The Mouse Thing

There seems to be no end to the supply of mice living around my back deck and hot tub. I have captured and released something very near 50 of them in the last five weeks. If you are keeping track, that's a lot.

If I had my druthers, they would be living over at Billy's place, and a bunch (can we call them a herd?) of hummingbirds would surround my deck.

It's not because a mouse is particularly intimidating. In fact, if you met just one out in the yard, you'd probably find the tiny fellow rather endearing. Twitchy pink ears. Bright eyes. Busy whiskers.

This is no grizzly bear.

But ultimately, they are after my peanut butter cookies. And as you can judge by the number I have captured, they procreate like mad.

A female mouse reaches maturity in only six to eight weeks. Her gestation lasts a mere nineteen to twenty-one days, and she typically produces five to eight pups. Under favorable conditions, she can become pregnant again within a day after giving birth.

That schedule doesn't leave much room on her calendar for hobbies.

Suppose you start with one healthy pair of adult mice in the throes of rodent love. Three weeks later, six pups arrive. Three weeks after that, another six. Two months in, fourteen mice isn't exactly a furry apocalypse.

Then the daughters grow up.

About six to eight weeks after they're born, they begin having litters of their own. Suddenly, reproduction isn't happening one family at a time. It's happening several families at once.

By the end of the third month, you might have thirty or forty mice. By the fourth month, it's easy to top a hundred. Five months in, several hundred isn't out of the question. By six months, under ideal conditions with plenty of food, warmth, and shelter, the descendants of that single pair could number well over a thousand.

I don't have that many cookies. So, I trap and relocate.

—Mitchell Hegman

Making Faces

As my dented luck would have it, I stepped into a checkout line behind a young mother with a toddler seated in her cart just as the young boy started bawling with conviction. The mother did her best to placate her child while, at the same time, placing items on the belt.

After a minute or so, the boy noticed me. "What's going on, buddy?" I asked. Then I offered a smile and a few skewed faces. The boy immediately stopped crying and studied me with a countenance that a mechanic might wear when examining a handful of bolts left over after rebuilding an engine.

Before long, the kid was pointing at the soda and candy on display next to him and then looking back at me for my reaction.

We had a thing, and he was calm and quiet as his mother completed her transaction and bagged her groceries. She even thanked me for calming her son before pushing off with her cart.

I'm thinking I might try offering Desiree those same faces the next time she is miffed at me to see if I can deliver her to a new state of mind.

—Mitchell Hegman

Three Horses and One Mule

Even though I’ve lived in horse-infatuated Montana my entire life, you’d be surprised how impressive I find the sight of horses (and one mule) frisking about in a pasture with mountains as the backdrop. Desiree, of course, is impressed with elk and horses above most things, both of which have a proud, regal air about them. So yesterday, when three horses and a mule pranced up to a fence line to check us out, we stopped so Desiree could talk to the critters and capture them in a sun-washed portrait.

Three Horses and One Mule

—Mitchell Hegman

7000 Photographs

Something weird happened to one of my game cameras at the cabin.

Before we unpack the weird stuff, you need to understand that I have three game cameras posted near the cabin. The camera we are talking about is shooting images at around 550 kB in file size.

That’s fairly small. At that size, the 32 GB SD card in the device would readily hold something near 58,000 images. The camera is strapped somewhat haphazardly atop the four-foot stump of a giant fir we were forced to fell last year.

Here’s the weird part. When I stopped to pull the SD card before driving past it, I found the camera had been knocked askew and was directed mostly at the sky and nearby treetops.

So, consider this: we are talking about a camera triggered by motion. What has more motion than trees in the wind? Given this, I found over 7,000 images on the game camera, all captured in a bit under two weeks. The first dozen images were of a righteous herd of elk milling about in front of the camera. Apparently, one of the elk nosed the camera and oriented the business end skyward. All the thousands of other images were of empty sky.

I’m sharing one of the photographs, showing the elk flowing past the camera as darkness descends on the mountain valley.

Elk Captured at Night

—Mitchell Hegman

Logging In

Given my struggle with passwords and the fact that I am all thumbs with my smarter-than-me phone and other electronics, I often struggle when attempting to sign in to any of my various apps and accounts. Also, I have never had a TikTok account. So, imagine my surprise when I retrieved my phone from my pocket after poking about in Desiree’s flower garden and found a new email on an account I rarely use. The message read as follows: “You're receiving this email because you used Sign in with Google to sign in to TikTok on July 25 at 9:02 AM.”

My phone was in my pocket at 9:02.

Apparently, my butt logged in to TikTok without informing the rest of me.

Honestly, this is slightly distressing. What might be next? What if my butt started making moves on the stock market or diving into bitcoin investments?

—Mitchell Hegman

Cooling Down

It’s a full hour before the robins will bribe the sun with their quickest song. The sky remains as still as solid stone and colored Wedgwood blue. My back door is open, and I’ve flung open the windows like clams. Near the door and two windows, floor fans whir with firm insistence.

I’m sitting on my sofa under wan light, allowing the mountain air to rush in and lay cool hands on me. I close my eyes and think of the snowcapped peaks west of me, and of the monkey flowers I found nodding along the bounce-and-run Arrastra Creek on my last mountain drive.

I’ve never been fond of summer’s heat, and this hour before sunrise is entirely mine. I have this hour, and perhaps two more, to draw in cool air so I may face another scorching day. The cool air has a weight I desire.

—Mitchell Hegman

Road Hazards

Certain inputs tend to stick with me longer than they should.

If, for instance, I happen to wake up to a song, that song will rattle about in my head for the rest of the day. Or if I find a big spider on the floor, every suspicious spot or motion in the house registers as a spider for the next several hours.

Recently, I had to have new tires put on my car because when I tried to have the existing tires rotated, the technician discovered they were coming apart where the tread meets the sidewall. “You need to get new tires right away,” he suggested. “Chunks are missing from one of them.”

That’s a pretty big input.

Within a few hours, new tires were mounted on my car. Now, at least for the short term, my driving experience has been altered. Every time I drive up behind another vehicle, I’m scoping out the tires.

I just know there is trouble out there.

—Mitchell Hegman