Soooo….just how DO you get a mouse off your back?

This is one of those stories for which I desperately wish I’d gotten a photo, because you’re probably not going to believe it.

I had to get the leaves raked, or at least start them. The trees aren’t quite bare yet, but they’re nearly there. Last year I thought I could put off the raking until November and then it snowed early and I never got it done at all. Besides, it’s so much easier to rake them while they’re still dry and fluffy.

It’s 150 feet down to the street. The big trees are sugar maples. They’re stunning. They’re gorgeous. They used to be tapped every spring by a local farm, so I could make maple syrup from them if I wanted to. They dump at least 75 tons of leaves on my property every fall. :-p

I spent five solid hours of heavy work raking and dragging tarps full of leaves over to the side of my property where I dump, er, compost them. I let Cerridwen go out while I was working and she was running around, being cute. It was almost sunset by the time I was finishing up what I could get done today. I only had one more small tarp-load to go, a few small piles left over from the big ones. I was stiff, I was cranky, and I never wanted to see a beautiful autumn leaf again. I noticed Cerridwen jumping and pouncing in the leaves, and I could see some small creature hopping desperately trying to get away from her. I thought maybe it was a frog or toad, but when I went over to see, it was a baby mouse.

I didn’t want her to catch it, so I put my hand down to push Cerridwen away. The mouse ran up my arm. This rather surprised me, and I reached over with my other hand to catch it. But I was wearing two sweatshirts and heavy gardening gloves, and the mouse just evaded my hand–by running the rest of the way up my arm. Then it ran behind my shoulder. So, now it was on my back, hanging on there–I could tell because if it had jumped, I’d have seen it–and I couldn’t get it off.

So I stood there, thinking, “Great. Now what?” It was a tiny little thing–really, it was so cute!–and it was just too scared to jump to the ground. With Cerridwen there, it was making a wise choice, really. But it clearly was wishing it could have thought things through a little better, because now it was stuck. I’d glimpse it from the corner of my eye, and look back, and there it was on my right shoulder, all a-quiver. It saw me looking and went out of sight, and in a moment it was on my left shoulder. But mostly, I couldn’t reach it or even see it, and I couldn’t have caught it with the clumsy gardening gloves on, anyway.

I just wanted to get the frellin’ leaves finished, so I finally went ahead and raked up the last few leaves and dragged the tarp over to the side yard and dumped it, with the petrified mouse hanging onto me the whole way. Finally, as I was walking back with the empty tarp, it ventured back down my arm. I stretched out my hand toward the ground and it jumped. By that time Cerridwen was nowhere in sight.

As you may have guessed by now, I am not a squeamish person. *wry smile* But I’m certainly getting close to the local critters this fall. While I was stacking the first cord of wood, Cerridwen trapped a chipmunk in a short length of rain pipe that was on the ground. I picked up the pipe, to try and get the chipmunk out of it and into the brush pile, because it was panicked and chirping incessantly. It wouldn’t leave the pipe, but I saw it at the end of the pipe, which I was holding, peering out at me several times. I finally left it in peace.