“The Evil Mitten”
So, last week, the girls and I were getting ready to go out for a walk, when Rosie suddenly screamed and threw away her mitten. It seems that Sam had tried to put on the mitten first herself, felt something in it that “felt weird and creepy”, took it off, and then gave it to her sister to wear. At any rate, by this point neither of them wanted to touch the mitten any more, so when we got back from our walk I decided to see what was inside that was making Sam call it the “Evil Mitten”.
My hands are too big to reach into their mittens, so I decided to just turn it inside out. Sam had said it felt “crunchy, and scratchy, and squishy”, which wasn’t much help telling me what to expect. The first thing I saw was a lot of crumbs that looked like crushed chicken feed, so as the mitten inverted I was brushing this into a wastebasket. Then, I felt something that felt different. Like animal fur. And I saw this, sticking out of a hole in the mitten lining:
“What’s this?” I said. “I think it’s a mouse!”
At this point, the screaming started. I hadn’t got that kind of a reaction out of them since the day I brought home the bed bugs!
It looks to be a typical mouse. We aren’t sure how it died. I don’t think it was trapped in there, it came out very easily and it looked like it had been hauling in food. Mice don’t live very long, so there are pretty good odds it simply died of natural causes.
A better question is how it got into the mitten, along with food. There is no other evidence of mice actually inside the house, although we have a lot of them in the yard and in the barn. After discussing back and forth a bit, we figure that what most likely happened was:
– Sam went out to the barn to feed the chickens, took off the mitten to open something or pick up something, and left it on a shelf near the chicken feed. She then forgot it, and it stayed there for some time (days to weeks)
– Mouse moved in, made itself at home, and then died of unspecified causes
– Sam spotted the mitten there, and brought it back into the house without putting it on. She then put it back in the mitten rack without ever being aware of what was in it.
Anyway, after the initial surprise died down, Sam and Rosie both wanted to get pictures so they could show their friends, so I guess it didn’t scar them for life or anything. Although I’ll have to watch and see if it makes them cautious about putting on mittens in the future.
Comments are closed.
We have a beach mouse here in northwest FL that is protected so it has slowed development. Yeah!
I first thought this was going to be story about Michigan. I’m oddly glad it was about a dead mouse!
Good story, by the way – this one might be one they remember for a long time.
We keep our gardening gloves outside. We have a regular infestations of brown widows. They are poisonous, but not as poisonous as black widows and are generally timid spiders. On those rare occasions where I use gloves, I always wonder if my fingers are going to greet someone living on the inside.