Every house has its story. What's yours?

I may have mentioned in a previous post that our house is a rambling, character-oozing dwelling with multitudinous charms, but a bit on the elderly side, at least for this part of the world. Built primarily in 1930, with extensions added in the 1950s and the 1960s, it is festooned with interesting little nooks and crannies. As we discovered the other week, it appears to be festooned with something else as well - pesky little rodents.

Well, not festooned exactly. More like sprinkled.

We first discovered this some months ago as the weather was growing colder, when my wife noticed a sort of scrabbling, scraping sound coming from the general vicinity of a sliding door opening. A few moments later, out popped the small, furry inquisitive head of a little brown mouse. Rather than running shrieking from the premises, as a lesser human whose veins do not pulse with 50 generations of Viking blood, as my wife's do, might have done, she called me in to look, her voice brimming with excitement.

"A mouse! Oh, it's so cute!" she bubbled, just as the Vikings did in 1158 when adoring crowds watched six-year-old Egbard the Frumpled ignite his first thatched roof. "You must come look!"

I immediately stared blankly at her for about 15 seconds, hunted around for the remote, clicked on the DVD recorder, waited for it to warm up, pressed the various buttons that would start recording House, pressed chase play, pressed pause, scratched the back of my neck meditatively, then lumbered stiffly up from the sofa, but by the time I arrived at the sliding door the mouse, through some sort of highly tuned primal instinct, had already sensed rapidly approaching danger and retreated deep into its walled lair.

We neither heard no saw any sign of the adorable little creature for some time-a month, maybe two. But one fine morning, as the December snow gently dissolved the bag of old newspapers I'd placed outside on the back porch intending to take down for recycling, then forgotten about, we discovered that the low shelf on which we keep the cardboard boxes containing the ever-changing colorful variations of breakfast cereals preferred by the kids was inexplicably covered with various and colorful bits of cereal

Closer inspection revealed some rather alarming, gaping, irregularly chewed holes in the bottoms of the boxes. There could be only one possible explanation: cardboard fatigue.

"It must be the mouse," my wife said. Humoring her, I nodded in modest agreement to the harebrained notion.

"We should get a mousetrap."

I explained that my deep and abiding love for all creatures of the earth, great and small, no matter how adorable and furry, prevented me from subscribing to any strategy that might involve the willful destruction of one of said creatures, and asked her, while at the store, to see if they had a have-a-heart trap. A mousetrap of this kind would allow us to ensnare the wee rodent without causing it bodily harm; we could then transport the harmless four-legged vessel of God's undying love and grace to the nearby woods and kindly, mercifully release it into the fox-riddled subzero Arctic desolation to continue its happy and carefree existence.

"Sure," she said, but the Viking within rumbled, "I'll also get one of the kind that kills them, in case the have-a-heart trap doesn't work."

Sweet, naïve descendent of Hampus the Clothheaded, I thought. Of course the have-a-heart trap will work.

The have-a-heart trap, needless to say, worked not even a tiny little bit. My wife returned from the store with it, along with a frightening additional construction clearly modeled by the least congenial of the Spanish inquisitors, and we tried the former out that evening. It was a small, rectangular sort of cage, with an opening in one side that led to a little platform on which, we imagined, a piece of cheese or some other mouse-attracting product was meant to be placed. The little platform had a hinged floor. In theory, we presumed, the mouse would climb up onto the platform trying to get the cheese, then would tumble helplessly through the trapdoor and into a separate, closed compartment on the other side.

This theory worked to perfection, except for the trap-door-opening-and-mouse-tumbling-helplessly part. As far as the first part of the plan, the part that involved providing the mouse with a nourishing slab of wholesome cheddar at no charge, that part worked like a charm.

So we fiddled with the thing and argued and tested various theories over the next week or so: trying to suspend or affix the bait to the far end of the little platform, so that the mouse would have to struggle to remove it and thereby give gravity time to lurch into action and send it tumbling helplessly through the trap-door etc.; trying various different forms of bait, including bread, crackers, Hungarian salami and tiny pieces of roast chicken; weighing down the trap-door on the little platform with marbles, so that only the tiniest weight would force it to fly open; but nothing made any difference whatsoever. Some nights the mouse visited and took away a little entree, sometimes it didn't. It never bothered to leave a tip. In the meantime, the trap, positioned as it was next to the opening of the sliding door where we had first spotted the rodent, was causing a remarkable number of stubbed and bloodied toes. It was time to escalate.

"You have to do it," I said to my wife, serenely confident my lofty moral stance had nothing to do with squeamishness.

"OK," the she-Viking replied brightly, and went hunting for the Spanish inquisition device.

This infernal machine looked nothing like the traditional mousetrap I had first expected, the kind of spring-loaded wooden wafer that a certain brand of entertainer likes to pretend to get their tongue caught in. This was a self-enclosed guillotine in reverse: a little mouse-sized box with a clamp of sorts hanging inside. The clamp was attached to a lever that releases a powerful spring mechanism, that in turn snaps a frame around the opening of the box rapidly upward, effectively breaking the neck of the harmless little creature. In a way, though, this design is intended to be quicker and more painless than the tongue-snappy kind, so it met with my grudging approval.

And, astonishingly, it worked.

It took a couple of nights to find the right kind of bait and to get the bait properly affixed to the clamp, but once we had, snap, as of next morning the mouse was no more.

My wife agreed to slip the little rigor mortised corpse into a plastic bag and take it out to the garbage, after first showing it to the kids, who were intensely curious. I was intensely curious as well, but rather urgently had to go start thinking about planning some dinner, so I missed my chance to inspect it at any length.

So, just like that, problem solved.

For a week or so.

About a week ago, I opened the cupboard door hunting, if I recall correctly, for some raw sugar lumps with which to sweeten my organic green tea, and found myself staring directly into the face of what could have been the corpse's twin. It shocked me, I'm not afraid to admit, not so much by being there, but by its complete, apparent absence of fear. It simply stared back at me, unblinking, from about a foot away between the baking powder and the vanilla sugar.

I closed the cupboard door as gently as I could and sprang into action. Operation: man vs mouse! First-something to capture the creature in. Hmm. A large bowl, with a book to slam it closed with? Perfect. A book: Horton Hears a Who? No! What if there's disease? Something that's never touched! Volume 12 of the encyclopedia. Check! Next, a stout pair of gloves with which to grab the creature. Ski gloves? One missing. Fluffy mittens? Too ungainly. Oven mitts! Check. To the cupboard! Beware, foul rodent, for thy doom doth approach thee apace!

Amazingly, the mouse had left the scene by the time I reopened the cupboard. That lightning quick primal instinct at work again.

I casually mentioned the whole exciting experience to my wife when she returned from work, then coincidentally left the country for five days.

On my return, I learned that on each and every one of those days she had successfully guillotined a rodent. Five down, an unknown quantity to go. Egad. We've heard no more scrabbling or scraping in the woodwork, so we assume there can't be that many more, but one never knows. We both are feeling rather uncomfortably like the myopic crone with the shotgun in Ratatouille.

On a positive note, I did set the mousetrap myself last night and this morning we found not a single expired rodent. But on the negative side, there was no bait in the trap. I must have shaken it out when disposing of last night's catch. But with newly heightened resolve, I immediately vowed to try again.

As of this moment, the guillotine is spring-loaded and baited with a fresh, alluring chunk of Edam cheese. Now, proud hunters, silent, tensed, unswerving, merciless, we await, our oven mitts close at hand.