance of scholastic achievement. Bait was set, traps left un-sprung. In this we wished to build his confidence and lure him into the battlefield of our choosing so that we might meet him in combat and (hopefully) emerge victorious.
So bide our time we did. Advanced mammals, experts in shirking those things expected of us, and our only major concern was whether we might get the mouse before his depredations drove Frankie to starvation, Frankie being the skinny kid and also our foremost machinist whose undue absence would leave us dependent on our instructors for shop advice, upon which we would all surely fail and return to our dreary workaday pre-gunsmithing-student lives.
In the days to wait we wore visibly. Tempers grew short, nerves frayed. Exchanges of harsh words led with increasing regularity to flung pocket change and dip cans and the odd superball. Tools were hidden, stock shavings set alight with scant regard for our projects, for our futures, for anything at all until, subsumed in the misery of our own stockmaking existence, we forgot the mouse entire and gazed daily into the abyss until the abyss would meet our gaze no longer and began to debate whether the password to the Ninth Circle of Gunsmith hell was ‘Mauser’ or ‘Semi-inlet’. In time, we spoke only in obscenity and veiled metaphor, our actions furtive and our words mysterious to all but our own.
And then he returned, and on that day we broke a file, one bench vise, and at least three Seals of Judgement. Driven near to madness, on the moment Frankie slid open his desk drawer and caught sight of our elusive foe, we were of a mood for blood and not particular from whence it came.
The cry went out, and as a well-oiled but generally poorly-maintained machine we leapt to action with our weapons ready. Dan had a two-pound hammer and Quincy had a sixteen-inch Springfield bayonet, and the rest of us somewhat reticent in our battle-lust to lose an eye mostly stood aside with dustpans and cigarette lighters and spray-bottles of acetone lest stronger measures be required, and our class president put in an extra pinch of evergreen for to celebrate this glorious day.
Our combatants went to the floor, singleminded in their pursuit and meeting the foe at his own level. Lost gun parts unseen for weeks and believed air-soluble sprang from beneath the desk under the sweep of bludgeon and blade. Furniture was shoved aside without ceremony, chairs overtuned, copious amounts of flammable liquids set afire in disconcerting promixity to smoke detectors, and had we been able to locate a virgin we might well have sacrificed that, too. There may or may not have been Viking warhorns – I cannot be entirely sure.
On the battle raged, the mouse batted this way and that, carnage every which way and GPAs in absolute free-fall and projects undone, and had our glorious war party been denied we might well have gone across campus and burned down the cafeteria, which in hindsight might have proven justifiable if not openly commendable. No jury would have convicted us.
Having several hundred pounds, opposable thumbs, and at least a handful of IQ points carried the day. By skill or by chance Dan landed a glancing blow with his hammer, glancing being relative when discussing a couple of pounds of tempered steel relative to a rodent the size of a roll of quarters, and we had only begun our victory celebrations when at our door appeared our chief instructor, him being better than mildly annoyed at the unfolding riot down the hall and, unmoved by the fighting prowess and enduring warlike spirit of the Class of 2016 told us to shut up and get our stupid asses back to work.
For some time afterwards the mouse remained a topic of great import. He was an annoyance, yes, and a sworn enemy to all advanced bipeds (as at least some of us were) and though he went down, his craft and is cunning were broadly agreed to have carried him into legend, and for being a dumb rodent he’d lasted a good while longer than any of us might credit. And more to the point, he went out in noble combat, readily overmatched in hardware if not intelligence. Better yet, he gave us an excuse to ditch working on our stocks for a couple of hours.
His was a warrior’s death. I raise a glass to his memory.
Excerpt of Chapter 7: The Small Five – Hunting Household Pests for Fun and Profit
***
We catch the sight of our quarry on the third day. He is alone, moving without hurry in that peculiar insolence of the wild things which register man not as philosophers or poets or builders of great civilization but only as an occasional hazard. Upwind we wait. He shows no particular concern at our presence, smelling as he does the discolored puddle gathering beneath the water fountain nearest the territorial homeland of the sophomores.
Our foe is not a remarkable specimen in any regard. He is not large for his breed, nor is he uncommonly marked or set apart in temperament. We have known of him for some weeks now, spotting him now and again, and of late bandied around the novelty of collecting him with the shop-vac and, once captive, devising a means of weaponizing the common field mouse. We have allowed great sums of time in this, as shenanigans compare favorably to stockmaking.
He is a fixture, our mouse. A remanant of a kinder and simpler time when, on a whim, some of our number bid our chief instructor a fine a productive summer by way of filling the lowest drawer of his workbench with several hundred unused condiment packets. Presuming this was a means of revolt does us too much credit. The drab truth remains that gunsmithing students display a remarkable ambivalence towards those seeking to impose law and order, that in the waning days of our freshman semester we found ourselves possessed of a dozen-odd pounds of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and possibly relish, and that – aside from one classmates soon to be gone, anyway – there was but one suitable target for our destructively anti-social tendencies.
That we should come to this was inevitable, really.
So a drawer full of condiments it was, stuffed to the brim and left in solitude those long summer months in a building moderately climate-controlled and a room largely ignored, and on the day of our promotion from first-year scum, lo did we discover we had a mouse.
We learned this in due course of opening said drawer, now spread with packets largely empty and one fat and insolent occupant, and as was befitting a class of enlightened scholars, combat veterans, and otherwise reasonably mature adult males, we dropped any semblance of productivity, armed ourselves for battle with knives and hammers and all manner of stock-shaping paraphernalia, and did surge to the scene of the insult in preparation for glorious blood sport.
Of course our quarry escaped, perhaps sensing the dangers inherent in bearded idiots waving sharpened tools. A clever one, he was.
Clever, but the same sort of fool as us, mostly, and the temptation proved too great and in short order he was returning regularly to his ersatz nest, which we had carefully lined with every contrivance of his destruction save perhaps glitter and acetone, the former being regarded as a form of disease and the latter carefully rationed less we be called erase the cave paintings which decorated the walls of our classroom in those days or to settle insults by single combat.
In truth we may have tolerated him had not be developed a taste for the sort of snacks stored nearabout his nest, those snacks belonging to one of ours who required all the calories he could get, as our cafeteria tried without cease to poison us all and moreover a skinny kid in America being a terrible thing to see. Further, our friend soon enough showed a taste for walnut, and with our grades (and to a lesser extent, our rifle stocks) dependent thereon it was decreed something must be done. Plainly, any animal that may gain a taste for stock material is a menace and must be stopped.
And perhaps our instructors tired of finding mouse pellets in places were mouse pellets ought not appear, perhaps in place a mouse could not conceivably reach, but this was a secondary concern. Nevertheless, twice-insulted by the vermin and insulted once more by the faculty we set about our mission with all the zeal of students whose futures depend on being engaged otherwise and thereafter the stage was set.
Untold hours we spent in monitoring his whereabouts. When spotted he was observed with great care – again, this taking considerable precedence over any semblance of scholastic achievement. Bait was set, traps left un-sprung. In this we wished to build his confidence and lure him into the battlefield of our choosing so that we might meet him in combat and (hopefully) emerge victorious.
So bide our time we did. Advanced mammals, experts in shirking those things expected of us, and our only major concern was whether we might get the mouse before his depredations drove Frankie to starvation, Frankie being the skinny kid and also our foremost machinist whose undue absence would leave us dependent on our instructors for shop advice, upon which we would all surely fail and return to our dreary workaday pre-gunsmithing-student lives.
In the days to wait we wore visibly. Tempers grew short, nerves frayed. Exchanges of harsh words led with increasing regularity to flung pocket change and dip cans and the odd superball. Tools were hidden, stock shavings set alight with scant regard for our projects, for our futures, for anything at all until, subsumed in the misery of our own stockmaking existence, we forgot the mouse entire and gazed daily into the abyss until the abyss would meet our gaze no longer and began to debate whether the password to the Ninth Circle of Gunsmith hell was ‘Mauser’ or ‘Semi-inlet’. In time, we spoke only in obscenity and veiled metaphor, our actions furtive and our words mysterious to all but our own.
And then he returned, and on that day we broke a file, one bench vise, and at least three Seals of Judgement. Driven near to madness, on the moment Frankie slid open his desk drawer and caught sight of our elusive foe, we were of a mood for blood and not particular from whence it came.
The cry went out, and as a well-oiled but generally poorly-maintained machine we leapt to action with our weapons ready. Dan had a two-pound hammer and Quincy had a sixteen-inch Springfield bayonet, and the rest of us somewhat reticent in our battle-lust to lose an eye mostly stood aside with dustpans and cigarette lighters and spray-bottles of acetone lest stronger measures be required, and our class president put in an extra pinch of evergreen for to celebrate this glorious day.
Our combatants went to the floor, singleminded in their pursuit and meeting the foe at his own level. Lost gun parts unseen for weeks and believed air-soluble sprang from beneath the desk under the sweep of bludgeon and blade. Furniture was shoved aside without ceremony, chairs overtuned, copious amounts of flammable liquids set afire in disconcerting promixity to smoke detectors, and had we been able to locate a virgin we might well have sacrificed that, too. There may or may not have been Viking warhorns – I cannot be entirely sure.
On the battle raged, the mouse batted this way and that, carnage every which way and GPAs in absolute free-fall and projects undone, and had our glorious war party been denied we might well have gone across campus and burned down the cafeteria, which in hindsight might have proven justifiable if not openly commendable. No jury would have convicted us.
Having several hundred pounds, opposable thumbs, and at least a handful of IQ points carried the day. By skill or by chance Dan landed a glancing blow with his hammer, glancing being relative when discussing a couple of pounds of tempered steel relative to a rodent the size of a roll of quarters, and we had only begun our victory celebrations when at our door appeared our chief instructor, him being better than mildly annoyed at the unfolding riot down the hall and, unmoved by the fighting prowess and enduring warlike spirit of the Class of 2016 told us to shut up and get our stupid asses back to work.
For some time afterwards the mouse remained a topic of great import. He was an annoyance, yes, and a sworn enemy to all advanced bipeds (as at least some of us were) and though he went down, his craft and is cunning were broadly agreed to have carried him into legend, and for being a dumb rodent he’d lasted a good while longer than any of us might credit. And more to the point, he went out in noble combat, readily overmatched in hardware if not intelligence. Better yet, he gave us an excuse to ditch working on our stocks for a couple of hours.
His was a warrior’s death. I raise a glass to his memory.
