At Home - Bill Bryson [129]
Although study makes it sound like a significant space, it is really just a glorified storeroom, too dark and cold even in mild months to encourage much lingering. This is another room that doesn’t appear on Edward Tull’s original plans. Presumably, Mr. Marsham had it added because he needed an office in which to write his sermons and receive parishioners—particularly, I daresay, the more unrefined and muddy-booted of them; the squire’s wife would almost certainly have been invited into the more comfortable parlor next door. These days the study is the final refuge of old furniture and pictures that one member of the marriage partnership admires and the other would happily see on a bonfire. Almost the only reason we go in there now is to check the mousetraps.
Mice are not easy creatures to figure. There is for a start their remarkable gullibility. When you consider how easily they are taught to find their way around mazes and other complex environments in labs, it is surprising that nowhere have they grasped that a dab of peanut butter on a wooden platform is a temptation worth resisting. No less mysterious in our house is their predilection—I might almost say their determination—for dying in this room, the study. It is not only the coldest room in the house but the farthest from the kitchen and all the biscuit crumbs and fugitive grains of rice and other morsels that end up on the floor and are there for the taking. Mice give the kitchen a wide berth (probably, it has been suggested to us, because our dog sleeps there) and mousetraps placed there, however generously baited, capture nothing but dust. It is to the study that our mice seem fatefully drawn, which is why I thought this might be the appropriate place to consider some of the many living things that dwell with us.
Wherever there are humans there are mice. No other creatures live in more environments than the two of us do. House mice—Mus musculus, as they are known on formal occasions—are wondrously adaptable with regard to environment. Mice have even been found living in a refrigerated meat locker kept permanently chilled at –10 degrees Celsius. They will eat almost anything. They are next to impossible to keep out of a house: a normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it. They could. They can. They very often do.
Once in, mice breed prodigiously. In optimum conditions (and in most houses conditions seldom are other than optimal) a female mouse can start breeding at six to eight weeks old and can give birth monthly thereafter. A typical litter consists of six to eight offspring, so numbers can very quickly mount up. Two mice, breeding prolifically, could theoretically produce a million descendants in a year. That doesn’t happen in our homes, thank goodness, but very occasionally mouse numbers do get completely out of control. Australia seems to be particularly propitious in this respect. In one famous outbreak in 1917, the town of Lascelles, in western Victoria, was overrun with mice after an unusually warm winter. For a short but memorably lively period, mice existed in Lascelles in such densities that every horizontal surface became a frantic mass of darting bodies. Every inanimate object writhed under a furry coating. There was nowhere to sit. Beds were unusable. “The people are sleeping on tables to avoid the mice,” one newspaper reported. “The women are kept in a constant state of terror, and the men are kept busy preventing the mice from crawling down their coat collars.” Over fifteen hundred tons of mice—perhaps a hundred million individuals—were killed before the outbreak was defeated.
James Henry Atkinson’s patent drawing for the “Little Nipper” mousetrap, 1899 (photo credit 11.1)
Even in comparatively small numbers mice can do a lot of damage, particularly in food storage areas. Mice and other