R.O.U.S.s and The Tragic End of Gus Gus the Mouse

The fall rains started today. If you’ve ever enjoyed the smell of rain as it’s just about to fall, you should smell what it’s like when it’s the first rain after five long cloudless months. Simply glorious.

The fall rains, or the ‘early rains’ as they’re called in the Bible, usher in a very brief autumn in our part of the world. This typically means a month or two of pleasant temperatures and a mini, second spring for some plants. But things get downright wintery by the time the rains are done. In a very brief period, everyone goes from sitting in front of their ACs or swamp coolers to sitting in front of their heaters.

Say you happened to be a cute little mouse. The beginning of these rains would be a warm and pleasant experience. But were you to be caught in them by the end of the season, they could be deadly. The latter is what happened to Gus Gus, a family ‘pet’ for a few days and the unfortunate victim of impromptu visitors.

But before we get to GusGus’ sad demise, we must first discuss something far more disturbing – R.O.U.S.s. If you haven’t seen or read The Princess Bride, you may not be familiar with this acronym which stands for Rodents Of Unusual Size. While the rats that visited us in our old stone house in the bazaar were not quite the size of those in the fire swamps of Westley and Buttercup’s world, they were still some of the largest we’d ever seen.

They lived in the old sewers and underground pipes of our neighborhood. To be fair, one of our local friends had warned us about them when we decided to rent such an old property. “You’ll have rats in the pipes,” she said to us. “Beware!”

She was right. We knew we had a problem when we repeatedly heard loud crunching noises coming from under the sink where we kept the dry dog food. Sure enough, some large rodent had chewed through the dog food bag and was regularly helping themselves to quite the banquet. Determined to put a stop to this burglary, I installed a sturdy plastic drain cover over the open piping in the floor where our sink drained and the rats were clearly gaining access to our kitchen.

Not long after, we heard the same loud crunching. I snuck into the kitchen and hovered outside the cabinet door, listening to the rhythmic crunch, crunch, shuffle, crunch, of a large rodent that had clearly somehow made it past our defenses. I flung open the door to the cabinet. But the beast somehow evaded being spotted. Quick little rascal.

As I examined where the forced entry had taken place, I saw a large hole chewed clean through the thick plastic of the drain cover I’d installed. Impressive. We’d have to up our game and use metal instead. The exact kind of drain cover we’d need for this might take some time to track down in the bazaar. In the meantime, I knew exactly where I could buy the box wire traps that catch small animals alive. I had often passed them for sale while prayer-walking and wandering through the many alleyways of the old marketplace.

The next day, I returned from my prayer walk with one of these traps in hand. And now that we knew that the rats loved dry dog food, we had the perfect bait. We set the trap with one piece of dog food and put the rest of it up and out of reach. That very evening we caught our first trespasser. It was massive, the kind of monster rodent I remember seeing on occasion emerging from our walls in Melanesia when I was a kid – that is, before we had an escaped python that took care of that problem.

I called my wife over to take a horrified look, then realized that I hadn’t thought of exactly how I would dispose of an R.O.U.S. were I to actually catch one. I decided I didn’t dare remove it from its trap, so I’d need to somehow kill it while it was still inside. Eventually, I decided a watery death would be the most humane method of execution.

I filled up a painter’s bucket with water and carried it and the condemned rat up to our flat roof. There, I placed the trap inside the water. But the dimensions of the bucket and the trap meant that if I let it simply sit there in the water, there was about a centimeter of air left at the top of the trap. So, the rat could easily keep breathing by poking its big furry nose and teeth up out of the water. He could probably float like that for days. After all, rats are quintessential survivors. No, there would be no walking away from the necessary deed. The only way it would work would be if I sat there and held the trap under the water for several minutes while the rat frantically tried to stay alive.

I genuinely felt bad for the R.O.U.S. as he succumbed to his watery death. Yes, he was a nasty giant rat that had invaded my home. Yes, my Christian and manly duty was to kill it. But still, it was a sobering deed. And now I had a dead waterlogged rat on my hands. What should be done with the body? After staring at it as it lay on our flat concrete rooftop, I decided the best option would be to fling it by the tail into the empty lot behind our house for the benefit of the neighborhood street cats. Perhaps this could be a peace offering after our recent feuds over their early-morning antics.

The next day, we caught our second one. Another massive hairy thing, another watery death, another peace offering to the feral cats. How many would I have to dispose of like this?

A week or so passed and we had no more R.O.U.S.s. I began to hope that we had dealt with the two primary villains and that there would be peace going forward. Then, one evening we heard the trap under the sink suddenly slam shut. But this time it was no R.O.U.S. Instead, it was a tiny, quivering, cute brown mouse.

I can’t exactly explain why we humans respond so differently to mice versus rats. They’re essentially the same sort of creature. But one registers as cute and cuddly and the other, well, as the stuff of nightmares. Needless to say, the kids and I really liked the mouse a lot and wanted to keep it. My wife wasn’t so sure, thinking that cute though he was, he was likely carrying nasty diseases.

As we tried to figure out if we should keep him or not, the kids gave him a name: Gus Gus. And as any parent knows, once you name an animal, you really can no longer kill it without finding yourself with a mutiny on your hands. For several days, Gus Gus lived in limbo, hanging out in his trap/cage and being fed and admired by the kids while my wife and I waited for a chance to talk in earnest about whether we should or should not try to keep a pet Central Asian mouse.

This situation came to a tragic end one day when we were paid an unexpected visit by some neighbors. As so often happens when the realization dawns that guests are suddenly at the gate, we straightened up the central areas of the house in a somewhat rushed and haphazard manner. My wife, not wanting to mortify our guests at the sight of a rodent, put Gus Gus’ trap/cage outside the door to our flat roof.

However, as the visit dragged on, a late autumn rainstorm started. Poor Gus Gus was exposed to the elements for perhaps two hours. By the time the guests left and we brought him back inside, he was weak and shivering and clearly not doing well.

I wrapped Gus Gus up in a soft hand towel and placed him in front of a small electric heater. For a while, it looked like he might rally. His breathing stabilized and his normal coloring returned. I carefully repositioned him in front of the heater’s warmth every so often. But it was not to be. After a day or so of attempting to revive him, Gus Gus was gone, the victim of the frigid rain and unintentional mouseslaughter. The kids, of course, were not to be consoled. Gus Gus had been murdered.

Gus Gus was buried in our garden, not unceremoniously flung over the back wall like the R.O.U.S.’s. And to this day, the kids still make pitiable noises when he is remembered. Even my wife, no fan of rodents in general, feels bad about the whole affair.

I soon found a metal drain cover in the bazaar. From then on, we had no more problems with any Rodents Of Unusual Size. We did eventually get another mouse though. Another tiny little guy, Gus Gus’ cousin perhaps, took up residence in a gap in our house’s old stone walls. But we didn’t mind. We let him scurry back and forth from his little hole in peace.

As we prepared to move back to Central Asia this past summer, my kids had many questions. But one of them was, “Do you think we’ll have another cute mouse that lives in our walls?! That would be so great!”

Given that we now live in a very modern apartment building, I doubt it. But if that means we won’t have to battle any more R.O.U.S.s either, then I am perfectly okay with that.

If you would like to help us purchase a vehicle for our family as we serve in Central Asia (10k currently needed), you can reach out here.

For my list of recommended books and travel gear, click here.

Photos are from Unsplash.com